Get Started with Content Analytics and Intelligence
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define content analytics.
- Understand how marketers use content analytics.
- Create content analytics goals.
- Build a content analytics process to support goals.
What Is Content Analytics?
You created great content—but is it making an impact? Look to content analytics for insight. Content analytics is the measurement and analysis of the consumption, engagement, and outcomes of audience interactions with content.
Content analytics lets you understand the effectiveness of content such as blog posts, social posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and more. This module focuses specifically on content analytics in the context of marketing, but content analytics also generates insights into other types of content, such as self-help or training documentation.
Content analytics is the data piece of content strategy. The goal of content strategy in marketing is to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time in the customer journey. Content analytics shows whether that’s happening.
Without content analytics, it’s difficult to:
- Know if audiences are finding your content in the channels where they browse and search for information
- Measure the impact of content
- Justify current or expanded investments in content
- Optimize content to resonate with audiences
- Evaluate whether content is moving audiences to take desired actions, such as making a purchase, speaking with a salesperson, or leaving their contact information
Why Use Content Analytics: Quality vs Quantity
Making content analytics part of your process lets you orient your content strategy toward quality. To win with content requires a way to keep score. Think of content analytics as the engine of your scoring system, using key performance indicators (KPIs) and engagement metrics.
Start by defining what content marketing success looks like to your organization. Choose KPIs that help track business success. For your organization, that can mean higher net promoter scores (NPS), qualified leads, free trial conversions, or some other measurable outcome. KPIs also vary by format and audience. A blog post has different goals and KPIs than a product demo.
Solely focusing on traffic volume and engagement metrics, such as page views and social shares, can lead you astray. That’s because engagement may not always mean you're reaching the right audience with the right content. Content KPIs that go beyond engagement include:
- Leads
- Conversion rate
- Return on investment (ROI)
At Salesforce, we use a content performance dashboard that reflects dozens of different metrics. The dashboard rolls up a customized selection of KPIs into a 0–100 score. It’s a quick snapshot of complete content performance. Our team can see what’s working rather than blindly creating large volumes of content in hopes that some of it reaches its intended audience.
How Marketers Use Content Analytics
Content analytics helps marketers understand and improve how marketing content is developed, shared, and consumed by customers and prospects. Marketers use data to gain visibility into how the content audience is engaging with content. Content analytics answers questions like:
- Who is consuming our content?
- Do we have the appropriate content for all our audiences at every stage of their customer journey?
- How do our audiences engage with our content?
- What steps (if any) do audiences take after engaging with our content?
- Is our content helping audiences advance on their customer journeys?
- Does our content lead audiences to desired, pre-defined outcomes, such as engaging with additional content, making a purchase, or asking for more information?
Understanding the Systems and Processes that Contribute to Content Analytics
You build a content analytics process using data from the full content operations technology stack you use to manage content. It won’t happen overnight. Mature organizations have a dedicated content operations team to manage and roll out analytics innovations. Many organizations get started with these basics.
- Content management system (CMS)
- Analytics dashboard
- Quality data
- Metrics that match your content
Using Google Analytics as a Foundation for Content Analytics
Many CMS let you explore your content data to uncover audience and consumption insights. Don’t have a CMS with the level of analytics power you need? You can use Google Analytics—the Understand Your Web Users with Google Analytics trail shows you how to get started.
With Google Analytics, you can see how visitors interact with your content by looking at standard reports. Reports in Google Analytics let you explore content performance from a number of angles. Here are a few that content marketers are likely to find useful.
- Acquisition overview
- Landing pages
- New vs returning users
- Content efficiency analysis
Content Analytics as a Career
If you’re passionate about content marketing and data analytics, consider content analytics as a career. It’s a career that lets you put your love of data to work. Many content analysts come to the career through marketing and content development. They found themselves drawn to content metrics and finding ways to improve content performance. As content analysts, they interrogate content data for insights—and share those insights with content stakeholders.
To become a content analyst, cultivate these skills.
- Collaboration skills that help you understand the many factors that contribute to content performance goals across product, social, campaigns, and other teams
- Ability to convey data-driven insights and analytics concepts to a nonanalytical audience
- Knowledge of common content types, KPIs, engagement metrics, and CMS
- Familiarity with advanced tools, such as Tableau, that let you visualize data from a variety of sources
What’s coming up? The next unit shows you how to choose and use KPIs to measure content effectiveness.