The conventional wisdom of every marketing agency around is that you absolutely need a content strategy – and for good reason. A content strategy, and the production of the actual content that comes with it, ensures your website a bigger digital footprint, gives valuable information to customers, and attracts visitors to your site.
But simply creating the content isn’t the end of the journey. Often, what happens is that a business will go away and create a vast volume of content – hundreds of blogs – but without any meaningful understanding of exactly what it is they’ve achieved, or if they’ve reached anyone at all. In the content economy many digital businesses now inhabit, it’s vital that content isn’t just produced – but tracked. Here’s why:
Tracking blog metrics helps you develop better content
In the example above, a business is producing huge volumes of written words or multimedia, and essentially shouting them to the void without knowledge of who they’re reaching or what their response is.
But thanks to analytics tools, it’s relatively simple to identify how many people are reading your blog, how long they’re staying for (their engagement), and whether they’re bouncing back to a page of search results or progressing through your website onto other pages.
Thus, you’re able to see which blog posts you’ve published that are best performing in terms of view count and engagement. If they’re centered around a particular topic, you can continue to write in that area and hope to capture the interest of your audience.
Tracking helps you identify touchpoints
Metrics can also show you where your readers are coming from. Your blog’s traffic sources are a valuable piece of information in identifying which platforms to boost the budget on and push – say Facebook, if you identify that a large percentage of your viewership comes from there.
It can also indicate search terms that people are using to find your business. For example, this blog post, published in January 2014, still gets consistent traffic and views from Google search. What that indicates is that people are using the keywords in the blog post to get to the content, and may allow you to write more blogs around that topic to cement your place in Google search rankings and attract a larger audience.
Tracking helps you sell
By knowing where your visitors are going in your website, you can better understand their journey and shape your content so it guides them towards blogs that convert by giving out an offer or inviting them to subscribe to a mailing list.
