And the survey says…

We recently completed the first of what we expect will be many readership surveys. As any analyst knows, it’s nearly impossible to make improvements if you don’t know where things stand at the moment and you don’t know the problem you’re facing. The online survey, conducted in March, not only gave us a good idea of where we are in terms of readership satisfaction, wants and needs, it also provided an invaluable roadmap regarding where we should be heading in the months and years ahead.

We want to thank the 350-plus readers who participated in the survey. While we’re pleased with the initial response to Analytics and believe we’re on track to attract a huge audience of analysts who are hungry for our content, we realize we have plenty of room for improvement.

The readership survey provided some particularly gratifying results: On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being “very dissatisfied” and 10 being “very satisfied,” 82.7 percent of respondents rated Analytics a “7? or higher and 62.9 percent rated it “8? or higher. Nearly 10 percent gave it a perfect “10.”

More insightful, from our standpoint, was the reason readers use Analytics: 64 percent use it to keep up with breaking analytics news (no small feat for a bimonthly), 66 percent use it to learn about analytics (welcome to the show) and 75 percent use it to gain broad exposure to analytics topics (never too old to learn new tricks).

Perhaps the most telling statistic was how much time the respondents said they spent reading a typical issue of Analytics. More than 55 percent said they spend at least 30 minutes reading each issue and 22.1 percent said they spend at least an hour reading it — incredible numbers compared to other online publications. The respondents also rated the quality, value and timeliness of the content quite high, and 83 percent of respondents said they were likely to recommend it to a colleague, supervisor or student.

Best of all, 70 respondents said they were interested in contributing an article to Analytics, and I’m following up with them as we speak. As I say almost every issue, Analytics is an interactive exercise. We look forward to your comments, editorial ideas and contributed articles.