Content Analysis: How To Measure Content Performance

You’ve done your reading on how valuable content is in every marketing strategy. Now you need to know how to measure the performance of your content.

Let’s jump into analysing your content and what metrics you should care about when it comes to content.

As modern marketers we’re surrounded by an awesome amount of data everyday, especially when it comes to all things digital.

With all the data you have, it’s well worth knowing what metrics you should care about when it comes to analysing your content’s performance.

The data you collect from your content is valuable. Not only will it help you to see how well your content is performing, but it will give you insight on weak spots in the content, missed opportunities and show you your best performing content.

Keep reading to learn more about how you can do a content analysis, along with handy tools you can use to help track content performance.

What do we mean by content analysis?

Content analysis is the process of identifying patterns of success and failures in your content.

By using relevant metrics where your content features, you can quickly understand customer behaviours and how well – or not so well – your content is engaged with by online users.

From websites to emails and social media platforms to printed flyers, there is a wealth of content types that make up your content marketing strategy.

It’s so important to see what impact your content is for your business. Whether people are reading your content and how they respond to reading your content.

By analysing your content you can see what copy is working and what isn’t, and act on your data to either scrap or scale a specific type of content that your customers like.

Content marketing metrics and analysis gives you the data needed to create content that’s suited to your audience.

How to analyse your different types of digital content, and what stats to pay attention to

So how can you track and analyse digital content effectively? Well, thankfully there are many different sources of content that can be looked at when it comes to content analytics.

Any business with a web presence will certainly be doing much of the below already. We’ve also included some useful tools further down that you can use to track the performance of your content marketing, in all its forms.

How to analyse the performance of your website content

For any business or individual creating website content, the information you include in these web pages and the way you convey your message are so important. The step after that is knowing if your web content is successful or not.

From your website’s pages, posts, landing pages, videos and more, you can determine the strengths and weaknesses that each piece of content has. It’s worth asking yourself questions when conducting web content analysis.

A few suggestions are below:

• Is my content up-to-date and accurate?
• Has the content been optimised for search engine optimisation?
• What content is performing the best?
• Which topics/headlines are the most popular?
• What topics are missing that could be useful to add?

But what else should you be looking for when it comes to your website content?

With web content, it’s all about how the users are interacting with your content. The better engaged they are, the more fruitful the results will be.

But before we talk about the engagement with your website content, it needs to be discoverable…

Website ranking

Another key stat to look at is how your website is ranking on search engines. When you search for a service your business offers, where is your website appearing for that search result? Are you above your competitors?

If you don’t see anyone coming to your website, this is limiting the data you can use for your content analytics. You need an SEO strategy to start getting your website to rank.

Then once it starts getting indexed and ranking, you will have much more data to act on for your content.

Seeing how well your content is doing on search engines is one thing, but it’s also worth checking to see what traffic is coming through as a result of your ranking on search engines.

You will want to look out for what’s called your organic traffic – people who find your website naturally on the likes of Google search.

Some web pages may be pulling in more traffic (views to your site) than other web pages. It’s nothing to worry about as this is something that can be worked on.

The idea however is to produce more content and optimise existing content to broaden the amount of pages ranking on the major search engines.

By doing this, it will give your website more influence on how it ranks on the major search engines.

Understanding behaviour and the user flow is important.

Where are your users coming from?

What external sources are proving more effective in getting traffic to your site?

Knowing this can help target your resources precisely where they’re most effective.

Engagement rate or bounce rate on your website

Engagement rates (commonly known as Bounce Rate) are another useful way to analyse your content performance.

You want your engagement rate to be as high as possible. You want to see people interacting with your copy, rather than leaving without zero engagement. In other words, you want your readers to stay and read your copy.

If you’re more used to the term high bounce rate, then 50% or more bounce rate, means people are coming to your site and clicking straight off.

But why would they leave your website quick? There could be many reasons.

Usually it comes down to either the experience of your website (if it’s slow to load, people will likely abandon), the look of your website, or even the opening copy is weak and they read something they dislike.

A good start is to run your website through Google Page Speed and see if it is to do with the load speed of your website. If your speed is quite quick and loads in seconds, then it could be the design or content on your website.

How to tell if your blogs are successful

Blogs are a great way to showcase your knowledge and expertise, while writing content that your customers will find beneficial to learn about.

To analyse the effectiveness of your blog content, take a look back at the website content section above. Similarly to analysing your web content, you can do the same for your blogs specifically too.

Look at the data you have on individual blog posts:

• Which ones get more views
• Which have low/high bounce rate
• Are any blog prompting your users to go to the contact page
• Which get the most engagement in the form of comments

Highlight any blog content that’s converted your readers into customers and use this information to tailor your future blogs.

For any guest blogs you do, use tracked URLs to provide accurate data on how influential that guest content is.

How to see what content works on social media

The power of social media is growing and we can gather a lot of data through the variety of platforms available. From Instagram to Tiktok, Facebook to Twitter, there is a lot of data already available to look at.

It’s simply a case of looking at the content analytics that’s accessible for every profile. Each piece of content, whether it be a grid post, a tweet or video, it can be easily analysed to check customer engagement and reach.

Social media platforms can supply some great content marketing metrics, and for the most part, for free.

For many startups and small businesses with limited budgets, it’s an opportunity too good to miss. With more than half of the world using social media, it’s a treasure chest of data that all businesses can use when it comes to tracking customer behaviour.

However, as social media has grown, so too have the definitions of success through social media.

Just because a business has 10,000 followers on Instagram, doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily have a high engagement – quite the opposite actually.

When assessing your social media metrics, there are certain ones to review in particular.

Look out for the following:

• Reach/impressions – the number of times your post has appeared and how many unique views were achieved on a post or story.
• Comments – the number of user interactions through leaving messages on the post.
• Reactions – the type of reaction they have depending on what options are given, e.g. like, dislike, heart, angry emoticon, etc.
• Button clicks/link clicks – you can track to see if people are converting with your call to action on the post.
• Referrals to your website – this is one to look at on Google Analytics to see if people are coming to your website from your social profiles or posts. You can see which social network is best for you.

All of these metrics can give you a better understanding of what your customers engage with the most, and what type of post: a normal post, video, carousel, videos, stories or images.

What metrics to care about for your emails

With 64% of small businesses using email marketing to reach customers, there’s a lot of opportunity that emails can provide.

It’s worthwhile building up your email subscribers or building your email contact list so that you can communicate on a regular basis with subscribers or potential customers regularly.

To analyse your email content to users, it’s worth creating separate email marketing campaigns so that you can refine the results and data you get.

This data can give feedback on how many emails were opened (or unopened) or any click-throughs from links within the email itself.

How to analyse the performance of your Paid Ads

A business can benefit from a mixture of organic and paid advertising. Google’s sponsored section on the results pages can certainly be useful to invest in where possible.

It also makes analysing the ads easier because Google provides its own dashboard. From tracking the progress of the ad to reports and insights on its performance. This can help tailoring your next ad campaigns to make them more impactful, whilst saving on costs in the process.

*Top tip – Know your audience so that your ad campaigns have a better success of reaching the right people.

How to analyse the performance of your SEO Content

Search engine optimisation is a proven technique to improving the online presence of your business.

From keyword ranking to your landing page content, it’s all influential to the success of driving traffic to your website and ranking your web pages higher.

Whether you use in-house content SEO experts or an SEO agency, content analysis is pivotal. You must track how your SEO content is performing and you’ve got to use your analysis to find new opportunities to grow even more.

So with that in mind, there are two parts to this type of content.

Firstly, when writing new content, it’s important to know what to write about. This will be relative to the type of business you have and what your ideal audience are engaging with on other sites.

It’s worth having some comparisons when seeking inspiration for the new content and so looking at your competitors to see what they’re producing, is helpful.

For existing content, it’s all about optimising it in order to make it more discoverable. Both new and existing content should focus on keyword research and the right words in particular. This all contributes to better quality SEO content in general.

In order to avoid any under-performing content, use existing metrics to discover the strengths and weaknesses of your content. Using KPIs are a great way to track your SEO content performance. Here are a few KPIs worth looking at:

Organic traffic

This KPI measures how much of the traffic you get is coming by your site naturally, rather than through paid advertising.

The main goal with SEO is to grow your traffic and this one can be an important metric to analyse.

Search visibility

A KPI like search visibility can help you understand how effective your keyword selections are.

Tracking search visibility can help you find the keywords that are driving the traffic to your website’s doors.

Links

Links are a key SEO metric to help with rankings and particularly backlinks.

It’s important to get high-quality links, rather than focusing on the quantity of backlinks that you’ve successfully achieved.

Tools to use to track online content performance

Knowing the importance of tracking and analysing content, many developers have created tools that can be used to help make it easier.

Most of the time, it’s free to use these tools and software but their premium versions will cost you. Usually with a monthly, annual subscription fee or one-off payment.

Google Analytics (GA4) – tracking how users find and interact with your website

Google Analytics 4 is the OG when it comes to content marketing metrics. You simply copy the code into the HTML of the website and the platform will start recording all of the traffic coming in and out of your site.

This platform is free to use but has advanced features that you can pay for. Google Analytics shows both historical data and real-time traffic on your site. It can collect data on your audience, as well as show the number of sessions on the site over a period of time.

The engagement rate/bounce rate is a useful metric that measures the percentage of people who come onto the site and then drop off without exploring other web pages.

Many businesses and website owners find great benefits from having this analytical software ticking by, collecting quality data.

Hootsuite – a social media management tool for posting, tracking performance and social listening

Hootsuite is a social media management platform, perfect for helping bring all of your socials to one place so that you have the ability to schedule and automate content as required.

Not only that, but it provides you with a wealth of data and content marketing metrics that will help develop your social media content further. This quality data can help you set benchmarks and monitor the improvement you make with your social media content over time.

Social media content can provide metrics such as impressions that the content has. It can also show further engagement through tracked conversions of sales or new subscribers to your platforms.

More importantly, Hootsuite can show your ROI when it comes to the money you spend on social media marketing and the creation of your content. It can help refine your focus on using the social media accounts that really matter and that are driving business success.

Ahrefs – a keyword tracking tool with a wealth of optimisation tools

Ahrefs offers both SEO tools and resources to help optimize your website. Not only that but it can study what your customers are looking for and track your ranking progress.

The tool helps to segment your data in the way you find most beneficial and helps zoom into that data using relevant filters and tags created.

A great benefit from Ahrefs is that one of its features can help find top-performing content and generate ideas that are most likely to perform the best. Researching over a billion web pages, it’s a priceless feature that can really drive the quality of the content you create.

SEMrush – also a keyword tracking tool with a wealth of optimisation tools

Described as an online visibility management platform, SEMrush offers a wealth of features that help with SEO, content marketing, advertising, market research and social media. It’s a great one if you’re looking for something that provides most of your analysis for content performance, in one place.

It’s a good one for not only analysing your own data but also your competitors too. There’s always a benefit from keeping an eye on what your competition is up to. Knowing what they’re doing from their content marketing efforts can help inspire your own.

My go-to tool, Google Search Console – another great free Google tool to track website performance on Google search engine results page

Google’s Search Console is another major player when it comes to analysing content performance online. Search Console’s tools and reports can help to measure your site’s search engine presence.

The most valuable element to Search Console is you can see which pages rank and what queries they rank for. This is amazing information to have as you can quickly see which of your pages are performing well, why that is and what for. AND you can see where you need to improve your ranking.

With Search Console, you can also submit sitemaps and individual URLs that you want crawled by Google. The same goes for index coverage and ensuring Google has the updated view of your site.

I’ll say it again, Google Search Console is my go-to tool for my SEO content strategy for my own website and all my client’s websites. The data there is awesome!

How to analyse print content

Analysing print content is certainly more challenging to track. However, there are ways about it that can prove quite useful to retrieving data and insight into this type of content.

Print media is still very much essential for many businesses to promote themselves. With 79% of consumers that prefer reading physical mail to reading emails, it’s essential to cater to the demand of consumers in the print industry.

Add a tracked phone number or email

For print content, whether it be a magazine or newspaper article to direct mail in the post, analysis can be done by adding a tracked phone number or email.

That way, you can track how many individuals are following your call to action, whether it’s for feedback or to purchase something, through the phone number/email itself.

Get insights from the print companies themselves

With regards to certain print coverage like magazines and newspapers, it’s worth going to the publishers themselves. You can get some basic insight in regards to the number of papers or magazines distributed and purchased, whether that’s contained to just your country or beyond.

Make use of content analytics for your content’s performance

Content analysis for your business is one that’s extremely beneficial to do, particularly so for small businesses who are just starting out.

It can help provide insight and guidance where needed to maximise the potential of all the content marketing you do for your business this year and beyond.

If you have any questions about anything you’ve read here, please do give me a shout – tom@tjcreative.co.uk