Splunk at NPR

Web Intelligence Benefits Listeners and Stations

Overview

Industry

  • Public broadcasting

Splunk Use Cases

  • Web Intelligence
  • Business Intelligence
  • Reporting and Analysis

Business Impact

  • Saves approximately $300,000 per year in log tracking service costs
  • Achieved return on investment (ROI) in less than 30 days
  • Accelerated NPR API performance by 50%, reducing need for infrastructure upgrades and increasing user satisfaction

Data Sources

  • Akamai server log data
  • Google analytics
  • NPR API logs
  • Streaming downloads, live concerts, podcasts, video downloads

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Success Story
Splunk at NPR

“I downloaded the trial version of Splunk and was immediately able to parse and analyze web logs to extract what we needed. It also saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in service fees!”
Sondra Russell
Sr. Digital Analyst, NPR

The Business

NPR uses Splunk to cost-effectively measure the ebb and flow of its online "listeners," evaluate the effectiveness of new programs and campaigns, optimize resource allocation and content delivery and more accurately account for revenue sharing and royalty payments.

Challenges

While NPR uses leading web analytic applications such as Adobe Omniture and Google Analytics to track the health of web sites belonging to it and member stations, it has been difficult for the organization to track and evaluate audio and video distribution. While web (client-side) traffic analysis systems typically use cookies or scripts to track browser activity, it was far more difficult for NPR to accurately capture and analyze meaningful numbers for website visitors who were streaming or downloading audio and video programs.

This made it challenging to allocate development resources to promising new programs or the most popular generations of mobile devices. NPR attempted to use Omniture to analyze log data captured from the Akamai managed download service. However, this proved cumbersome and expensive.

Enter Splunk

In April 2010, NPR senior digital analyst Sondra Russell downloaded a trial version of Splunk, loaded some log files from audio and video downloads and got "numbers immediately that I couldn't get any other way."

Russell crunched the numbers and discovered that if NPR continued using Omniture for log-based tracking it would quickly get to be "very expensive," potentially costing $300,000 or more per year. She was able to easily demonstrate not only the cost-effectiveness of Splunk, but the power and flexibility it offered NPR for web analytics, business intelligence and operational efficiency."

Breakthroughs

Splunk enables NPR to accurately and quickly track and analyze important social media and audio/video downloads and streaming content. This new level of web intelligence has allowed NPR, for the first time, to estimate how many unique listeners are using audio and video resources and which mobile platforms are most popular.

NPR uses Splunk to analyze more than 50 million audio and video events each month and report on the results to C-level NPR management and member station managers.

NPR continues to find new uses for Splunk, including monitoring the organization's critical content handling systems. The NPR application programming interface (API) provides a structured way for the public and member stations to access NPR archived content.

According to Russell, Splunk helps NPR provide the highest quality online experience and helps build a pool of engaged listeners and contributors. She notes: "We knew we could make the API more efficient, but without powerful data analysis we didn't know where to start. With Splunk, we can quickly troubleshoot problems and collect the information we need to make better decisions."