If content marketing is about the creation and sharing of content, then content analysis measures the performance of that content. With the right content analytic tools, you can arm yourself with valuable insights that will inform your content strategy so your teams create content that truly resonates with their target audience.
What is content analytics?
Content analytics is the process of analyzing all forms of content, such as blogs and social media, to measure content performance. Marketers employ various tools for tracking, analyzing, and reporting on audience behavior and content performance metrics. Marketing data provides insight into how audiences react to their content, its effectiveness, and how their content teams are performing, helping them optimize their content strategies.
How content analytics works
Content analytics tools collect data from various digital content sources, including websites, apps, and other platforms. They track and analyze this data to uncover patterns and insights about audience behavior and the content itself.
By utilizing content analytics reports, marketing professionals can sift through the collected data, allowing them to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of their audience’s preferences and interests.
Equipped with these valuable insights, content teams can make intelligent data-driven decisions when crafting content that precisely aligns with the unique needs and interests of their target audience.
Why is content analytics important?
Understanding how your target audience interacts with your content gives you insider knowledge on what’s working and what’s not. The data about your audience helps you figure out what clicks with them (and what content drives clicks) so you can make smart, data-informed decisions when it comes to your content strategy.
This means you can create top-notch, perfectly tailored content for your audiences. In a nutshell, content analytics reveals both the strengths and the areas that need improvement in your content strategy. If you want a 360-degree view of your audience, keep reading!
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Gain a deeper understanding of your audience
Content analytics cuts through the guesswork and provides a crystal clear understanding of what your audience is truly interested in. It paints a detailed picture of your audience demographics, including their age, gender, location, and more. This valuable data gives you a snapshot of your customer persona.
By delving into this audience data, you gain valuable insights into their behavior and preferences. It reveals whether your audience is genuinely captivated by your content or not. With this knowledge, you can fine-tune your content to target your ideal audience with content that excites and engages them.
Analyze audience behavior
With content analytics tools, content marketers get behind-the-scenes insight into visitor behavior. You can see how much time your audience spends on your website, the devices they use (whether it’s desktop or mobile), and even the specific city and country they’re from.
Who’s sharing your content? Who’s clicking on your call-to-action buttons? These are the questions that content analytics tools can confidently answer. With their effective use, you’ll have all the insights you need to make informed decisions and optimize your content strategy.
Track audience engagement
With content data at your fingertips, you can pinpoint the types of content that captivate your audience. User engagement is a key metric to consider when measuring content. Engagement encompasses various factors, such as the time spent on your page, likes, shares, comments, and even bounce rates.
You can identify your most compelling content by analyzing audience engagement. Likewise, you can determine the least useful content based on factors like high bounce rates, indicating a lack of action from your audience.
These insights enable you to adjust your content strategy to drive more engagement. Whether creating more relevant content or testing out different call-to-action buttons, these adjustments optimize your content strategy for your audience.
Create better-performing content
When content marketers regularly evaluate their team’s content performance from a content analytics perspective, they get valuable insights to figure out what content to stick with, what content needs some work, and what content they should create more of.
Are your visitors gravitating toward your video content? Which topics is your audience showing interest in? Are there blog articles you should scrap altogether? A thorough content analytics report will provide all the information you need to create content that matches the interests and preferences of your target audience.
The difference between content analytics and web analytics
Web analytics refers to the measurement, collection, and analysis of user data when visiting a website. On the flip side, content analytics hones in the user data gathered from multiple content channels, including websites, social media, blog posts, and more. The key difference is that web analytics concentrates its efforts on pulling data only on websites.
4 essential metrics for content analytics
Before diving into content strategy optimization, marketers need to start examining the metrics. This involves performing a content analysis, which focuses on four crucial metrics: production, engagement, performance, and content scoring. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Production
Content production involves all aspects of the process from planning and creation to editing and publishing. Content analysts, strategists, or managers dive into content metrics and provide valuable insights. They can assess the number of content pieces created by each author, the variety of content types (like blogs, eBooks, webinars, and more), the amount of content targeting specific customer personas, and the different categories of content within a business.
By looking at these content analytics metrics, they can assess content performance and make informed decisions to level up their content strategy.
Engagment
As we mentioned before, gauging engagement is key to understanding how well your content is doing. You can get a sense of engagement by looking at social media and online activity around your content.
As a marketer, you can track engagement through various factors, such as the total number of social media shares, user comments on your post, page views, and the number of backlinks your content receives (those outbound links). By considering all these factors together, you can get a good idea of how valuable your audience finds your content.
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Performance
The performance metric provides an overview of both production and engagement metrics, giving you insights into how successful your content is from a revenue perspective. It also serves as a tool for businesses to assess if their content team is meeting their marketing goals.
By analyzing top-performing content within a specific timeframe, identifying popular content categories, and tracking which authors’ content generates the most engagement, marketers can understand which content is driving revenue and performing well.
Content Scoring
This refers to the process of monitoring and ranking the quality of content. By using a content analytics tool, marketers assign a numerical value known as the content score to each piece of content. This score provides insights into how well the content is performing or if it’s falling short.
The content score takes into account various factors, including category, author, conversion rate, content type compared to campaign type, and the revenue generated. By leveraging a content scoring tool, marketers can calculate the return on investment (ROI) for each piece of content and determine if they are achieving their marketing goals.