You gather data on how your clients interact with your content and then make beautiful graphics to tell your colleagues all about it. And when they ask what this means for your business and how to act on it, you realize that you sincerely don't know what to say.
Sounds familiar? Yes, it may happen to many of us. But don't worry, you can start measuring smartly and use these insights to make your content even better. Today, we'll talk about marketing content, such as blogs and website pages. In our next blog post, we'll dwell upon how to track and analyze PDFs that are used for sales purposes. So, let's get started.
Set Your Analytics Goals
First of all, you have to see a wide picture and define what goals you want your content to achieve. It shouldn't be hard at all because, when you create a content strategy or just write some marketing materials, you are aiming at specific results. And these are the goals that you need. With these goals in mind, you'll be able to choose the right metrics. Let's look at the most widespread goals for analytics:
- Brand awareness. You want to reach new horizons and tell more potential clients about your business.
- Engagement. You want to know your active clients better by building a more emotional and friendly connection with them.
- Customer retention/loyalty. You work with your clients to interest them and make them come back to you even if they've gone away for a while.
- Lead generation. You gate your content to get more quality leads or open it to get more leads. Either way, you want to collect leads.
Key Metrics
After setting goals for your analytics, you choose the key metrics and start measuring your content. Naturally, you want to measure as much as possible, to know how to make your content more efficient. You have more and more data every month and your excel file becomes more and more scary. To avoid this unpleasant scenario, you have to measure smartly - choose only the basic metrics that are directly connected with your content goals. Here are the metrics that are frequently used by marketers from different businesses and you'll surely find the ones that suit your goals.
Engagement Metrics
- Comments can be a tricky thing if you think about all that spam. But moderation can deal with that. What is important here is that if your readers read your blog posts and also want to discuss them afterwards (no matter if they agree or disagree), it means that your writing is compelling. So, hurrah to comments! Obviously, you can track the number of readers' comments for each post. Don't forget to exclude authors' answers to gather analytics that are true to life. You can use a commenting system from Disqus or a Facebook plugin.
- Votes are becoming more and more popular if you're posting content on your website or blog regularly. If your readers like or dislike your post but don't want to write comments, they can still express their opinion by upvoting or downvoting your content. Upvotes and downvotes can tell you what type of content is more popular and what raises questions or puzzlements.
- Link tracking can help you understand how your SEO is doing. You can see what pages are linking to your website or blog. Or, if you make marketing ebooks and include links, you can track their click rate. A free tool from Moz can help you with that.
Traffic Metrics
- Traffic source is also a good way to know where your readers come from and how your SEO and ads are working. Knowing this can help you to optimize your ads campaigns and analyze your target audience.
- Unique pageviews tracking helps you to analyze which pages are most interesting for your readers and to know what your audience looks for - maybe it's statistics, infographics, or simple and clear texts.
- Time on page comes handy after the pageviews. You can track not only what pages are the most engaging but also how much time your readers spend on each of them. It helps to optimize content and make it more target-oriented.
Social Metrics
Social media are everywhere and, of course, you want to track the performance of your content there too. Buzzsumo is a convenient tool for this task. You can divide your social media metrics in two sections:
- Tracking all the activities of your brand in social media - how many likes, shares, and comments your posts get.
- Tracking how your pages and blog posts are shared - many businesses include social media plugins to their websites and blogs so that their clients can share what they find interesting right away.
By the way, if you create ebooks as a part of your marketing campaign, you can try FlippingBook Online. It allows you to add a convenient lead capture form to collect quality leads and analyze how your readers use your documents. You can see the total number of views that your document gets, and the individual number of views by each person who's left an email address.
Smart Analytics Can Greatly Help to Make Your Content Work
Now that you know how to set analytics goals and choose the right metrics, you are equipped with powerful knowledge: you can make conclusions on how your marketing content performs and then optimize it to suit your goals and make it more valuable for your audience. Not to mention that you are able to present this analysis to your colleagues and bosses, showing that content is an essential part of all marketing strategies and can make wonders happen.
