You’ve selected a web host like Bluehost, learned how to set up WordPress, created and even promoted content. These are all essential parts of your content strategy, but now to really get the most out of your efforts, you’ll need to measure the effectiveness of your content.
Over 45% of marketing professionals don’t have effective analytics in place or don’t communicate those numbers to their content teams. In addition, marketers are spending 73%of the time analyzing the past, but only 27% of their time mapping out the future. Marketing analytics can seem intimidating at first, but with a bit of study, the numbers will not only make sense, they’ll help you better understand the impact your content is having out there in the vast internet.
The importance of tracking content is so you can see what kind of exposure your article or blog is having: how many social shares, inbound links, and conversions (such as sign-ups or sales) did it earn? Social shares in and of themselves may not increase revenue, but shares that drive traffic to your website will. And this is where analytics for measuring content engagement come in: with the proper tools, you can see if you are getting the ROIs from each piece you’re producing that you need to grow your business.
Here are five great tools for measuring content effectiveness:
There is no other free tool that will give you the powerful insights you can get from Google Analytics. Analytics is a web-based platform that tracks your content to see what kind of engagement each piece is getting from your readers—where they read your article, how they came to your website, which keywords they searched for that led them to you, how long they spent on your site, etc.
Knowing this comprehensive demographic information about your audience enables you to craft future content with their interests and needs in mind. Analytics shows you both the raw numbers and simple charts to help you visualize your results, and you can categorize these results by new or returning visitors, referral sources, geography, etc. By consulting these numbers on a regular basis, you can see trends, better understand what brings people to your site, and improve your website’s usability so that you aren’t wasting money by blindly producing content and hoping something sticks.
Buffer For Business isn’t just a social media scheduling tool—it also comes with a powerful set of analytics as well as the capacity for Google Analytics integration. This makes it a key tool for measuring the engagement of your social media efforts. It uses information from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, and LinkedIn so you can see which posts are the most popular over time and you can even have the information delivered to you in a handy weekly report.
Not only does it save you time by scheduling your content on the right social platforms at the right time, but with the data it gathers, you can adjust your campaigns to increase audience engagement. And with the integration of Google Analytics, you can set a UTM tracking code to your URL and match your Buffer analytics with Google analytics, as well as measure the growth of your social followers.
Scoop.It is part content curation tool and part analytics tool, which allows you to publish posts and share them with social tools such as Buffer, and is used by over a million people. It measures visitors, views, comments, and shares each day to show you what level of engagement your content is getting. By analyzing which posts receive the most interaction, you’ll know what to produce more of over time. Plus, Scoop.It also offers a large library of resources to help you keep up on the latest marketing trends and learn more about how to use content marketing effectively.
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard for your social media, analytics, marketing, sales, etc, and is a great organizational tool for businesses who use various platforms to track all their metrics. Features include monitoring multiple websites, real-time reports, and customization of your dashboard—which allows you to categorize your dashboard into groups, like social media, marketing, incoming revenue, email open rates, project management, etc. You can add widgets, such as FreshBooks, PayPal, InfusionSoft, and Facebook, to your dashboard to give you an at-a-glance snapshot of where your business stands from any departmental point of view.
When promoting content on Twitter, the time at which you post can have a massive impact on your content’s effectiveness. This social network moves fast and if you are posting at the wrong time of day, your Tweets may never be seen. Instead of just guessing when your audience is likely to be online, you can use Tweroid to track responses to your posts and see what time of day your followers are most active on Twitter, which will help to boost engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Tracking your content’s performance doesn’t just help you understand what works and what doesn’t. It can also, over time, significantly improve your content marketing ROI. When you have the data that tells you what works, you can concentrate your efforts and let go of time – or money – wasters. This makes you more effective, increases profitability, and sets the stage for greater success in your company’s future.
