JILLYN: Hi, I’m Jillyn, founder and executive director of Technology Aloha and I’m here today with our content manager Kelli to talk about measuring some stuff with your content. Our podcast today will be broken into four sections: content analytics, why you need to measure the success of your content, what you can do with the information, and tools you can use to evaluate the content. Let’s get started. So, Kelli, what are content analytics?
What Are Content Analytics?
KELLI: Content analytics are the numbers of your writing. If your content is a paper you wrote for school the main analytics would be the grade it earned. So, if you pass you got an A.
JILLYN: And this is a really great way to categorize and characterize analytics. They are kind of framed as the various grades your content received.
KELLI: Yep, content analytics can seem confusing but when you put it down into the numbers it makes it so much easier to look at.
JILLYN: Agreed.
KELLI: So Jillyn, I know we need to look at our content analytics but why do we need to look at them?
Why do we need to measure them?
JILLYN: So, just like so much in life if you don’t measure you don’t know what’s working and what’s not. Analytics help you determine what is working and what isn’t. Content is a time-consuming thing to produce and you want to make sure that what you’re writing is doing its job. You want to make sure that what you’re writing is doing its job. You want to make sure that you’re writing more of the content that draws your readers in and helps you break into future clients.
Your analytics can also help you learn more about your market and following. For instance, you might think that you’re writing for middle-class men in their late thirties, however, when you look at the analytics you may find the majority of your visitors are actually women in their mid-twenties with children. That’s a very different demographic, and it will allow you to better position yourself to speak to that market and refine your tone to better fit your audience.
KELLI: Yes, you definitely want to get to the right audience, because if you’re writing for the wrong audience then you might end up not getting better clients and customers.
JILLYN: That’s a very good point. The other thing that analytics can do for you is that it can help you service gaps, not only in your content but in your offering. So, when you look at what people read and where they spend their time, and how they navigate through your site sometimes their needs are really clear and a lot of times those needs are things that you can supply solutions for. And you already have the audience so it’s instant money for your organization.
KELLI: We all know that instant money in business lets you get other wonderful things done.
JILLYN: Agreed. So, now that you know why you need the analytics, what can you do with the information once you have it?
What Can You Do with Them?
KELLI: So, once you have the information you will know your most popular post and you can create more of what people want and are reading. Then you won’t waste your time creating content that no one looks at and you don’t want to waste your time, you’re busy! You want to be able to put out what people are looking at. You can also go into greater detail with the popular posts. You can do a follow-up post with more current information and you can just really get down to what your readers find the most interesting.
JILLYN: And that’s an important thing. A lot of times those follow-up posts are easier to write because you’re not reinventing the wheel and they tend to be more actionable because they are more detailed.
KELLI: Exactly. The other thing that you can do is repurpose the content. When you showcase your popular content in a new way it will do wonders for your reach and we’re actually going to go more into repurposing content in the next month on a new episode.
JILLYN: I’m looking forward to that one. The other thing about repurposing content is that it can give you opportunities to capture more leads. So, you get something of value and because of the analytics, you can see what’s of value on your site.
KELLI: Exactly, and then another thing that you can do is if you have a lot of content that isn’t scoring well but combined it kind of scores pretty well, you can just combine it to something that people will really, really enjoy and then you can also get rid of the outdated content on your website and by cleaning the outdated content you’re going to increase your websites speed which everyone wants, and also getting rid of content that isn’t popular will help you highlight the highest quality content. And if all of your content is the highest quality then everyone will love your website that much more.
JILLYN: Including Google, one of the things that Google looks at is not only how each piece of your content performs but also how all of it performs as a whole. So, if you weed out the content that isn’t doing well and you focus on the content that is doing well your whole site does well and will funnel more and more traffic your way. More and more traffic, more and more potential leads, better return on investments, better-performing company.
KELLI: Exactly. And so now that we know why we should be doing this and what we should do after we have the information Jillyn what tools can we use to evaluate our content performance?
What Tools are there to Measure Success?
JILLYN: There are a ton of analytic tools out there both paid and free and selecting the best fit for you and your organization will depend at least in part on what you need to measure to meet your goals. That said, start with Google Analytics. It’s free. It’s simple to set up and it’s definitely the current industry standard. Any agency you work with will know how to use that data to help you make good decisions for your business. They also use it to help guide advertising budget. So when you’re ready to start advertising online they will have the information that they need to provide the best return on investment for your advertising dollar.
Here at Technology Aloha we also use a couple of other tools. One is Heath and it’s not nearly as well known as Google Analytics but its really handy because it offers these fantastic ways to create detailed product-centered reports. If your selling services and your products are online it’s a really really good option.
The other one that we use is called Hotjar and Hotjar sort of fills in the gap* where I feel Google is a little bit weak. They do a wonderful job of showing, they’re called heat maps and they basically show how your visitors actually interact with the content on your site. They show you where they spend time. They show you where they click. They show you all of these things about how they interact with each individual page. It also gives you the opportunity to poll your visitors and get feedback directly from them about the experience that they have on each individual page of your site. Those three tools are all really great and they all measure slightly different aspects of that whole content analytic field of your site.
KELLI: Exactly, and Hotjar is nice because when you can see where they’re clicking and where the mouse is sitting on the page you can see where they’re looking. So if you find that they’re looking in a specific spot and nothing is there, or whatever’s there isn’t as important you could move a call to action there or something that would grab that user’s attention better. So anyway Hot jar is really nice for that because it gives you a visual map on where you could be moving things around to help your customers.
JILLYN: That’s a really fantastic point and again, at the end of the day we’re all looking at making money from our businesses and our websites are definitely a great extension to that, especially during the current crisis where everybody is working online and spending more time online and not being out at the brick and mortar locations. So, I think that that is all that we have time for today. We’ve included some links in the podcast description for several of our blog posts and the tools that we talked about today. I’m Jillyn.
KELLI: And I’m Kelli. If you have questions about measuring the success of your blog or have other topics you want to hear on our podcast please reach out on social media or contact us at technologyaloha.com.
JILLYN: Thank you for listening to Into the Inbound with Technology Aloha. We hope we’ve added a little aloha to your day.
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