Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Using analytics to come up with a directed strategy for developing content has become second nature. Did you know that you also can use analytics for your content auditing? Let’s take an inside look at content audits and how analytics figure into them.

Content auditing involves a detailed analysis of a website’s content to weed out poorly performing pages, identify outdated pages or wrong information, and learn which pages have poor SEO built into them. The aim is to fix these problems to streamline the operation of the site and to keep visitors (both new and returning) happy. Content auditing also allows you to revamp existing content to increase its search ranking or to develop content similar to previously successful pages. It’s one of the best ways to maintain the ongoing quality of your content....

But in many areas of marketing, more doesn't always mean better. Take your marketing data, for example. Though having data about your marketing programs is crucial to analyzing your success and making changes to future programs, some individual metrics aren't actually that helpful. And with only so much time in your day, you can't afford to spend your time analyzing data that won't help you make better marketing decisions. 

If you want to get a full run-down on the metrics you should (and shouldn't be tracking, tune into our webinar on March 11 called Smart Reporting: How to Stop Wasting Time and Make Better Marketing Decisions. To register for that webinar, click here.

In the meantime, let's take a look at some of the metrics you might not want to track -- and give you suggestions for different metrics to look at instead....

Consider a survey from eMarketer earlier this year that claims that over three-quarters of European marketers are using website visits as their primary measure of branded content effectiveness, yet less than half are measuring ROI (whether that be brand return or actual sales return, presumably). Visits are important, of course they are: Every brand manager wants people to actually see their content, right?

But to use a simple behavioral measure as a metric of impact on your brand is arguably doing more injustice to the rich immersive nature of branded content (when it’s done well!) than clicks do to display ads.

So why do we do this then?

Simple: Because it's often too hard to do anything else.

The measurement of branded content shouldn’t even stop at measuring brand impact. Quality of content is the very measure by which our readers judge us, and media owners need to acknowledge that what they produce has an impact on both their own and their commercial partners' brands… and this impact needs to be measured, too.

So what might a simple hierarchy of branded content metrics look like if you want to measure impact in its entirety then....

But how you know when the number of interactions you’re getting is good? And what does “good” mean, anyway?

The answer: It’s all relative. A “good” amount for engagement for a marketer in the software industry could be a totally different number than for a marketer in the financial services industry. That’s why we put together the 2015 Social Media Benchmarks Report -- it's 49 pages of of social media data and analysis from over 7,000 business in nine industries.In this post, I’ll analyze our findings on audience participation on social media for each of the industries represented.

Find your industry below (or use our jump-to links to head directly to your industry) to see how much interaction is happening relative to how much a company posts a week on social media, and also get some key takeaways for how to apply this to your own social strategy....