Data analytics are already a seemingly indispensable tool for the news industry. Evidently, knowing how many people are visiting your site and which articles are the most popular is extremely useful, hence the success of companies like Google Analytics, Omniture, Chartbeat and their newsroom-specific product Newsbeat.

Undoubtedly, these tools are incredibly useful; but what if there were something better, a service that could calculate how to make readers stay on the site for longer and view more content?

In fact, these services already exist. During recent months a number of companies, such as YieldBot, JumpTime and OutBrain, have sprung up offering news sites the possibility to optimise content recommendation - i.e. related links - and therefore encourage more users to stay on the site for longer. The Nieman Journalism Lab provides a detailed summary of the how these services operate and the differences between them.

So what does this new generation of analytics give you that other services don't?

Crucially, these analytics give you a real time assessment of what's happening on the site and this allows the programs to calculate how many views a story will attract when placed in a certain position on the site.

This then allows more accurate predictions to be made regarding what stories will do well; consequently, the programme can work out where on the site articles should be positioned and which stories should be linked to each other for optimum traffic.

This is one step beyond displaying a simple list of links to stories with associated content. Instead, these programmes use previous traffic as a benchmark to identify what will make your readers leave the site and which links will make them want to stay - the more visitors stay on the site, the more advertising revenue increases.

Although, as Poynter reports, such services don't come cheap, some costing over $1000 per month. However, some publications, such as the The Telegraph and The New York Daily News, clearly think it is worth the expense. How great an impact will such services have?

Sources: The Nieman Journalism Lab, Poynter