Helpful summary
Overview: We emphasize the role of content analytics in evaluating and boosting content marketing effectiveness for businesses, focusing on measuring engagement, performance, and reach.
Why you can trust us: At Embarque, our proficiency in content analytics has led to remarkable client successes. For instance, we helped Cleanvoice increase its monthly recurring revenue by 300% through aggressive targeting of podcasting-related topics, demonstrating our ability to tailor SEO strategies to specific industry needs.
Why this is important: Content analytics is crucial for businesses to understand audience engagement, improve SEO, and ensure content resonates with the target market, ultimately increasing traffic, indexing speed, and revenue.
Action points: We recommend businesses regularly analyze content performance using tools like Google Analytics and adjust their content strategy based on insights to maximize ROI.
Further research: Businesses should explore integrating content analytics with other digital marketing strategies for comprehensive online success.
Need help with content analytics?
Analyzing content analytics remains one of the best ways to measure the extent of your marketing efforts.
It’s a mystery that only a few establishments have given quality attention to content analytics perhaps because it’s considered a difficult responsibility in the marketing world.
Surprisingly, only 27% of B2B marketers are effectively committed to measuring the returns of their content marketing efforts.
At Embarque, an agency for premium SEO content that converts, we know how effective content marketing analytics produces actionable insights that drive an organization towards its business goals.
Content data, content marketing reporting, video content marketing analytics are not all industry buzzwords that we can avert in this present day.
Tracking your content marketing metrics could help you increase your ROI.
In this article, you’ll learn the basics of content analytics and how you can gear it towards conversions and sales.
We’ll cover:
- The tools for content creation, distribution and analysis
- Various content marketing analytics that you should calculate to find ROI
- Video content analytics
- Google’s EAT principle for great content
- Why you should repurpose your content for social media
Why listen to us about content analytics?
In content analytics, our focus at Embarque is on actionable insights that drive business goals. We understand the power of content data and marketing reporting in today's digital landscape. Our SEO services are aimed at increasing ROI, demonstrating our commitment to leveraging analytics for business success. See how we achieved a 3x increase in organic traffic growth for one of our SaaS clients through keyword research and providing SEO-optimized content.
Definition of content analytics
Simply defined, content analytics is a dynamic process that uses an array of content metrics to measure the engagement, performance, and reach of published content. It also contains insights that are backed with data and analysis.
It moves a brand from merely authoring and publishing content to making sure the content produced is useful, engaging, and tending towards business goals.
Unlike traditional web analytics which lacks audience intelligence and insights, content analytics provides actionable reasons a published content performed excellently and why another did not.
In a nutshell, great content marketing analytics answers the question:
- Are we delivering the right message to the audience?
- Are we tending towards the goal of the organization?
- Is it the right piece of content to publish?
- How optimized is our content marketing effort?
- What new strategy should we incorporate to boost our content marketing effort?
Performance metrics such as page views, sessions, unique users, bounce rate, time spent on the page are a few of those things that are measured on popular coftware analytics software like Google Analytics.
One key decision you might want to make with analytics is whether or not your SEO content converts or you probably need a content marketing agency.
It’s increasingly surprising that some marketers are not aware of the truth about SEO content creation. Here’s a few:
- SEO content is an investment, not an expense, that pays huge dividends in the long run.
- Organic search allows you to get clients in your sleep.
- SEO content allows you to scale up your growth processes, instead of relying on time and energy intensive old-fashioned marketing campaigns
- You need SEO blog posts and landing pages to rank in Google for your keywords
Now that you understand what content analytics is, I think it’s time to tell you some reasons you might need it.
Analytics tools to use for content analysis
Fortunately, there are various analysis tools to measure content performance metrics. One of the best known content analytics software is Google Analytics, which allows us to access conversions, graphical reports, content and advertising analysis, bounce rates, and session duration, among other data.
We also have other content analytics software alternatives like ClickTale, Webtrends, CrazyEggs, Clicky, and Tableau.
This choice will depend on the volume of data, the budget, and the price of the tool, our needs, and whether we will measure users or a site.
For SEO keyword research, Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz are the most popular ones and have reliable keyword difficulty metrics. Normally, popular searches in Google also rank well for YouTube.
For SEO content creation, semantic content quality, content depth and to create structured content, you can use Frase, Copywritely or CognitiveSEO to check if your content can rank in Google. They also have content scoring systems to see how relevant your content is for that keyword.
In short, analytics is an essential resource to collect, measure, and analyze figures or behavioral patterns, and thus make effective decisions that enable the optimization of our content.
Reasons For Content Analytics
For accurate measurement of content performance
There are numerous difficulties related with creating and executing a successful content marketing practice.
Prominent among them is one that speaks to the genuine essence of the content marketing issue: ineffectiveness to quantify content viability.
This is the genuine trouble confronting content marketers, not just delivering more content, but also creating the correct content — content that takes your business places.
Time and again, brands set out to produce more content without productively getting from Point A to Point B.
Thanks to content analytics, brands and content teams can now use content performance metrics to move towards the latter.
Content analytics helps you connect with the audience more intensely
By human perception, you can’t fully comprehend what happens to your readers every hour.
At one time, they may be moody, and at another they are excited. With the right tool at hand, this can be effectively analyzed.
Using engagement metrics to measure content quality and the impact of your content production, you can correctly deliver great content that resonates time and again.
You’ll identify what works
Meaningful content analysis helps you identify which content works to build an audience, grow your SEO and even acquire backlinks.
Content insights don’t work in a vacuum. Paired with overall business metrics, you can figure out uncharted avenues that your existing customers will want to find content on.
The content marketing roi metrics that every company should know
The main indicators that can help you figure out the best pieces of content that are turning readers into customers.
To analyze most these KPIs (except for the social media analytics) you can use Google Analytics.
Number of visits to a certain page
This metric tells you the number of times a page on your website has been viewed. It is used to know the impact that your landing pages or another piece of content has had.
On the other hand, it is also useful to know the trends and the preferences of your visitors.
Location of visitors
This indicates the places from which people access your website.
This is a fundamental metric for local businesses since visits from other places will not have the same value.
On the other hand, if the location of the users matches that of the company, it means that the local SEO is working properly.
Bounce rate
It is the percentage of people who visit your website and leave it before half a minute.
On the one hand, it may indicate that the person has not found what they were looking for, so you should rethink the use of other keywords.
It can also be an indicator that the content on your page is not of interest. This is definitely one of the most important engagement metrics out there, so look into your industry bounce rate averages to see how you perform.
Most visited categories
It is used to know which categories of your online site have the most visits.
Its analysis will allow you to know the tastes of your audience and direct your efforts towards those preferences or to improve the quality of the content of the other categories.
Days and hours with the most visits
Knowing these data will allow you to know if you are reaching your target audience.
For example, if you have a company that offers services to SMEs, the most logical thing is that your page is more visited during the week and business hours.
However, if you have an online store, it is more likely that you will have a greater number of visits after six in the afternoon and also on weekends.
Social media visits
This KPI will allow you to know the number of visits that come to your website from the different social networks.
Thus, you will be able to know which are the most useful for your company and at what time you should share your content on each social media platform.
Engagement in social media platforms
This metric provides data on how many likes, social shares, favorites, or retweets your publications have on different social media platforms. The higher the number, the more impact you will be having.
To be successful in a content marketing campaign, you need to share them on social media channels.
Video content analytics
Video in recent times has been regarded as the most engaging type of content. Its power as a medium is joined by the detailed vision it offers on the behavior of the audience.
Videos are found to be helpful, convenient, and conveys information quickly in this modern era. In fact, 59% of consumers will preferably choose videos over blog posts.
While this is true, It’s essential to identify your best content and discover profitable audience behaviors through comprehensive reporting and analytics
Video content marketing analytics when used effectively can help you track the response of your audience. Another thing it accomplishes is to help you monitor the success of your videos.
Here are a few performance metrics you should consider for effective video performance
- Views: How many people saw the video? How many minutes or seconds did they spend watching? Which video had the maximum number of views? All this are worth measuring during video analytics.
- Demographics: when you’re not sure about your target audience, the demographic can help to put you on the right track by pointing out the set of people that enjoyed the video.
- On-site Action: Are you working towards the bottom line of your business? This is a retention metric that you definitely need to increase.
One factor that can always answer that could be the amount of time visitors spend on the page after adding a video.
Using proper analytics will help you determine whether you’re tending towards more conversions or otherwise.
- Play Rate: This shows how attention-grabbing and catchy your videos are. It measures just how the audience are eager to play the video. This helps you determine whether you need to change or update your thumbnails and headlines.
In this way, you can analyze and even transfer your videos to other systems that help you to obtain a global vision of the return of all the investment of your company in video systems.
Short form videos vs long form video content? Go short to generate high engagement metrics. Go long if you want to create an engaged audience and long term loyalty around your videos. Read this blog post for more information on the topic.
Do keep in mind that whether you like short form videos vs long form video content shouldn’t matter. As content creators, part of our job is to create content pieces that resonate with our audiences.
Other best practices to creating measuring and creating meaningful digital content
It is precisely in this last point where the knowledge of the habits and preferences of the target audience is essential.
For example, if you know the best-performing social media posts, the key metrics to measure, the best SEO content pieces that convert, you can develop a body of knowledge and scale these successes through an overarching content strategy.
Now, if the origin of the target is also known, content data on other cultures and influences can be obtained and the content can be taken in that direction.
Google E-A-T’s Principle for promising content analysis
Google E-A-T is a principle developed by Google which clarifies that entrepreneurs, businesses, brands should give more attention to creating high-quality, usable, and engaging content and give less attention to keyword stuffing, keyword density, and other SEO jargons out there.
The E-A-T is an acronym for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
Along with these principles comes the “Google Quality Raters Guidelines”, a compendium used to judge content by Google.
The E-A-T in nutshell rates the quality of your content based on the following criteria:
- Expertise: The volume of information you possess about a topic or subject which could be facts, figures, research papers, historical documents.
- Authority: This speaks about your authority in the field you are writing about usually measured through authorship. This could be backlinks, mentions et al.
- Trustworthiness: Your domain authority, trustworthiness, accuracy of information, external references.
In your content analytics this could be a factor that saves the rest of the day.
If at any point you discover your bounce rate increased reasonably higher, then, needless to say, y, our content might be offering more piece of garbage than usable, valuable, and helpful content.
The solution is to create content that is not only designed at getting tons of clicks and driving massive traffic to your website but resonates with the pain points of the readers. A content that readers will want to keep reading, hence, spend more time on your web page.
You can also create this by hiring professional content writing experts at Embarque. We’ll help you create content that steers your business goals to success.
Define your KPIs
To be more specific, let’s turn to the Key Performance Indicator (KPIs), the choice of which will depend on the goals set and the characteristics of what we are going to measure.
As in this case we are talking about content and what is expected is to increase its quality and therefore, the loyalty of the reader. Pay attention to indicators such as page views per visit, the most read, the number of new users, the time spent, and the bounce rate.
But the important thing is that our KPIs respond to the acronym of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely), that is, that they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and Timely.
In this way, we will make the difference between the success and failure of our analytics process.
Repurpose your content for social media
Social media marketing is a whole beast in itself, and you have to share great content in a certain way to make this process more effective. In essence, there are two types of engagement in social media marketing: social advertising and community sharing.
In essence, you can just share your article on various platforms, but you need a meaningful distribution strategy in order for this to work. Social media experts know that you need to repurpose your content to fit the different crowds you’re trying to get.
Use tools to measure social analytics and facilitate your posting process. You can use social media scheduling tools like Later, Hootsuite or Buffer. In your social media marketing process, these provide important insights on pieces of content that works.
Your social media strategy can then be integrated into an overarching content marketing strategy to figure out the types of content to create.
Measuring content success metrics is a process of iteration
Ultimately, what critical metrics to measure depends on your goals for your content strategy. Is it to get customers or build a community? Is it to boost sales metrics or rank first in organic search?
These are important questions to ask to make sure that you’re doing the right content marketing efforts.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed this comprehensive guide to content marketing analytics. From defining various content marketing analytics to using analytics tools like Google Analytics, you need to know that creating great content is an iterative process.
Content marketing success therefore depends on how quickly you can identify what great content means to you and creating a content marketing program that works.
Have any questions? Or interested in scaling growth through SEO content that gets you customers? Try out Embarque or email julian@embarque.io for more information.
