How data analysis will sharpen up your content
How relevant is your brand’s published content? How do you know what your customers like (and don’t like)? And how can you improve your content to make it perform better? In today’s vast digital landscape, where content is distributed across multiple platforms and devices, relevance at every touchpoint is crucial. Data measurement and analysis are vital to building successful and profitable relationships.
TONI PECORARI, Senior Digital Analyst, Redwood
Using tracking and data analysis helps marketers and publishers gauge whether their content resonates with their prospects and customers and how it might be adjusted to work more efficiently. There is no magic here: brands need to establish business goals, develop a focused idea of what they want to track, and create a measurement plan that focuses on metrics to support those goals and also provides clear actions.
Knowing how many people saw your content, where they came from, for how long they read it, if they made it past the headline and what elements enticed them to engage, is all vital information for analysing overall performance. Success cannot always be measured easily or according to universal standards – for example, is a shorter dwell time good or bad? Does that mean your content failed to retain attention, or is it the opposite? Does it mean that your users were able to find what they were looking for with minimal effort? This is why analysing the results in relation to clear objectives is crucial. It will decide the direction to take in terms of the content you create and will allow you to ascertain what works and what doesn’t. You may find that pages containing videos produce higher engagement; if so, then perhaps next time you could try to replace more text with videos and evaluate the impact. Great content will encourage people to return, engage further and often act on what they have seen.
To really stand out from the crowd, marketers now have to increase their efforts and investments in the measurement field. At Redwood, in order to prove the effectiveness of the content we produce for our clients, we examine full user journeys (where users come from, what they look at and where they go afterwards) as well as “in-content” interactions (video, quiz, infographics, shares, scroll behaviour, etc.) across all devices. We also create content based on what people are searching for or talking about on social media. We want to make sure that we reach them at the right time on the right device and serve them with content that is relevant, contextual and helpful, thus creating a stronger strategy and delivering high ROI for our clients.
Is a shorter dwell time good or bad? There is no universal standard. This is why analysing the results in relation to clear objectives is crucial