Content analytics is the practice of analyzing and measuring the effectiveness of content marketing strategies. It involves collecting and analyzing data related to content performance and user engagement to help businesses make data-driven decisions and improve the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts.
By analyzing data related to content performance and user engagement, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of how their target audience is interacting with their content. This, in turn, can help businesses optimize their content strategies to drive better results.
One of the key components of content analytics is the use of metrics to measure and track the performance of content.
Content engagement metrics
Engagement metrics are a set of metrics used to measure the level of engagement of a target audience with a particular piece of content.
This includes metrics such as pageviews, referrers, average engaged time, recirculation rate, and social shares. These metrics can provide insights into how audiences are interacting with content and can help businesses understand which types of content are resonating most with their target audience.
Content conversion metrics and attribution
Conversion metrics are another set of metrics used in content analytics to measure the effectiveness of a piece of content in converting leads into customers or encouraging desired actions on a website.
Content conversions link your content directly to those valuable actions—e.g., lead capture events, newsletter signups, purchases, affiliate link clicks, paid digital subscriptions. This helps bridge the gap between your content and proving return on investment (ROI).
Attribution models
Content conversions can also include different attribution models, for example, first touch, linear, last touch, and last post touched.
First touch gives insight on the topics or campaigns that led an audience member to your content. Last touch and last post touched credit the content that led to immediate conversion. Linear provides full visibility into the complete journey a user takes over multiple sessions leading up to a conversion.
Content analytics and WordPress
WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), used by more than 40% of the Internet. Parse.ly Analytics, part of the WordPress VIP enterprise-grade CMS platform, makes working with content analytics easy for writers, authors, marketers, and newsrooms, giving them insights they need to focus their content strategy and prove ROI.
A WordPress plug-in, the Parse.ly Content Helper infuses WordPress and platforms like WordPress VIP with curated content analytics and information from Parse.ly. These insights include performance details for the past seven days such as the number of views, visitors, and referrer data. It also allows users to identify and leverage the characteristics and patterns of the site’s best posts. This helps content creators know at a glance how their content is performing and best ways to make it more engaging for readers.