For Katie Couric Media, audience engagement isn’t just a metric, it’s the business. Like most modern media companies, revenue is directly tied to how many people show up, how long they stay, and how deeply they engage with the content.

To understand that audience — and act on what they learned — the team turned to Parse.ly, using data not just to report performance, but to shape product decisions on the site itself.

Katie Couric Media had a clear view of where their traffic was coming from. Newsletters were driving a significant portion of site visits. But once readers landed, many weren’t clicking further.

“A lot of people come to our website mainly from newsletter, and then do not visit past that.”

– Samantha Donsky, Senior Manager, Audience & Strategy at Katie Couric Media

That low recirculation rate pointed to a bigger issue: Article pages weren’t doing enough to keep readers engaged once they arrived. And in a world where clicks alone no longer tell the full story, the team needed deeper insight into how readers were actually interacting with content.

Katie Couric Media already relied on Parse.ly as the foundation for audience analytics and reporting. But they saw an opportunity to go further: using Parse.ly’s API and machine learning capabilities to directly improve the on-site experience.

The team built new, data-driven widgets powered by Parse.ly insights, including:

• “More like this” recommendations.
• Related content modules in sidebars and inline placements.
• Smarter content grouping based on audience behavior and interests.

“These insights created the business case to sign up for the Parse.ly API. And because of that, we’ve been able to create a lot of great widgets based on the machine learning algorithms.”

– Samantha Donsky, Senior Manager, Audience & Strategy at Katie Couric Media

At the same time, the team evolved how they defined success. Instead of focusing solely on clicks, they leaned into engaged time, using Parse.ly’s heartbeat tool to understand whether readers were truly consuming the stories.

“Did they really buy into the story that we were telling?” Donsky said.

By creating tag groups and analyzing engagement by content vertical, the team could see which topics resonated most — and double down on what worked.

The impact was immediate and measurable.

“That has been the biggest product-based change we’ve pulled from Parse.ly. And it’s created a great result in traffic and engagement.”

– Samantha Donsky, Senior Manager, Audience & Strategy at Katie Couric Media

More importantly, the team gained confidence that insights were translating into outcomes.

“If you see upticks in performance in certain areas, you know the insights that led to action ended up paying off.”

– Samantha Donsky, Senior Manager, Audience & Strategy at Katie Couric Media

For Katie Couric Media, this is just the beginning.

“There are so many ways to help enrich the website with one tool. We know we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

– Samantha Donsky, Senior Manager, Audience & Strategy at Katie Couric Media

With Parse.ly continuing to inform both strategy and execution, the team is positioned to keep refining how they engage readers — not by guessing, but by listening closely to what the data is telling them.