Is republishing great-performing articles a part of your editorial strategy? Here's how to track performance of this type of article within the smartocto Insights app.
Republishing older articles is a common practice among all kinds of publishers.
Our system is designed not to update most of the article metadata once it saves and stores the initial values. This means that, if you republish a piece of content, smartocto Insights will not be aware of the fact that you did this if you do not change the Article ID.
Our system will continue to aggregate the data for that specific article, regardless of the changes in the publish date, the title, even the URL.
This means that:
- The republished article will not appear in the application as a new piece
- Any new traffic will just pile on top of the old traffic, which will prevent you from assessing your article's performance after you've republished it
By assigning each republished article a new _ain.postid, you will be able to track your republished articles and they will be visible in the application. However, you will now have two instances of the same article. Although this may sound off at first, it does make sense in the long run.
If you decide to republish an article without changing anything, you have to keep in mind that this leaves consequences in terms of calculations and data processing. Things are likely to be different because a lot of factors determine the life of your article: publish date/time, audience, position on the site.
On the other hand, if you are changing the article itself (title, certain paragraphs, data etc.), you are actually making a "new-old" article.
In both cases, you are basically creating novel articles because they are different from the old ones, one way or another.
That is why having two instances of the 'same' article works. New articles gain a new life and with smartocto Insights, you can track both the performance of the republished articles and the performance of your old articles.