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Much of content marketing is rooted in creating informative, engaging, and interesting content. But how do you know what to write about in the first place? The answer: content marketing analytics.
With the right information, you can tap into a wealth of data about how your content is performing, what’s going well, and what needs improvement, as well as what your next steps should be.
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Content marketing analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, and analyzing data from your content creation efforts. This is done to help inform you about potential ideas for future content (and how you can better optimize existing content) based on what your analytics efforts tell you.
Content marketing analytics is all about learning what pieces of content resonate with your audience and creating more of them across various other topic clusters.
Content marketing involves four major steps, including:
Today, with the advances of analytics together with artificial intelligence and machine learning, it’s easier than ever to hone in on what’s working and what isn’t.
The good news is that having access to this information opens up a wealth of opportunities and possibilities, such as greater accountability, better return on investment, improved decision-making, and more competitive advantages.
When you’re evaluating every piece of content on its own merits and how people and search engines interact with it, you’re able to measure its performance based on real data, not guesswork.
Content marketing analytics isn’t all strategy and numbers. Creativity absolutely plays a role in the process.
Understanding which topics, marketing channels, and even formats drive conversions frees up your content team to create content that’s unique, attention-grabbing, and highly effective.
If your analytics tells you, for example, that more people respond to video posts than blog articles, it makes sense to divert more resources to video creation.
Vanity metrics such as likes don’t move the needle when it comes to ROI (return on investment).
Meaning that while they may offer insight into which content is more engaging for your audience, it doesn’t necessarily translate to hitting your business goals.
By focusing on the metrics that matter, like conversion rates and customer lifetime value, you’re not only marketing content, you're lining up your strategy with business objectives.
Content marketing analytics will also reveal in-depth information about your target audience, from user behavior to search intent.
For example, are people spending more time on reading how-to guides or case studies? Based on the information you glean from your analytics, you can steer your content calendar and better tailor each piece to serve your audience’s needs.
What’s more, analytics also helps you better segment your audience so that you can then personalize the content to their unique needs. This, in turn, drives higher conversions and engagement.
Now that you better understand what content marketing analytics are and how they work, which metrics out of all of the information that can be collected are actually worth focusing on? Let’s break it down:
Website traffic is a good indicator of who’s visiting your site and where they’re coming from.
It may come from a variety of sources, including organic efforts, paid ads, social media, or direct referrals from other sites.
Knowing your website traffic can show you the volume of potential leads your content is currently attracting. It also shows you which channels are driving the most people to your pages.
Metrics like time on page and bounce rate tell you how long a person spends on a particular piece of content, or if they left your site after only viewing one page.
Take note of the bounce rate — if it’s unusually high, it might mean that your content isn’t resonating with your target audience, and it’s time to course-correct.
Under the same broad user engagement umbrella, you’ll also want to look at social shares as a high number of shares, likes, and comments (even though likes are more vanity metrics than anything else); they’ll tell you which pieces of content people appreciate.
Conversion metrics will tell you what percentage of people took the action you wanted them to take (like made a purchase or signed up for a newsletter). They directly inform how effective your content is in terms of matching your business goals.
Content marketing analytics will also tell you how many leads are generated through gated content, and metrics like the customer acquisition cost will tell you how much it costs to acquire a customer through marketing, so that you can better understand what you’re spending to bring people in and what happens when you do.
Keyword rankings and backlinks are all great indicators of how your content is doing. The CTR (click-through rate) from SERPs (search engine results pages) will tell you how compelling your content is, which is important for organic traffic and search engine visibility.
There is a wide range of content marketing tools available to help you better track your efforts and see how your content is performing.
Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular and widely used. It monitors and reports on everything from page views to bounce rates and can even show you the conversion path your users take, as well as if any bottlenecks are affecting your numbers.
Originality.ai’s Content Optimization Tool can help you genuinely improve your content (it’s resistant to manipulation tactics like keyword stuffing) to predictably drive better rankings.
Then, other platforms like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz track organic keyword performance and can offer insights into backlinks as well.
Content marketing analytics have evolved quite a bit from the early days and transitioned into more data-driven decision-making.
But what’s on the horizon for content marketing as a whole?
You can expect that AI and machine learning will continue to grow more sophisticated and become an increasingly notable content marketing trend.
Then, considering Google’s latest Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which now include guidance around generative AI, incorporating AI detection is essential for content marketers looking to maintain transparency in the content they publish.
Becoming a data-driven content marketer doesn’t mean you have to give up your creativity or your desire to test and refine; far from it.
Gleaning insights from your data makes things like split testing even more effective, while the metrics tell you what people want more of, or what they could take or leave.
Great content marketing isn’t just about return on investment, but also about launching a strategy that’s personalized and targeted.
With the information from your content marketing analytics, you’ll know precisely what to refine, where, and how. Over time, this has the potential to not only engage your audience but to do so in a way that helps you continue to build credibility and authority in your marketing efforts.
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