Implementing an effective content strategy is a challenging task even for professionals. Not only is it a challenge and time consuming to create high value-added content, you then have the task of understanding which channels are effective and which need informing for future strategies.
In today’s digital world, every content professional should be aware that analytics is important. But even the best content professionals can find defining and using analytics to be a challenge. It used to be that tracking page views or unique visitors was sufficient. Not anymore. Analytics now are far more sophisticated and complex.
And analytics are more essential than ever in making good decisions about content. From strategy to user experience, to individual tactics, analytics should be your content guide.
In this GrowTraffic blog, I’m going to explain How Can You Use Data And Analytics To Understand The Effectiveness Of My Content And Inform Future Strategy.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing is a viable and cost-effective way to attract new customers and build a better rapport with existing customers. By creating and distributing relevant content, your website will receive traffic and attract your consumers attention.
But if you want your content marketing efforts to be effective, it’s necessary to understand the effect your content has on your target audience.
What Are The Key Content Reports In Google Analytics
I’m going to dive straight in. Google Analytics is the most reliable and accurate data and analytics tools for your website to understand the effectiveness of your content and the strategy you have in place.
This picture showcases how your content Is performing. You will find a list of all the pages of your site that have been viewed during the date range you have set. If your page URLs don’t make it easy to understand which pages are being viewed, you can select “Page Title”.
Here’s an overview of the data columns
Page views – This will show you which pages on your website are most popular as it is the number of times visitors see the page. If the page is reloaded or returned to, additional page views will be recorded.
Unique Page views – This refers to the number of individual users who have looked at your pages.
Avg. Time on Page: Uses the time metrics available for the page and works out the average across the page views.
Entrances: How many times this page was the first page in a session.
Bounce Rate – This is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the page they arrived at without visiting other pages).
% Exit: The percentage of page views that were the final page in a session.
Page Value: Calculated using e-commerce and goal values, this divides the total value by the number of page views for this page.
How To Use Data Analysis To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
Data analysis helps to better inform your content marketing decisions, ensuring that you’re providing content that appeals to and influences your target audience.
We have found consistently that evaluating content it performs better. On every measure (The above picture) of success, teams that evaluate content are doing far better than those that don’t.
To truly capitalise on data-driven insights, your content team needs to understand how to use and interpret data to benefit the content strategy. Part of this process is understanding what data can do for your content.
Here’s our top 4 tactics that help leverage data analysis to improve your content strategy:
1. Strategise SEO Content With Keyword Data
Using keyword data, you can identify the best keywords to target within your blog campaigns so that you can get your articles to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) that will generate significant traffic.
Keyword research tools like Moz and SEMRush can help provide this data.
2. Refine Your Social Media Content Using Social Analytics Data
You need to make sure that you’re distributing the right content to the right social media platforms. If you aren’t the data will tell you – so use it. Use this data to redefine the types of content you put out on each platform.
You also need to consider timing. It’s important to understand when your audience engages with your content on each platform so that you’re posting when they’re watching.
3. Use Email Engagement Rates To Better Personalise Content
By better understanding email engagement rates, content marketers can get a more in-depth view of the types of email content that trigger each audience segment to take action.
Monitoring open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, email marketers can better understand how to personalise future content to each segment to encourage more positive actions.
4. Monitor Google Analytics To Build Buyer Personas
Your products or services are likely to appeal to more than one type of buyer. Over 50% of marketers create content for four or more different buyer personas.
To understand how buyer personas behave, 88% of content marketers use website analytics tools like Google Analytics.
GrowTraffic: Content Marketing Experts
Since we formed, GrowTraffic has been creating valuable content marketing strategies for its clients. When we say valuable, we use Google Analytics for future reference for each client ensuring we not only keep the highest standards but to also ensure better results for yourself.
With the right tools and knowledge, content marketing measurement is not too difficult to learn, at least on a basic level. By using some basic tools, you can easily get the baseline idea of how well your content is engaging audiences. But getting into the nitty-gritty of the buyer’s journey – that is, why they do what they do – is a little trickier.
GrowTraffic is an award-winning digital marketing agency that specialises in SEO. Our friendly team is here to help. We can tackle your content problems for you, or we can give you the training needed to tackle them yourself!
Get in touch to find out more. You can call us on 0161 706 0012, email us at info@growtraffic.co.uk or fill out our online contact form.
