It seems as if the word “analytics” is getting a lot of play these days. Chances are if you have a website or social media sites, you have access to some type of analytics to help measure your traffic.
YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook Insights all offer analytics to help understand how popular – or not – your site is. Are those analytics doing anything more than informing you and making you analyze more?
The key to analytics is to make them actionable, not turn them into a tool to make yourself nuts (you know they’re making you nuts). There is plenty of valuable, proof-in-the-numbers type data in analytics that can help you to understand and improve your page and content performance. What is the first step? Hopefully the tools you are using to share content offer “tutorials.” Tutorials are great resources for you to find out exactly the types of features you have at your fingertips and how to use them.
At LoopLogic, we offer analytics to help understand exactly what your visitor is doing the entire time they are viewing your content. With advanced analytics such as these, you can take a video or any other content that you have added to a website, social network or a mass email and get an insider’s view into user engagement. Statistics that offer insight into who actually viewed your content, the time spent on viewing, how many downloads or who is sharing content are just a few examples of how analytics can give you great insight into what content is working and what is not.
Now what?
Using analytics to road test your content is very powerful. Gone are the days that a marketer puts out an online advertisement and has to wait until the sale is made to measure success. You can now see what your viewers are doing almost in real time.
- How long are they staying on the site?
- What is preceding the drop off point of a video?
- What is the average time spent on a key landing page?
Prioritize what is important and be sure that you understand your results – then act on them.
For example, if you are finding that people stop watching your video after 15 seconds, you know that your opening content needs work. If no one is sharing your content, it’s not as viral as you thought. You may find that when you incorporate a link to a white paper in with a deck, people open it. That’s a clue not only that you should do that more often, but that your intended buyers want to see thought leadership. This insight can help you adjust your entire strategy.
Any way you look at it, analytics are worth your time so long as you’re using them to do something.
