When we asked our customers why they publish in Apple News, there was a clear consensus: Apple News features quality journalism from trusted news sources and reaches a large audience of new readers.

In early 2017, we became the first service to provide publishers with audience insights from Apple News on a daily basis. Since then, a growing group of our publishing clients has leveraged this data to understand daily, weekly, and monthly trends in traffic from Apple News.

Today, we’re proud to announce we’ve upgraded our Apple News integration to support real-time analytics as well. Parse.ly Enterprise customers can gain more visibility into engagement with stories in Apple News, and see that engagement alongside other major traffic sources.

This integration ensures that no personal information from Apple News readers (e.g. IP addresses, cookies or device IDs) is ever shared with Parse.ly.

Apple News, with its massive audience across iOS and macOS devices, drives impressive traffic and audience engagement for publishers. But it’s very different from the traffic and engagement patterns publishers experience on their owned-and-operated sites and apps.

Curious about how insights into Apple News could help you? Read on to learn how Apple News content analytics in Parse.ly has made an impact for Slate and The Daily Beast.

Get visibility into a new audience

“This is the first time we’ve ever had a unified real-time look at every single major traffic source to Slate,” said Mark Morgioni, Director of Research and Data at Slate.

With the Apple News integration in Parse.ly, the whole organization can see what content resonates across different platforms.

Bill Carey, Senior Director of Strategy at Slate, estimated the number of people looking at Apple News data has increased three-fold. He added, “Now anyone in the newsroom can see when a story is doing well in Apple News. It’s really easy for people on our audience and homepage teams to look at that information.”

Veronica de Souza, Director of Audience Development at The Daily Beast, said that editors are excited to see their Apple News traffic in Parse.ly, and are excited about the potential of Apple News overall. “It’s good for them to be aware of that extra audience they have.”

Capitalize on Apple News opportunities in real-time

What does Slate do now that they can see an increase in audience in Apple News traffic as it happens?

“We look at what’s doing well elsewhere as a prompt when we’re thinking about what stories to promote. Before Parse.ly we weren’t able to see that for Apple News at all. We’re able to use what’s doing well in Apple News to promote it elsewhere, and I think that’s really valuable for our audience team,” said Carey.

The Slate team saw that a story detailing how to claim $125 from the Equifax settlement was generating a large audience in Apple News but not on Slate.com. They upgraded the story’s placement on the Slate homepage and shared it on social, which created a chain reaction of several bursts of traffic. In the following days, referrals came in from Pocket, where readers had saved the story to read later.

“I wouldn’t have bet in a million years that that story did as well as it did,” Morgioni chimed in. Slate saw that maximizing the story’s exposure created a positive network effect.

Improve your Apple News strategy by understanding high-level trends

Apple News is home to a large and engaged audience. The stories that audiences are drawn to in Apple News may be different from what attracts audiences to individual publisher websites. For example, a publisher’s most notable content might be investment and business news, but in Apple News, perhaps it’s their political coverage that interests more readers.

You can analyze those trends over long stretches of time in Parse.ly. See what authors, sections, or tags resonate with readers in Apple News right now, this week, or several months ago.

Or set up a recurring report to get updates on Apple News performance in your inbox.

What will you do with easy-to-access Apple News analytics? Fill out the form below to learn more about possibilities and pricing.

For technical details on what Apple News data is available in Parse.ly, check out our distributed channels documentation.

Get even more Apple News insights

Here are some of the other ways Parse.ly can help you understand your Apple News audience:

Segment by Apple News subscribers

Parse.ly customers who participate in Apple News+ have the option to segment by Apple News+ subscribers and users who follow Apple News+ channels. This allows you to see what articles are resonating with subscribers and how much time subscribers spend engaged with your content.

Access raw Apple News data

Another aspect of the new Apple News integration that we’re quite excited about is its support for unified and cross-channel raw data warehousing. You’ll soon have access to Apple News raw event data in Parse.ly’s Data Pipeline. You can then pull this data into your favorite business intelligence tool and combine it with other data sources for deep, custom analyses.

We already have a few customers using this integration. It’s been transformative for them to have a unified raw data view of content across channels. If you’re interested, fill out the form below and select “I’m interested in access to Apple News raw event data.”

What else is new in Parse.ly?

To see all the new features and improvements we’ve been working on, check out our release notes.