Content Analysis and Reporting

Hang around content marketing circles long enough and you’ll hear this sentence: "Everything is iterative." In a nutshell: There’s always more work to be done, a better result to be attained.

And that’s a very good thing.

Like search engine results, the needs of your audience don’t sit idle. They change over time, and when they do, nimble brands (like yours, right?) are there to serve up a new batch of quality, relevant content.

SEOs typically have a front-row seat to what’s happening, what's working, and what’s not, seeing clearly the content types that are performing best in the SERPs. And, because their eyes are always on the analytics, gauging the brand’s content performance, they more clearly see what content is worth experimenting with, what tactics should be adopted, and what the likely outcome will be based on the entirety of the landscape — content, brand, and marketplace.

For this experimentation and iteration process to work smoothly, however, we must have clear goals and objectives to guide us.

As we’ve talked about throughout this guide, it takes time for content marketing to work. But the C-Suite is likely only to be as patient as your team is able to quantify the ROI of your efforts. This section will tackle not only how to analyze your efforts, but how to present that data to your stakeholders, as well.

Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is credited with having said: There are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." The phrase is used to invoke the prevalence with which numbers — data — are used and how easy it is to mislead people with the former’s mere presence. Numbers can help paint a picture of how well your content marketing efforts are working, but they cannot tell the entire story, especially not the all-important "why" element.

An example that might hit close to home for an SEO: Imagine a quarterly progress meeting where the marketing team giddily reports on their latest content campaign, when a junior marketer has this to say…

"We saw a 400% increase in traffic this year."

How do you think the key stakeholders would react?

Those traffic numbers could be the indication of great content marketing work. Or, it could be that 100 views the year before moved to 400 this year, 300 of which came from staffers visiting the site. Even if those numbers remain impressive to the team, the key with respect to any data is to measure what matters. In that light, those traffic figures from above only tell a small part of a much larger story.

As an SEO, you aren’t swayed by traffic numbers alone. You care about meaningful traffic from prospects and customers who’ve found your brand online via organic search, branded search, or a link on social media. You want to show the value of the work your team did to get visitors to the site, and hopefully convert them, by showing the value of the content your team helped optimize and share.

The role of goal-setting and KPIs

The goal-setting process begins with being clear about what the most important benchmarks to track actually are, why they are meaningful, and how they’ll be tracked.

By doing this at the outset, before undertaking the content creation process, you can be certain everyone is clear on what the goals are for each piece of content well in advance of when it’s ultimately created and shared.

This is when "it's iterative" becomes a real, tangible process. Many brands make the mistake of assuming smart goal tracking involves gathering a lot of data about many things. The reality, however, is often quite different. Once you’re clear on what the goals are for the brand (or for your brand’s content marketing efforts specifically) it’s best to start as small as possible, measuring only those elements that you’re able to most quickly act upon.

For example, what is the goal for your blog? Traffic? Links? Conversions? Gaining clarity on this makes it far, far easier to figure out which metrics tell the story of how well your brand is doing. If your blog goal is, say, traffic, but your numbers in Google Analytics don’t show significant growth after a predetermined amount of time, it makes sense to explore where the problem originates (e.g., content quality, amplification, etc.)

Again, you’ll need to determine your own goals are most important for your brand.

There are five key goal areas that capture marketers’ attention as worth the time and effort to track:

1. Brand awareness - How well your brand is doing at attaining the attention of prospects.
2. Engagement - How much time people are spending with your brand, either via onsite content, social media, etc.
3. Customer retention / loyalty - How well your brand is doing at not only converting prospects to customers, but retaining them as well
4. Lead generation - Reflects the job your brand is doing at capturing information — an email address, for example, from gated content on a blog — that could be used to market to prospects or customers in the future
5. Sales - If sales are increasing, it could be a reflection of how well your brand’s content is performing

Let’s take a deeper look at how each of these goals could be measured:

The core metrics we’ll cover here are those most often used by content marketers and that typically have the greatest value for brands. Again, your team will have to determine precisely what makes sense for your brand to measure, but use the following to get some clarity on what you should expect to discern from each metric.

Traffic metrics

No matter what your brand makes or offers for sale, the need to drive qualified traffic to your site will almost certainly be a goal. There is a person behind each search; those people are who eventually purchase your products and services.

Let’s take a look at each of the traffic-related metrics below:

Engagement metrics

Once a web searcher has made it to your page, the goal is for them to interact with it in a meaningful way (e.g., by commenting on blog posts, copying a URL to share, etc.)

This is known as engagement.

Page engagement sends a signal that web visitors find your content worth their investment of time. However, what suffices as engagement varies from one site to the next. Your brand might value comments left on the blog, seeing it as a signal that the content is resonating. Another brand might view a social share as the ideal signal, as it highlights that visitors found the content worthwhile and worth sharing.

Regardless of which metrics your company chooses to track, it helps to understand the core elements worth paying attention to:

Time on site

Time on site (TOS) can provide a snapshot of how interested visitors were in your website’s content. However, we write “can provide” for a reason: It could be that the visitor came to your site, clicked around for five minutes, and then left. They didn’t really engage to a significant degree with your brand’s content — they were simply on the site.

Bounce rate

As an SEO, you likely hear the words “bounce rate” all the time. Bounce rate highlights the percentage of visitors who entered your site via a particular page, but who left before interacting with it to any significant degree.

That is, they visited one page and were kaput, gone.

Marketers often see pages having a high bounce rate as a bad sign, one that means the content didn’t resonate to a high enough degree to warrant the visitor investigating the site further. However, a high bounce rate could be a signal of just the opposite occurrence. For instance, the page the visitor landed on could have answered their question so thoroughly that they did not need to view or visit any additional pages.

A great example of this would be a page designed to answer a specific query. Once the visitor landed on that page and got the answer, it’s unlikely they visited more pages on the site.

Instead of concerning yourself with pages that have a high bounce rate, try to figure out what’s behind it:

• If the visitor left the page but did complete the goal, (e.g., click the call to action, provide an email address, etc.) the content and the page were a success, meaning a high bounce rate is desired.

• If, however, you determine no goal was completed, the team should redouble its efforts to make certain the content clearly conveys the message a web searcher would have upon landing on the page.

Links

Take heart, SEOs: links are not dead. In fact, as we’ve seen and heard numerous times, links and content continue to be two of the most important elements for SEO

Your team will certainly want to track which web pages are linking to your site’s content. This data may be able to provide clues to what additional content your brand should create, while also helping you uncover additional link opportunities. (You could also reach other, similar brands with similar content/pages to see if they’d be interested in linking to your page. If they see that the competition is linking to you, it might nudge them to do the same.)

Link Explorer is a free tool that allows you to look at both new and established links to your content. You’ll be able to see not only the links to your pages, but also the anchor text used by the linking source, the authority of their site/page, and whether the link might be viewed as spammy by Google. On top of that, even more data is yours to mine with a Moz Pro free trial or subscription.

Comments

Although some brands have closed off comments, they can be a useful tool for audience building. Comments sections are a great way for your brand to interact with website visitors on a much more personal level. Visitors are typically more likely to leave comments if the brand is responsive. They are also more likely to return to these sites and their content.

And if you’re seeing the same faces and comments show up on your blog posts, it’s a good sign what you’re doing is working. Again, this isn’t the type of thing to show up on any analytics dashboard, but it’s worth monitoring as a measure of engagement.

(You’ll certainly want to monitor the comments for spam or abusive comments, but realize that the section can certainly be worth the potential headache.)

Social metrics

Before you roll your eyes, realize that social metrics can be invaluable for your work as an SEO. Consider this scenario:

Your brand posts a blog on your site. The community team shares the blog to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The blog is retweeted numerous times by the audience, with many of them deciding to visit the site and read the content, which they too share. A few of the visitors even link to the content.

See what happened there? Those tweets, shares and likes led to additional traffic and links to your website.

We hope you’re starting to see the value of social metrics. The key, as an SEO, is to view social metrics for what they are: harbingers of achieving your real goals (e.g., website visits, traffic, links, and conversions). You’ll need a third-party tool to track your brand’s performance on social media. The darling of the industry is BuzzSumo, which is easy to use, inexpensive, and provides a level of detail that’s rich in insight

Also, if you like to do things the hard(er) way, you can pull the data into an Excel spreadsheet or other document using a few custom scripts. (We provide an excellent walkthrough of that process in this post.)

Applause, amplification, conversation rate

Each social network has more than one way to interact with your content. That is, visitors can like, share or comment on a Facebook post; they can tweet or favorite content shared on Twitter. Because of these cross-network differences, it can sometimes be difficult to directly compare content’s performance on one network versus another. Is a retweet the same as a Facebook comment? Is a LinkedIn comment as valuable as an Instagram favorite? With so many ways to engage, comparing “apples to apples” can be difficult.

To get around this challenge here at Moz, we’ve seen success by distilling social metrics from across the networks we use into three categories:

• Applause: A simple vote of approval — Facebook likes + Twitter favorites

• Amplification: Sharing a link with other followers/friends/circles/groups on any of the networks — Facebook shares + Tweets + etc.

• Conversation rate: Talking about a post on one of the networks, often in a reply to the brand's original share — Facebook comments + Twitter replies + etc.

Again, these serve as examples of what we’ve found that works for our brand. As your SEO team gains clarity on what the brand is attempting to accomplish with each piece of content they share, you can decide how best to track interactions from visitors.

As we’ve stated numerous times throughout this guide, any metric you track should paint a picture of how well your brand is accomplishing its goals. Knowing this, it’s likely you still have questions about the best ways to use content as a conversion tool or what you can do to convince skeptical stakeholders. In a nutshell, neither task is easy to accomplish. But both are doable — with time and some elbow grease.

The two areas we’ll focus on in this section are measuring conversions and return on investment (ROI).

Many of the content marketing efforts you undertake won’t have a straight line path to sales — and thus, measuring the impact any one piece of content has on your company’s bottom line can be difficult. To understand why, let’s look at an example:

A customer who buys your product after visiting your site and reading a whitepaper might have actually heard about your brand a year earlier, visited your site and found what she needed, then didn’t return until the need was pressing.

To attribute conversions to the initial piece of content the visitor read (a blog), your brand would have to track who might be just inside or just outside of your marketing funnel, which can be incredibly difficult.

Conversion paths might not only be circuitous; they can sometimes be downright lopsided. Not all conversion attributions should be judged as one and the same.

For example, say a blog post led to your brand attaining 15 loyal customers who'll stick around for years, buying numerous products from you. Those customers are likely worth more than 100 people who buy from you once but never return.

As an SEO, your job with respect to reporting and analysis is to be sure the brand has accurate data with which to make decisions. But, it’s important to realize that you don’t have to have all of the data at your disposal to still make an informed decision. Often, an educated guess suffices, and tools like Google Analytics can help you acquire the data we need to make those assertions. This post provides a complete look at attribution modeling.

Often, stakeholders are reluctant to invest in content marketing because of the difficulty in attributing much of the work we do to actual conversions. The reality is, though, that with the right tools and skills, you can track visits and attribute them to the relevant channels, clearly and concretely showing the real ROI of your content marketing efforts.

Reporting can be a real bugaboo for marketers.

With analysis, you view the numbers, discern what they're telling you, and then act accordingly. Reporting, however, adds another all-important element: communicating those numbers — and the insight behind them — to others.

As SEOs, we’re well-versed in the nuances of traffic, visits, engagement metrics and such. The people we’re often talking to, however, mainly need to know what those numbers mean, not what they are.

This is when you must have your thinking and your listening hat on.

Step 1: Know your audience

When SEOs walk into the room to present data to the C-Suite and other key stakeholders, those stakeholders may expect a data dump (based on their previous experiences) — which will only garner eyerolls.

The image many stakeholders have of SEOs is of folks who think and speak in terms of traffic, links and such. Wow them by focusing on not just what went up or down, but on what that means, what you learned and how it’ll guide the strategy going forward.

When gathering and assembling the information for the report, try to put yourself in their shoes:

• What would you want to know?

• What questions would you have?

• How can you highlight the impact of the work your team is doing?

• What do they need to walk out of the meeting with?

• How can you make them look good to their peers, bosses and competitors?

By taking these questions into account before each reporting session, you’re certain to keep a seat at the table for SEO.

Step 2: Determine what they care about, including the numbers they need to see

If you’ve ever been in a stakeholder meeting, you know things can be tense. A lot of that tension can arise from SEOs not knowing the facts and figures stakeholders care about and expect to lay their eyes on.

Keep yourself out of this situation by asking, in advance, what each stakeholder needs to see during the meeting or upon delivery of the report. Once you know what they need, you can redouble your efforts to track, compile and analyze this information.

Step 3: Create content that helps you deliver on your goals

Once you know what stakeholders expect to see in your reports to them, your job is then to reverse engineer the process, making certain your teams are creating the content that makes it easy to compile data in these areas.

Step 4: Create a dashboard

It doesn’t matter what tool you use to construct your dashboard. What does matter is setting it up so that the data your stakeholders need to view is easy to access. In fact, it might be useful to have multiple dashboards, each tailored to a different audience.

Staying up-to-date on your metrics will also give you a better day-to-day sense for how your efforts are doing, allowing you to course-correct in small increments instead of having an "oh, crap" moment farther down the line.

You’ve made it through what many consider the most challenging part of the guide — content analysis and reporting. If you leave this chapter remembering only one thing, remember this: measure what matters and focus more on the insight than simply the raw numbers. That’s what separates the best SEOs from the rest.

In the last chapter of the guide, we’ll talk about how SEOs can keep all of the content marketing balls in the air, successfully managing the content marketing process. Head over to Chapter 10: Maintenance, Repurposing, and Growth.

Written by the Moz staff and our good friends at Seer Interactive.