What Content Analytics Can Tell You About Your Business

Content is one of the most important things your business needs in order to succeed online. However, simply pushing out as much content as possible won’t cut it. You need to use content analytics to make sure your content strategy is working.

While most marketers and other business professionals recognize the importance of quality content, they don’t necessarily know how to manage and analyze the effects of their content. In fact, 41% of business leaders don’t see content as something that needs strategic management.

Without management, your content strategy is going to suffer, and you won’t see the engagement and returns you should be seeing.

Let’s explore what content analytics is and what it can mean to your business.

Key Takeaways

• Content analytics uses metrics to evaluate how much content you produce and how it performs

• Analyze the various types of content you produce and categorize them by type, author, and persona

• Checking content performance can give you a quick snapshot of your overall content strategy

🤫 PS: Looking for pricing on custom Tech content? Get a price list here

What Is Content Analytics?

Content analytics examines content marketing strategies. This includes how content is produced and how user’s respond to it. Most businesses use some form of content analytics technology to automatically track their content data.

The goal of content analytics is to improve the decision making surrounding content creation. For example, if your content analytics indicate you’re not getting the expected ROI with your content, you can explore the reasons why this is happening and make the necessary changes.

Teams that take the time to evaluate and understand their content are setting themselves up for success. One 2021 study found that companies that evaluate their content have a better understanding of how to reach their goals.

4 Key Strategies in Content Analytics

Without strategically managing and tracking the effects of your content, it can be difficult to know if it’s working, even with the most creative content marketers on your team.

Content analytics can be broken down into four key areas. With solid data in these four areas, you’ll get clear evidence of how effective, or ineffective, your content strategy is.

1. Content Production

Content production refers to how much “stuff” your content team is creating. This is one of the easiest metrics to track and simply includes counting your content. You can monitor your content production in a few areas:

• Content by Type: This would include the number of assets, such as blogs, eBooks, and webinars, your team has created
• Content by Category: For this metric, you would count how many content pieces you’ve created for certain business categories, like marketing, finance, sales, and so on
• Content by Author: This would include a count to show how many content pieces have been  produced by each author
• Content by Persona: Your business likely has multiple target customer demographics, so this metric would ensure you’re producing and analyzing content for each type of buyer persona you target

Content production metrics are important for your content strategy. They provide you with measurable goals. For example, how many blogs you want to publish each month, or how many blogs you want focused on each buyer persona for each quarter. You might even realize you’re producing too much of one type of content and not enough of another.

2. Audience Engagement

In content analytics, engagement measures how much activity a piece of content triggers. There are a lot of engagement metrics to choose from. Some of the most popular metrics include:

• Social Shares: A social share is when a user shares your content through social media. You would combine shares on all social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on) for this metric.
• Page Views: How many times did users view your content?
• Links: How many link backs did your content get?
• Comments: What comments are users  leaving and how many comments have been posted about your content?

You can produce the best content in the world, but if no one interacts with it, it’s all wasted. You want your readers (or viewers) to feel connected with your content. The more engagement a piece gets, the more valuable it becomes. By tracking the total engagement for each content piece, it can show you what type of content is working for your brand and what isn’t.

3. Content Performance

For a holistic look at your content, you want to monitor content performance. This metric typically considers both content production and engagement. You can monitor:

• Top Authors: See which of your authors delivers the most engagement
• Top 10 Posts: Determine your top 10 posts within a specific time frame
• Top Categories: Which of your content categories have the most content?

Performance metrics are an easy way to give your content strategy a quick health check. While there are various technology tools you can use to track your content performance, one of the most popular tools is Google Analytics. This video walks you through how to use Google Analytics to track your content performance.

4. Content Scoring

With content scoring, each piece of content is given a score out of 100 depending on the criteria you’re considering. The score should give you an indication of how well that piece of content is doing at producing sales, or in other words, how much money it’s generating. You can choose various metrics to determine the score for each content piece:

• Revenue generated
• Conversions or outcomes
• Content type vs. campaign type
• Author
• Content category

Content scoring will be the most effective tool to use if you need to convince someone of the business value of content management.

Advance Your Content Analytics with ActualTech Media

You need a content strategy that works for your business, and content analytics is the best way forward. Choose the metrics that are most important to your goals and focus on making improvements there.

Content analytics can quickly reveal the strengths and weaknesses within your content strategy. If you need help creating engaging content that brings in sales, ActualTech Media can help. We offer expert content creation specific to the technology industry.

We use more than 60 subject matter experts to create the IT content your brand needs. This includes blogs, videos, eBooks, and even infographics.

With our flexible process, you can choose to take the lead or let us discover what works best for your brand.

Ready to see your content perform the way you need it to? Contact us today to explore your options.