Execution: Step 5. Analytics and Gaining Insights from Your Data
The adage goes “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” The same is true when it comes to executing a content strategy. You’ve done all this work and started putting your content out to the world. But how do you know if it’s actually working?
Another key element of your content strategy is tracking your data, gathering insights from that data to see what’s working and what needs improvement, and using those insights to inform tweaks and changes in your content strategy going forward. These insights come from tracking different metrics across your channels.
Some common website metrics include:
Visitors/Unique Visitors: How many people visit your website.
Page Views: How views a page receives.
Average Time on Page: How long a visitor spends on one page.
Average Session Duration: How long a visitor spent looking around your website.
Bounce Rate: How often are visitors likely to leave your site on a particular page.
Traffic Sources: Where website visitors are coming from.
Device Type: What devices they’re using to view your website.
Conversion Rate: What percentage are buying when they visit your site.
Top Pages: The most popular pages.
Some common social media metrics include:
Engagement: This includes how followers are engaging with your content through likes and reactions, comments, and shares.
Reach or Impressions: How many people are seeing your content and how wide it’s being shared.
Followers: How many people follow your account.
Conversation or Click-Through Rate: How many are clicking through a link or CTA.
Demographics: The demographics of who is seeing your content.
Video Watch Time: How many are watching your videos until the end.
Some common newsletter metrics include:
Open Rate: Of your subscribers, how many open the email.
Clicks or Click-Through Rate: How many are clicking on your links.
Subscribers: How many subscribers you have.
Demographics: The demographics of your subscribers.
How to track your metrics
One of the very first things you determined when creating your content strategy was your business goals. If you got detailed enough, you should have then determined some metrics that you wanted to track to meet your goal: increased followers or subscribers, engagement, or click-throughs on your links. Now you’ll track them to see if you actually met those goals.
Your platforms (website, social media, and newsletter) will likely already have analytics built in so you can track how many visitors your website has received, how much engagement your posts get, or how many people opened your email. You can evaluate this through the platform, or you can create your own document to track specific metrics that you want to track.
Finding Analytics Dashboards
Here’s how to locate those metrics on various platforms:
Instagram Analytics
In the app or on desktop:
Go to your profile
Tap on “Professional Dashboard”
At the top will be your “Insights”
You can also tap “View Insights” on each of your posts
Facebook Analytics
In the app or on desktop:
Go to your profile
Go to “Professional Dashboard” or “View Tools”
Tap “Insights”
LinkedIn Analytics
In the app or on desktop:
Tap on “View Profile” and go to your profile
Analytics will appear as a box in your profile visible to you
TikTok Analytics
Go to your profile
Tap on the three lines at the top right corner
Tap on TikTok Studio
Your Analytics will appear at the top
Threads Analytics
Threads is slowly rolling out analytics, but is not available for all users yet.
Newsletter
Depending on your newsletter service, you may find an analytics dashboard or simply data for each newsletter sent, otherwise known as a campaign. For example, Mailchimp has a marketing dashboard as part of its paid subscription, but you can see analytics for each campaign with its free version.
Website and Google Analytics
Your website builder platform is likely to have a separate analytics tab where you can view all the data about your website. If you’d like more insights, you can use Google Analytics. Simply add your website (for free) and use its analytics dashboard to gain insights on your website.
How to analyze your data to gain insights
Data can be daunting, so here are some tips for using data to help you understand the impact of your content efforts.
An example: You’re an author who is promoting your new book frequently on social media by talking about your story and characters, posting quotes, and engaging with your audience. Your social media analytics tell you that you’re getting a lot of clicks on the “Order” links that you post. Fantastic! You go to your website and see that you have a lot of visitors coming to your book page from social media. Great! However, your web analytics tell you that very few are clicking the link to order your book.
What do you do? Obviously, people are interested in your book, but something’s preventing them from ordering. Head to your book webpage to take a look at it: Do the links not work? Are the links not there or buried way down the page? Is it unclear how to order your book? Instead of saying “Well people just don’t want to buy my book,” you now know what in the chain of the customer journey is making them hesitate.
Another example: You’re a writing center that sends out a weekly email about what you do, your writing courses, and other events. You have a number of subscribers but your open rates are very low.
What do you do? First, test out different subject lines to see if that increases the open rate. People may not be interested in reading your newsletter because your subject line is vague, too simple, or boring. Next, look at when you send your email and try a different day or time. For example, a newsletter sent on a weekend or a Monday morning may not be opened because people have other things to do. However, sending a newsletter on a Friday morning when people have some time and are winding down for the week may be opened more. Also, if there’s been a drop-off in your open rate — lots of people once opened it and no longer do — you may need to reevaluate your content because it may just be uninteresting.
A third example: You’re a literary non-profit that sends an email newsletter out each month with an article about a topic in your area of expertise, a story about how your work impacted an individual, or your mission and vision for the future. At the end of every newsletter, you add a “Donate” button that takes readers to your website. Through your newsletter analytics and your website analytics, you find that there’s a high click-through rate on that button and that each newsletter results in around $500 worth of donations. Great! However, you would like the same type of engagement on Instagram and get nowhere near that. You have a donations link in your profile but it rarely gets tapped, and what posts you do have calling for donations don’t result in link clicks.
What do you do? Evaluate your entire Instagram content strategy. Obviously, something is working with your newsletter, and your topical articles and stories are resulting in action taken and donations given. What’s most likely happening is that your Instagram posts are not sharing your mission, stories about your impact, or topics relevant to your audience. You may not even have the right audience following you. In this made-up example, we see that whoever’s been posting to Instagram is just sharing book covers, pictures from outside the office window, an event or two without any context, an occasional call for donations, and nothing about the stories, impact, or mission of the organization. Go back to the basics, create a content strategy that aligns with what you’re doing on your newsletter, and track how engagement changes.
Iterating, Tweaking, and Revising Your Content Strategy
We all know how important revisions are for creative work. The same is true for your content strategy. Once you create it, it shouldn’t be set in stone. Instead, content marketing is all about seeing what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved. As shown in the example above, look at the data, figure out what it might be saying, and then make changes. Then do it all over again!
That’s all there is to building an executing a content marketing strategy! Easy enough, right? Finally, let’s wrap up with some best practices for your marketing.
Hi! I’m Jessica, and I help literary businesses, organizations, and authors build and execute their marketing strategies. If you'd like to learn how to do this 👆, come work with me!
