There is no magic formula for creating content that engages your audience and drives bottom line benefits. This is because consumers’ online behaviour can be fickle and you must understand facts around their behaviour to form your content creation strategies. Here’s where data analytics comes in handy, presenting data that provides actionable insights and enables you to create the desired impact with your branded content.
Google Analytics is a popular tool that provides reports on important statistics like page views and time spent on page, while there are others that tell you what kind of content your target audience wants you to deliver, such as videos, functional content, product-focused information, inspirational content and so on. By leveraging data analytics tools, you can focus your efforts on content strategies that can actually deliver results.
Webpage conversions – Separating winners from losers
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At the core of any data analytics objective is to understand which content attracts the greatest readership and why. Google Analytics can give you critical information about the popularity of your webpages and blog posts. Its behavior report provides metrics on number of visits, bounce rate, conversions and more. Once you have identified pages that are converting well, you will get a clearer picture of the products/services that most interest buyers. You can also investigate the reasons behind pages with high bounce rates, and adjust your content approach to make the products/services more appealing to your target audience. The insights gleaned from the report can also help you zero in on suitable topics for your blog posts.
How to make the most of valuable pages
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A full report of top content from Google Analytics can give you quick ideas on optimizing your best performing pages (those attracting the most traffics) to convert. Here are some strategies you can explore:
Plug in new content that promotes your offerings: You can consider adding a few lines of promotional content around a new or high-value product to a page receiving a lot of traffic.
Convert visitors into subscribers: Creating a download for a page that receives thousands of views each month makes sense. It is an excellent way to get visitors to provide their email address and engage more closely with your brand.
Add internal links: Support your SEO efforts and drive more pageviews by adding 1-2 links at the beginning of a post or page to related content.
You can also convert a page attracting heavy traffic into a landing page, and see more calls to action being heeded by visitors.
Solving the problem of ‘what to write about’
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Analytics can tell you how well your blog posts are working for you. Google Analytics’ behavior report provides an important metric – the number of unique people who have viewed each blog post. If the ‘unique pageviews’ for list-based posts are high, you can instantly identify that readers prefer this content structure. Similarly, you can examine the readership value of different blog topics by assessing page views, and understand what topics to focus on more than others. Data analytics, in this way, can help you develop posts that attract a lot of readership and shares.
What type of content are users looking for?
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Analytics tells you what type of content users are searching for on your website. This information is invaluable in further understanding your customers’ needs, which you can use to optimize your content efforts. Google Analytics offers this functionality, collecting the details of searches performed on your site based on the query parameters. By identifying search terms with the highest number of searches and most search refinements, you will know what topics interest your target audience. The data can also identify topics not covered on your website that users have tried to access. Based on this insight, you can plug content holes appropriately.
Improve social currency
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Google Analytics Social Tracking allows you to gauge visitor reactions to your social media contents. Metrics like time spent on site, bounce rate and purchases can help you tweak your social content strategy for better results. There are tools that give you data about which pages with links to your website are being shared on social media, which social network is driving the most leads, and who are the key influencers in your industry and what they are saying. PinLeague, for instance, gives you an idea about the kind of pins users are liking and repinning.
Social media analytics can define or redefine your approach to content, channels and posting schedule. You can create a highly-targeted social media campaign that improves engagement and contributes to your bottom line.
Analytics aids discovery and provides insights that can transform content creation and marketing. Just as you leverage the best analytics tools, you should focus on taking the right action for maximum benefits.
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