A beginner’s guide to content marketing analytics

Looking at traffic

Your traffic refers to how many people are viewing your content, but there are different ways to analyze your traffic to gain a deeper understanding of who your readers are. 

• Pageviews: This gives you a comprehensive picture of how many times a page has been visited. While this number is helpful, this could be a single person visiting your content many times. Your unique views help you determine how many readers are visiting your content. (See next bullet.)
• Unique visitors: This number denotes how many individual users visited your content. This is more helpful because you can identify how many different people are reading your content, rather than how many times a single person may have viewed your page. 
• Traffic sources: Where visitors come from (organic search, social media, direct, referral or those instances where a visitor types in a URL or originates from a bookmarked link and paid ads).

Understanding engagement

What does engagement actually mean for your content? Some readers may land on your page, but abscond without ever reading a single word. Others will adore what you’ve written and share as much as possible. Knowing how to interpret engagement is essential. 

• Time on page: This can be helpful to know how actively engaged a reader is by letting you know how long visitors spend on a particular page.
  
  • Tip for improvement: Add in graphics or imagery if there is none. Otherwise, try to evaluate the content for deeper insights by providing real-life scenarios or examples for expert input. 
• Bounce rate: Let’s bounce! Or rather, this metric lets you know how many visitors left your site after viewing only one page…and then bouncing. 
  
  • Tips for improvement: Try building in a more robust link strategy with associated content to keep visitors on your site. These could include downloadable content, interviews, videos or infographics. 
• Social shares: A fairly self-explanatory metric, this is the number of times your content is shared on social media. Social shares can be very helpful for growing an audience because they are a source of free marketing. 
  
  • Tips for improvement: Encourage your friends to share content with their network. You can also try to build followers on social networks with social conversations and incentives. 
• Comments and interactions: This is when your audience participates in discussions about your content. While it’s a good idea to also interact with comments, beware of trolls! It’s generally best not to engage with those offering only toxic commentary. 
  
  • Tips for improvement: Encourage readers to interact and provide feedback within your article and make sure to always respond to comments to promote conversation. 

Identifying conversion metrics

Conversion is a fancy term that means you get someone to “buy” or become a regular reader (if you’re not selling anything), or rather, they convert to your content. Essentially, these metrics help you understand when people are going to come back to your content again and again. These numbers are important for writers because if you’re trying to grow your audience, these people are, in fact, your audience. 

• Click-through rate (CTR): This number shows the percentage of users who click on a link within your content. CTRs are important because they help you identify which content is working, but they also help to improve your ranking, boosting your content further up on page results. 
• Lead generation: If you’re on the business end of writing, this is the number of leads acquired through your content.From a business perspective, this is your number of potential customers.  
• Conversion rate: Again, on the business side, this is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (sign up, download, purchase, whatever you’d like for them to do).

Sizing up SEO metrics

SEO is important even for the novice writer because content only has value if it can be found. You might write the most striking piece of content to come out of this millennium, but it will do you no good if no one is able to find it. 

• Keyword rankings: Is your content showing up when people search for target keywords? If it's not, you don’t have good keyword usage and therefore you won’t see high rankings. Search engines use keywords to identify if your content matches a user’s search so it’s important to ensure you have the right keywords in your content. On a side note, avoid keyword stuffing as it will actually hurt your rankings. Your best option is to make sure you’re using keywords naturally throughout your content. 
• Backlinks: This is the number of external sites linking to your content. These are valuable because it shows search engines that you have authoritative content that others are referencing as a source of truth. You want people to use your content as a link as it will help improve your page ranking.
• Domain authority: Your domain authority is a Moz score indicating the credibility of your website in search engines. Think of this as your content’s reputation. Make sure you are using factual content with research, expert opinion or statistics to back it up. Google qualifies your credibility based using page rans. 

Google Analytics

Most writers consider Google to be the king of search engines as the most-used browser in the webosphere. Google Analytics will show you website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.

To find metrics in Google Analytics, choose Reports from the menu on the left side. 

A dashboard will appear. At first glance, you’ll be able to see the following.

• Active users: Those who have visited your page. 
• New users: Those who are new to your page. 
• Average engagement time per active user: The amount of time each user is spending on average on your page. 
• Total revenue: Any revenue made from purchases on your site, which may only be relevant if you have product offerings. 

Scrolling down you can see additional metrics that include any recent active users, where users are coming from, which pieces of content are performing the best, where visitors are located geographically, user activity over time, any digital events that are performing well and so much more.

You can also filter on each of these metrics so that you can add custom data and remove anything that doesn’t apply to your content. For example, if you don’t host online events such as webinars, you can remove this data from your view.

Eventually, you see metrics go up or down and you’ll gain insights into how well your pages are actually performing. Check out this guide from Hubspot for more information. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a great place to find insights about search performance and indexing. Indexing is an action done by Google when it crawls pages to assess their relevance.

Google Search Console is a free and very useful tool for writers because it helps you see how your content is doing underneath the page, so to speak. It tells you things such as any site errors and broken links, whether you have indexing issues with pages or videos, as well as performance reports. 

While these tools provide powerful insights into your content's performance, their true value lies in how you interpret and act on the data they provide. Successfully leveraging analytics requires a strategic approach that combines the right tools with thoughtful analysis and implementation. Let's explore how to transform these analytical insights into actionable content marketing improvements. Review this guide for more details on using Google Search Console.

Social media analytics 

Every social media platform has its own analytics that show how your posts are performing. At a high level, this may not be as relevant for writers, but it comes in very handy when you need to promote your content or level up your readership. These tools are generally pretty intuitive to use and they show metrics that include engagement, click throughs and comments. 

Comments can come in very handy from a social media perspective to understand engagement and what other types of related content readers want to see, but this is an additional warning that toxic commentary may ensue. This guide has more information about using social media analytics.

SEO tools

As we discussed previously, SEO tools help you to make your content findable. We’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it, SEO is only a piece of the puzzle, but you still can’t see the full picture without it. Search engines find your content based on its relevancy to a search term. More art than science, it is best conducted with a combination of keywords but written for humans.