To get those insights, you need to make use of the best marketing analytics tool for your goals. The features that tool needs will vary depending on what those goals are. It’s less about finding one tool with all the features listed in this article and more about seeing which of these components fit your needs.

1. A user interface you can actually use

Here’s probably the most important quality a content analytics tool should have: You can actually use it.

Some tools like GA4, the newest version of Google Analytics, offer a ton of powerful features. You can get nearly real-time insights into big-picture topics like what a typical user journey looks like or dive into granular information like how many viewers scrolled through at least 90 percent of the content on a sign-up form page.

Unfortunately for everyone who’s not an analytics expert, understanding GA4’s user interface can feel like trying to read a dead language. Luckily there are marketing analytics tools out there built with ease of use in mind — there’s been a lot of good things said about Plausible, for instance. That and similar tools make great options if you’re looking for something to tell you how your content is performing at a glance.

2. Audience analytics beyond the basics

Successful content marketing is all about crafting pieces specific to your audience’s needs, preferences, and motivations. Good luck doing that if you don’t know who your audience is, though.

That means you need a tool with a solid audience analytics component. Most website analytics tools can give you a basic overview about things like the age and gender of web visitors. If you’re using a customer relationship management platform, though, you can get extremely deep insights through tools like Salesforce’s Audience Studio. The better you design your buyer persona, the better content you can produce.

3. Info on user behavior and experience

A lot of content marketing analytics tools can show you user journeys and content funnels, letting you determine what pages your readers entered and exited. That’s important information, but trying to understand a user’s experience that way is like trying to visit a city by looking at it on a map.

You can get a user-eye view of how people engage with the content on your site by using tools with heat maps and user session recordings. Heat maps are just what they sound like – they show where users are scrolling, clicking, and engaging the most with your content. User session recordings can show you actual recordings of users navigating a certain page. That means you can see from their perspective exactly what’s working or not working with your content.

If you’re looking for website analytics tools specializing in these areas, check out Contently’s Docalytics tool. You can use it to not only optimize your case studies, white papers, or blog posts, but improve the conversion rates of your landing pages for gated content as well.

4. Competitive keyword analysis

You can’t stand out from your competitors if you don’t know what they’re doing. Some analytics tools have features letting you track how your competitors’ content is doing compared to yours based on different variables. That means you can see how they’re ranking for different keywords you’re targeting, as well as where they’re earning backlinks.

Based on this information, you can determine where the whitespace is for upcoming content, helping ensure your editorial calendar stays unique. You can also determine what battles are worth fighting when it comes to certain keywords or phrases you’re trying to rank for – some may just not be worth the effort.

5. An SEO strategy assist

The key to successful SEO content is, first and foremost, quality content. That doesn’t mean the technical side of things doesn’t matter. You’re going to need a tool that lets you see how your site is ranking for various keywords, gives you word count recommendations to make sure you’re not publishing thin content, and whether broken links are torpedoing your traffic.

The good news is you’ve got a lot of great options here. Contently offers a ton of tools for planning out your SEO keywords using cost-per-click insights, info on search volumes, and more. Most of the other big players in this space like Moz or SEMRush will let you get some basic info like keyword suggestions for free.

6. Breezy reporting capabilities

Like most of you, I’m sure, I find the most rewarding part of content marketing is making decks showing how different assets are performing. I love it so much and don’t find struggling with Powerpoint soul-crushing in the slightest.

For real, though, a lot of different content marketing tools can generate automatic reports or dashboards that are easy to understand and visually interesting. That lets you spend less time wrangling decks and more time on the valuable parts of your job.

7. Channel performance data

Audiences are scattered across so many different channels these days. LinkedIn. TikTok. X (yeah, still, I know). However, not every content marketing tool is suited for tracking how different pieces are performing on social media.

The built-in analytics available on individual social media platforms offer some info, but that can make it hard to get a consolidated view of how your content is doing across each channel. Platforms like Sprout Social or Hootsuite can help bring together multiple channels into a single view.

Wrapping it up

Finding the right content analytics tool is a process, and knowing what to look for will help you align your needs with a product’s offerings. Contently’s content optimization tools could be what you’re looking for. If so, contact us to set up a product demo.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs

What role do content marketing analytics play when building out individual pieces of content?

Analytics tools can do more than just give you the lowdown on what keywords to include in your copy. You can use them to develop a better understanding of your audience, which is the foundation good content is built upon. Done right, the best marketing analytics tools help you write content that people and search engines will love.

What are some actual examples of how I could use heatmaps to improve content?

Let’s say you’re looking at a heatmap and notice a bunch of people clicking on an image. This may indicate that these users are expecting that picture to be linked to a different page – and that they’re getting frustrated when their clicks do nothing. That’s exactly what we saw when using heatmaps to review content. Fixing this led to a better user experience.

Other than analytics, what are some of the best ways I can get to know my audience better?

Marketing analytics tools aren’t the be-all-end-all for developing a better understanding of your audience. Make sure you’re regularly reading reviews, conducting surveys, and monitoring social media to see who your readers are and what they’re talking about.

Are you ready to build a data-driven content strategy? Contently Analytics has you covered.

The post 7 Features the Best Marketing Analytics Tools Will Have appeared first on Contently.

Unfortunately for those folks, that magical god metric simply doesn’t exist.

No matter your goal, you need to understand your results on a number of levels. This is easier said than done, however, and because it’s so difficult, you begin to see a familiar, damaging pattern in the way that brands approach metrics.

Take the type of marketer who tends to focus only on editorial metrics, either because she hails from a media background or because she uses Google Analytics. The most forlorn of these folks will just look at pageviews—a metric that only really matters for publishers selling display ads—and social shares. More advanced marketers in this vein will also measure metrics like engaged time, average finish, and return visitors to get a richer sense of how people are interacting with their content. But they’ll stop there.

The other main type of marketer tends to focus on conversions, but not care too much about audience-building metrics. To them, conversion is king. All that really matters is how many people are getting driven into the funnel, and everything that comes before isn’t as important.

Both of these types of marketers are putting themselves at a disadvantage. If you truly want to succeed at content marketing, you need to look at conversion and audience metrics together.

Say your goal is lead generation. After all, you’re creating content because you want people to buy something from you, and for many—particularly digital, B2B businesses—it’s relatively easy to track how many people who come in contact with your content subsequently become customers. However, fixating on lead generation means you’re making the assumption that nothing important happens before someone becomes a lead.

You’ve probably heard the cliche that content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s a lot of truth to it. Often, a prospect will be a reader for months, maybe even years, before expressing interest in becoming a client. But you’ve held their interest through great content, and now that the stars have aligned, they’re eager to work with you because of the strong relationship you’ve developed. That’s something you won’t see if you’re only tracking lead gen metrics.

In reality, strong audience metrics often correspond with strong lead gen metrics. That’s especially true for content marketing operations that are less than 18 months old because encouraging audience metrics are often an indication that a lead windfall is on the horizon. Getting people’s attention for the right reasons pays off.

On the flip side, if your goal is brand awareness, conversion metrics still matter. Even a cereal brand that does most of its sales in-store should be concerned with how many email newsletter signups or social follows come from its content, and which pieces of content are performing best. It’s another important data point when trying to determine which content performs best.

In 2016, smart content marketers will look at all of these metrics in concert. That’s our bet, at least. And that’s why we’ve been building our Analytics platform to show our clients how their content performs both in terms of audience and conversion metrics so they can demonstrate clear success and, more importantly, keep improving their content over time.

Marketers who embrace that holistic view of content measurement will be at an advantage, and when the debate starts raging between conversion and audience metrics at the next marketing conference… well, you can just rest easy at the happy hour bar.

Michael Enriquez is the product manager for analytics at Contently.

The post Conversion vs. Audience Metrics: The Secret to Successful Content Measurement appeared first on Contently.

Bots just may be ruining your content strategy.

Bot traffic—including scrapers, hackers, spammers, impersonators—has been estimated to be as high as 61 percent of all traffic, according to a 2013 report by Incapsula. The sheer enormity of web traffic coming from bots not only hurts the ability of publishers to accurately measure the success of their content, but also their ability to plan for the future. A swarm of bots could, in some circumstances, give you the false sense that a particular tactic is working and lead to poor editorial and business decisions.

For traditional publishers, bot traffic can provide an upside by inflating pageview numbers and ad revenue, but for brand publishers, they’re nothing but a plague. After all, smart brand publishers are primarily concerned with building relationships with actual humans and tracking how those relationships develop, and bots mess that up. To use another metaphor, it’s like having a bunch of androids show up to your pep rally; suddenly, the crowd goes from 90 percent engaged to 70 percent lifeless.

“If you use [Google] Analytics to make decisions, then you want the data as clean as possible,” explains Andy Crestodina, co-founder and strategic director at Orbit Media Studios. “That means filtering out any traffic that aren’t your visitors. Almost every site has Analytics set up to filter out traffic from their own office. Filtering out bot traffic is similar. The better the data, the better the Analytics and the better your decisions will be.”

This begs the question: If false traffic is a big issue, and Google prides itself on accurate Analytics data, why has it taken them so long to implement a solution?

“I think that the Google Analytics team is responding to the fact that more and more bots are out there executing code, when it was not normal practice a few years ago,” says Yehoshua Coren, founder and principal of Analytics Ninja.

When bots execute code, they act more like human readers, which makes the swarms of bot traffic harder to pick and filter out. In increasing numbers, bots are no longer simply reading a site’s code—the raw text of the programming instructions—but actually implementing programs such as JavaScript. So if a publisher has a widget on their WordPress site that pulls information from Twitter, the bot will now take actions that mimic what would happen if an actual human viewed the site and the widget loaded on their page. This makes it even more difficult to distinguish between human and non-human traffic, and skews results in Google Analytics, such as higher direct traffic, higher bounces, and often more traffic from a specific location or domain.

Google’s bot filtering solution is far from perfect. The update only filters out some non-human traffic, excluding known bots and spiders from the Interactive Advertising Bureau list, which is updated monthly. However, the list isn’t entirely comprehensive, and only includes a fraction of bots and spiders.

Luckily, there are other ways to spot bots, says Coren.

“With a quick look, it’s pretty easy to identify abnormal traffic,” Coren says. He typically looks for high bounces and direct traffic in the Google Analytics dashboard, and finds that it usually it comes from just one city and/or one ISP domain. He looks for traffic spikes coming through direct traffic, which is how bots typically show up. Before Google offered this new feature, he would simply create a filter or use advanced segments to exclude specific cities or domains.

That kind of next-level navigation of Google Analytics may sound daunting, but it’s likely necessary. You can’t rely on Google to get rid of all the bots for you; you need to be your own John Conner.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.​

The post Bot Traffic May Be Ruining Your Content Strategy, and Google Knows It appeared first on Contently.

Content marketing needs more than great writing to truly add value to your brand. Whether you’re producing videos, articles, or blog pieces, you need to ensure that what you produce has a clear place in your company’s sales funnel.

“A viable content marketing strategy relates each persona and target audience to each phase of the sales engagement cycle,” said Suzanne Baran, content strategy director at Saatchi & Saatchi LA.

Her experience spans brands and publishers, as she has spent the last 14 years working with brands such as Yahoo, AT&T, Cisco, Scottrade, POM Wonderful, DirecTV, Teleflora, FIJI Water, California Psychics, AVG, The Hollywood Reporter, and Buzz Media.

Here’s what she’s learned:

1. Start with a content engagement map

“Companies can learn from creating content that provides rich information.”

First and foremost, brand marketers need to jump into their content plans with clear revenue goals. A first step in that process is to create a map that links content back to your business model.

“Creating a content engagement map informs what type of content will serve the needs of a potential consumer,” Baran said. “For example, if Jane is unfamiliar with a retail brand, she might fall in the top of the sales cycle under ‘awareness.’ Jane may not have a pressing need or pain point just yet. Her only pain point is not being able to find the perfect pumps.”

Content will facilitate the introductory handshake to our brand, according to Baran.

“Instead of bombarding her with bombastic marketing materials, companies can learn from creating content that provides rich information, such as a photo gallery on spring’s hottest colors,” Baran said.

2. Appoint a visionary to lead with stride

“Brands often lack structure around content creation … buy-in is often a challenge, and the process is rarely collaborative.”

The most common reason why content strategies fall flat is simple — brands fail to jump in with clearly defined objectives. You need a person to take the lead to oversee planning, creation, production, and maintenance of the entire content lifecycle. Leading content strategist Erin Scime calls this individual the “content czar.”

“Brands need to empower their czar with authority, accountability, and responsibility,” Baran said. “Often, companies do a poor job of creating this role and evangelizing the significance to internal and external facing stakeholders. Brands often lack structure around content creation. Outside resources will build their strategy, but buy-in is often a challenge, and the process is rarely collaborative.”

The key to success is flexibility.

“Brands are becoming publishers,” Baran said. “They are breaking news and require a nimble approach to publishing content across multiple platforms, especially social. Social influencers are becoming more convincing than other digital mediums.”

3. Get your measurement tools in place

“The most commonly used metric isn’t the most effective measurement tool.”

Baran encourages brands to get their metrics in order.

“Most brands I’ve worked with have multiple tools and disparate metrics, poor tagging, and the list goes on,” Baran said. “I advocate for Google Analytics and dashboards for content teams so that they have access data to inform their programming decisions.”

Don’t rely on a cookie-cutter approach to measuring success, she recommends.

“Conversions are defined differently by each brand,” Baran said. “The most commonly used metric isn’t the most effective measurement tool—pageviews and reach. Sign-ups, registrations, and information requests are widespread types of content marketing conversions. The least widespread type of conversion is video views and downloads, which is increasing in relevancy.”

It is essential that content marketers be data driven.

“I help brands by optimizing their content, specifically by identifying and delivering the right message for the right audience at the right time,” Baran said.

The post Why Content Should Always Align With Brand Sales Goals appeared first on Contently.

Lenovo’s BuzzFeed Takeover

To promote its Ideapad Yoga, Lenovo has posted branded content on BuzzFeed, “12 Awesome Additional Uses For Everyday Objects.”

In true BuzzFeed, form, it features photos, along with short grafs on how to use objects like Alka Seltzer for toilet cleaner and ice cube trays to hold earrings. There is also a display ad and video ad to go along with the sponsored post.

Facebook’s Pages-only News Stream 

Good news for brands: Users can now switch their streams to exclusively feature content from the pages they follow on Facebook, according to Pandomonthly.

The social media site has rolled out this feature as a response “to a market uproar as the company began changing the way brand content appears in the main news feed and then charging companies for increased distribution.”

An Increase in Self-Employeed Workers

A press release from Elance says that “online hiring and earnings are far outpacing the traditional employment economy with over 40% growth rates.”

More people are writing online due to bad economies at in their home regions. Niche writing is one of the biggest growing industries, and there have been increases across the board.

The report states, “Specialized writing skills such as speech writing (+474%), script writing (+371%) and sports writing (+282%) have seen increases compared to the same quarter last year on Elance.”

The Meaning of Data to Pepsi

Kate Kaye of AdAge reports that the CMO of Pepsi Frank Cooper is looking at how data can help his brand.

“We need to measure how people are becoming involved in brands, how people are advocating on behalf of brands,” He told Kaye. “We’re figuring out ways to synthesize the data we have.”

Pepsi already looks at information coming from Google Analytics, YouTube, and Collective Intellect, the social conversation analysis company it uses. The company is currently gearing up to release branded content on YouTube and partner up with several major channels on the site.

Where Target Went Wrong with “Revenge” Campaign

Emily Garvey of 360i Blog critiques Target’s campaign for Neiman Marcus during the show “Revenge.”

During the show, ABC “aired a scripted mini-series to craft a story around the new luxury-for-less retail line, mimicking the look and feel of ‘Revenge.’ As the show’s characters unwrapped various Target items, viewers were prompted to tweet with the hashtag #GiftofRevenge, which was displayed throughout the episode,” Garvey writes.

She says that the scripted mini-episodes detracted from the real episode that was airing, and that no value was given to fans of the show. There was also a lack of communication between Target, its #GiftofRevenge hashtag, US Weekly, and Neiman Marcus, she adds.

Coca-Cola and Fidelity Invest in Spotify

Spotify, a streaming music service, is receiving financial support from Coca-Cola and Fidelity, The New York Times reports.

The service, which is worldwide and opened in Luxembourg and Ireland this week, will be valued at $3 billion. It currently has 15 million users, 4 million of who pay for the service.

Pinterest’s Business Accounts Introduced

According to ClickZ, Pinterest has now introduced business accounts. Cat Lee, product manager of the company said, “We want to help more businesses provide great content on Pinterest and make it easy to pin from their websites.”

Businesses will require a verification badge and the pages are suitable for bloggers, online merchants, publications and retailers, to name a few.

The post Lenovo’s BuzzFeed Campaign, Facebook Pages-only Stream, Freelancers Gain appeared first on Contently.

Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert has, for 24 years, seen the industry evolve.

Jay Baer

As the written culture of the business has constricted over the decades into smaller and quicker messages, he said he had seen content marketing has become more social, more visual and more personalized.

The Content Strategist talked with Baer, expert marketer, social media specialist, and co-author of The Now Revolution, about what he thinks the future holds for the industry.

The Content Strategist: How has the business changed since you started in 1988?

Jay Baer: [Since] marketing has moved online in the last 25 years, the great advantage that digital marketing has is that it’s inherently measurable.

I can tell you how many people went to this website, tweeted something, or downloaded this PDF. In offline marketing I can’t do that as accurately. I can’t tell you how many people listened to the radio today.

Because [marketing is] online, it’s made the culture much more math-oriented than it was in the past. Ultimately it’s a good thing because it allows the companies to spend the dollars more wisely. The challenge is that there are a lot of people who do math poorly or don’t really use the math that’s available to them.

A classic example on the social media side is paying a tremendous amount of attention to the number of fans. On the blogging side I’m constantly faced with a number of companies who see comments as a metric for success. Sometimes the measurability of marketing today leads people astray.

From a blog perspective, you want to ensure that that blog ultimately generates behavior that is useful to the organization — email subscriptions, e-book downloads, sign-ups for email lists, requests for information, RSS subscriptions, social sharing — something that indicates a level of loyalty and persuasion so people will be interested in coming back again and again.

Content has to drive behavior. It’s good to go backwards and say, “What behavior do we want to create? And what content do we have to create to make that a reality?”

TCS: What role do you think video will play in marketing campaigns? 

JB: I think we’re really entering an era of multimedia photo and video content being the primary mechanism by which people consume content.

 [Look at] everything that’s happened in the last 12-18 months, such as [the use] of Hulu, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram. Facebook and Google+ are now allowing larger photos.

What we tell corporate clients all the time is that if you don’t have a multimedia strategy going forward, you are going to be in serious, serious trouble.

People just don’t want to read anymore. It’s a visual world.

People vote with their fingertips and have high speed internet in their pockets all the time. [Video is] persuasive. It’s visceral in a way that books aren’t.

TCS: What do you think is the next trend in content marketing?

JB: I hope that the next trend is going to be the trend today done better. I think we’re too eager to jump on the new thing without doing the old thing well. I think we’re going to get to the point pretty quickly where it’ll be a lot easier to start hypersegmenting content.

They’re tying Google Analytics together with social media marketing. So when I come to the blog post I see one version, and when you come you see another one. That’s been available on email for a while and in some cases, [with] website software.

I think you’ll see that type of segmented communication become more common and built into WordPress and Facebook. There won’t be a website. There will be a version of the webpage based on your history with that company.

TCS: What are Convince and Convert’s goals? 

JB: We try and combine high value consulting with a continuous stream of what we hope is useful content across a plethora of content types. We have the blog Convince and Convert which is updated almost every day, a weekly podcast, a daily email newsletter, a number of webinars, e-books, and my book “The Now Revolution.”

We only work on projects that we have a passion for. We work for clients we want to work for, period.

The post Content Q&A: Jay Baer on the Future of Hypersegmented Content [INTERVIEW] appeared first on Contently.

Links, whether they’re on a company’s website linking to others, or another site has linked back to the company, are always going to increase exposure, writes Business 2 Community‘s Sookie Shuen.

Links should be used wisely, and not so much that they overload the visitor. As Shuen puts it, “One very useful thing to keep in mind is Wikipedia and the way it allows you to begin on one topic and click through to move from one related topic to the next, taking you somewhere very different. Keep this approach in mind and apply it to as many relevant websites as possible.”

The links should relate, and the topics should smoothly flow from one to the other. Instead of focusing on posting keywords that are SEO-friendly to generate traffic, marketers should build their linking methods.

Blogging, as it’s been repeatedly proven, will also get a brand noticed. Shuen says that since blog services, like Tumblr or WordPress, have their own hubs where blogs are categorized, posts are more likely to be read. Essentially, those sites are doing the link building for the companies.

Signing up for a social media account, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, isn’t enough for a company. Marketers need to join in on conversations, as well as talk to customers one on one.

By interacting on these sites, “This shows you as a friendly business, rather than one simply trying to sell,” writes Sheun. “Once someone does need your service, they’ll already be aware of you as a business they can trust.”

Google Analytics and web server tracking tools allow marketers to see the fruits of their labors. Whether it’s social media or content marketing, marketers should always be looking to find the best strategies.

Image courtesy of hojusaram/flickr

The post How to Increase a Brand’s Popularity Online appeared first on Contently.

This becomes clear when Google Analytics or Chartbeat show a surge in site visitors long after a post was first published.

Is there a cycle of popularity for posts, the same way that fashions like flared jeans return after two decades?

Individual experiences can vary greatly, but having renewed popularity at the two-month mark is far enough from the publish date to warrant curiosity, but not so far in the future that most blog posts  would no longer be relevant.

Here are a few reasons why content might get a second wind:

1. Search

Incoming links will build over time, so a post that isn’t at the top of search results the first day it is published might continue to rise as time goes on. Suddenly, a solid post is the go-to reference on a topic once it makes page one of Google.

2. Seasonal

It’s obvious that a Christmas post could become popular again the following holiday season — but not everyone is on the same schedule. A post on wedding dress designs or purchasing birthday gifts for in-laws could see a spike of relevance at an unexpected time.

3. Pinterest

The great thing about Pinterest is that it’s more than a stream — it’s a collection, and designed in such a way that users can easily return to something that was pinned months ago. Their followers can, too, and might re-pin an image that links back to your post. If the right person pins it, virality may ensue.

4. StumbleUpon

Once a URL is entered in StumbleUpon’s system, it can continue to be served up to users based on topic, with no constraints regarding time or the freshness of the content.

5. Linkage

If others read your piece and like it, they may do nothing, at least not right away. But when the time comes to write a post a few months later and another blogger remembers that great point you made, they will likely link back — and if their audience is bigger than yours, the referral traffic can be significant.

One simple way to benefit from all these avenues is to produce memorable content. Think, is this substantive enough that it will be worthwhile to visit two months from now? And if it is, go ahead and redistribute your blog post on your own social media two months later, and perhaps create a second run that is truly your own.

Image courtesy of sheelamohanachandran2010/shutterstock

The post Why Some Posts Become Two-Months-Later Successes appeared first on Contently.

The return on investment (ROI) for social media usually isn’t clear, and sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr are often used to simply promote brand awareness.

Companies must take three important steps to determine social media marketing success. These are establishing goals and baselines upfront and then tracking the efforts afterwards, according to Dynamic Business‘ Anna Cairo.

Before beginning a campaign, Cairo says marketers need to determine their goals. These goals might include the need to “reach a specific demographic, get more reviews, increase brand awareness or sell more products,” she said.

The goals must be tangible and each step must be broken down as much as possible. Otherwise, she said, “it will be impossible to effectively measure what you are doing.”

Baselines are standards against which results will be measured to determine whether goals have been met, Cairo said. Perhaps a local business hopes to reach 100,000 Twitter followers or 5,000 likes on Facebook to ultimately sell more items. If marketers know where they want to go and why, it will be easier to figure out if they’ve reached their mark.

Cairo points out that by using free tools such as Facebook Insights, Google Analytics and WordPress stats, marketers can see where they are on their road map. LinkedIn also offers a tracking tool that is useful for B2B marketers.

Social media may not be the ultimate answer for ROI, but it will remain a crucial resource for marketers to use for promotional purposes.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/shutterstock

The post Measuring Social Media Success appeared first on Contently.

The wrong audience for your site isn’t likely to produce horrific results, but it might create one of the worst possible outcomes for your business … nothing at all.  Here are five things to look for that indicate your blog isn’t reaching your intended audience:

1. Inbound Traffic From Random Sources

Site statistics will tell you what pages your visitors were on immediately prior to coming to you. Random number strings, unrelated sites and known link farms indicate sources of less invested visitors.

2. High Bounce Rate

“Bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors who view only one page before leaving your website. Some of these will represent die-hard fans who drop in regularly checking for updates. Most, however, represent people who showed up and left from lack of interest.

Bounce Rates

3. Traffic Spikes

If you get a single day or weekend of high traffic followed by nothing, that traffic probably consisted of the wrong people. It came from a single post that went viral, or an effective publicity initiative — not from engaging the people your blog is aimed for.

It’s worthwhile to look at what caused the spike, though. It may point you toward ways to attract the right readers using similar methods.

4.Off-Kilter Comments  

Read the comments on your blog. Are they engaged and interested? Do they expand the conversation? Or are they link bait or a single meaningless line? A lack of high-value comments is a sure sign that you’re failing to attract visitors who care about what you have to say.

5. Low Conversion Rate

If you get 10,000 visitors each day, but no subscriptions or sales, you’re reaching the wrong people. This seems fairly obvious, but many beginning bloggers will look only at their traffic, without considering conversion rate — or even including an opportunity to buy or subscribe on each page.

Related articles

• 8 Tips For Measuring Engagement Of Your Blog Readers (contently.com)
• Optimization Testing: Don’t Obsess Over Conversion Rates (hubspot.com)
• 7 Things You’re Probably Doing Wrong On Your Company Blog (contently.com)

The post Five Signs that your Blog Isn’t Reaching the Right Audience appeared first on Contently.

There is no one-size-fits-all advice that makes awesome e-commerce blogs.  But there are shared traits that today’s successful Internet businesses employ.  (If you’re still unsure why you should be blogging or what to write about, you got to check out this article.)

Two of the most powerful are animated copywriting and laser-focused value propositioning.

Animate your Products with Masterful Copywriting

So many e-commerce sites sell similar things now that it’s hard to stand out.  One major lever blogs can use is to make the copy live — infuse it with energy, spunk and personality so that the brand lives in the words of the blog.

Remember, the blog can — and should — be used as the front end of your sales funnel. The content isn’t just a placeholder; it’s what’s going to compel browsers of your website to become active prospects.

Groupon’s Editor in Chief Aaron With said, “We’re mixing business with art and creating our own voice.”

Check out what AppSumo is doing as a daily deals sites for geeks.  The site sells software for people running Internet sites and educational material for techies.  Pretty boring, right?  Nah, subscribers actually look forward to receiving offers from the firm.

Now the language isn’t for everybody (“Sumo ass-whupping” turns some users off), but it does do a good job of weaving a story out of seemingly ho-hum products.

Copy writing is where businesses meet their customers online — every business is ultimately as good as its copy.

What to do next:

• Read Copyblogger’s Copywriting 101, a great site and great info about how masterful copy writers influence readers to take action
• Learn from Gary Halbert: Gary Halbert was really a guru copy writer before anyone knew how essential that skill was.  All of his sales letters, techniques, etc are available to learn from.
• Check out Hubspot.  Few companies are better at giving away free content to capture an email and move users through the sales funnel.

The Blog as Value Proposition Clarifier

I made that word up (clarifier) but not the concept (and it really should be a word).  Successful e-commerce blogs don’t stop at providing valuable content to prospective customers — they actually have to clarify why someone would need your product.

The best e-commerce blogs slaying it are attracting new prospects and converting them to active customers.  And they’re doing so by

1. defining the prospect’s maximum point of pain
2. providing resources to help alleviate this pain
3. channeling user activity with clear call to actions

Let’s look at KissMetrics, a web analytics firm that has a massively successful blog in the 3-step framework just mentioned:

1. Pain point: KissMetrics is an analytics firm but knows its customers need help with general marketing (without traffic, who cares how to measure it??).  So, the blog becomes a resource for growing and managing a web business.
2. Resources: Old-school e-commerce sites would never have even mentioned competitors on their websites (Google Analytics).  Instead, KissMetrics is mature enough to understand that many of its users are already using (free) Google Analytics and sets out to help them.  The site also does a really good job of using infographics (as pioneered by personal finance site, Mint.com), valuable charts/illustrations of data that help prospects learn more.
3. Call to Actions: It’s not enough to just give away awesome content with well-storified content.  Provide users the means to learn more from you, to take the relationship up a notch.  E-mail captures should abound with clear explanations of what prospects get in return.

Successful blogs provide another powerful dimension to e-commerce sites, enabling them to weave an powerful story about the company and its products.

Related articles

• [E-book] The Beginner’s Guide To Blogging & Content Marketing Strategy (contently.com)
• 5 Must-Measure eCommerce Blogging Strategies (hubspot.com)

The post How To Crush It With Your Ecommerce Blog appeared first on Contently.

Right? Well, you can only know for sure if you’re measuring engagement.

With tools that are already embedded in a blog’s design or that you can plug in (called plugins), you can measure if – and how well – your readers are engaged in all of this great content you’re giving them. Once you discover what attracts your audience, you’ll be able to provide more of it.

Count the averages

Joost de Valk, a web developer who created the Blog Metrics plugin and runs a weekly podcast for WordPress users, suggests using a plugin like his to track the following metrics so you can count the average number of:

• comments per post (a good reason to ask those relevant questions).
• new inbound links per post (to see who’s talking about you).
• tweets per post (how many people are sharing your content).

You also may want to look at the length of a post to see if certain lengths work better with readers than others. And pay attention to reader requests.

Measure it regularly

Brandon Wick, who works for McClenahan Bruer Communications, a technology B2B agency in Portland, Ore., says his company sets aside time once a month to track engagement using Google Analytics. He measures visitor loyalty by looking at the relationship ratio, considering 70:30 (new to returning) a good number to maintain.

Don’t forget your offsite traffic

With subscription services like Google’s FeedBurner, de Valk says you’ll want to track the number of blog subscribers you have, including those who sign up for your RSS. The online report lists both the number of subscribers as well as your reach.

Add “contact us” prompts

If you’re using your blog as a sales and marketing tool, you can determine its effectiveness by prompting your readers to contact you. For instance, add a “contact us” prompt for your email newsletter or white papers. Social Media Manager Jessica Carlson of Off Madison Ave in Phoenix, Ariz., says, with direct “contact us” prompts, you can easily determine a return on investment.

More to consider

• Time spent: How much time readers spend on your blog may or may not be important. That depends on
  whether they return and what they do while they’re there. Are they taking your polls, signing up for your webinars, reading the case studies, or requesting your newsletter? If so, those are signs of engagement.
• Bounce rate: This is important to a certain degree but can be deceiving. For example, if a reader
  shows up, spends a few minutes looking around and scrolls down the page, but never clicks on anything, that can count as a bounce. Does that mean this person wasn’t engaged?
• Outside referrals: You definitely want to know who’s talking about your blog in cyberspace, and this is where pingbacks can be valuable. As long as other bloggers are linking back to the post they reference, you can easily track who’s talking about you with the pingbacks on your page.
• URL shorteners: Try this new URL shortener called Bizo Switchboard. In the beta stage, this free web-based toolkit not only shortens a link but also grabs data that allows you to follow and interact with whomever’s sending your link around the World Wide Web.

Do you have any other tools you use to measure engagement? Let us know in the comments!

Related articles

• 5 Basic Metrics to Measure If You Care About the ROI of Your Content (contently.com)
• 15 Must-Have Tools For Better Blogging (contently.com)

The post 8 Tips For Measuring Engagement Of Your Blog Readers appeared first on Contently.