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What do you bank on to improve your content? Likes, comments, or shares. Many content creators make blind guesses instead of relying on data.

This approach is wrong, and while it could work by chance, it’s not sustainable.The best way to boost your message online is by using analytics to measure and improve your content.

This post will teach you how to use analytics to improve your content performance. Whether you create blog posts, articles, social media posts, video content, newsletters, or podcasts, this post will help you.

Content Analytics to Track

There are different types of analytics; let’s see how they differ and what they reveal.

Traffic Metrics

These monitor people who visit your website and include the number of unique visitors, page views, and referral sources.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics indicate how people interact with your content. It includes bounce rate (how quickly they leave), time on the page, and scroll depth.

Conversion Metrics

These show how many people took your call to action and acted like downloads, leads, email signups, and sales.

SEO Performance

SEO performance analyzes your SEO strategy if other websites link to your content and rank positions on search engines. It includes click-through rate (CTR), backlinks, and keywords.

How to Find Your Best-Performing Content

All content is not equal; even the best thought-out ones can fall flat. That’s why it’s essential to find and monitor your best-performing content. Here’s how.

Google Analytics for Tracking Website Performance

This free tool reveals your website user’s behavior, traffic, and high-performing content. It shows the following metrics:

Traffic Sources: Where are your web visitors coming from (direct, organic search, referrals,  social media)?

Web User Engagement: The time they spend on a page, bounce rate, and pages viewed per visit session.

Conversions: What actions they took (purchase, sign-ups, downloads)?

Top Pages: Best forming blog posts or landing pages.

Use Google Analytics to find high-performing pages, demographics, and interests to understand your site visitors.   And source or medium on most platform analytics to find the source of most traffic.

Social Media Insights

Every social media platform has built-in analytics for content tracking.  They reveal these metrics:

Engagement: Shares, likes, comments, save.

Reach and Impressions:  Reach is the number of people who have seen your content. Impression is the number of times your content has been displayed, whether viewed or not.

Follower Growth:  If you are gaining or losing followers.

Best Performing Content: Content with the most interaction.

The exact metrics to measure will differ across each platform and depend on the content type. For instance, YouTube videos will have different measurements from an email newsletter. 

However, the purpose remains: to identify the best-performing content and format to replicate across the board.

 Email Newsletter Analytics

These metrics track email marketing campaigns. 

• Open Rate – Percentage of subscribers that opened your email.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Percentage that clicked the link in the email.
• Bounce Rate – Emails that didn’t deliver.
• Unsubscribe Rate – Percentage of people that opt out of receiving your email.
•  Conversion Rate – Percentage of subscribers who followed the call to action (sign up, purchase, download).
• List Growth Rate – How your email list grows (more new subscribers vs. fewer unsubscribes).
•  Spam Complaint Rate – The frequency of your emails being marked as spam.

Also Read: How to Measure Content Success

Common Content Problems and Solutions

Let’s see the key signs of low performance and how to use analytics to improve your content.

1. Weak Headlines or Titles

When captions or titles are unclear or don’t look interesting, it doesn’t entice people to view them. Headlines need to be optimized with keywords to get clicks.

You can fix this using emotional triggers and power words in your titles.

For example, use “7 Proven Tricks to Boost Views” instead of “How to Boost Views.”

• Make your headings benefit-driven, clear, and concise. 
• Add relevant keywords in your blog post titles, meta descriptions, and image file names. 
• Headline analyzing tools like Sharethrough and CoSchedule can help you with your headlines.  You can also find trending keywords on Google Trends.

Our guide on crafting headlines will interest you.

2. Poor Content Structure and Readability

Poor content flow, visual or written, will make your audience leave quickly. Nobody likes long, complex sentences and paragraphs because they are hard to understand. The same applies to unorganized content flow or confusing content.

• Make your sentence short, and use numbers and bullet points to make your content easy to scan.
• Group your content into categories with subheadings for clarity and add visuals to increase appeal.
• Lastly, give white by spacing out your text and bold the key points for easy identification.

Hemingway Editor is great for assessing content readability, and proofreading tools like Grammarly and Quillbot are editing.

Use these strategies to improve your content readability.

3. Low Engagement

If people are viewing your content and not staying long or engaging with it, it can hinder your reach.

Content with low engagement might not be interactive or sharable in the case of social media posts. It could also be that your message is not resonating with your audience or due to a lack of a clear call to action.

• Fix this by asking engaging questions and using interactive content like video clips, polls, carousels, and quizzes.
• You can also experiment with various content formats and types (infographics, videos, etc) and use bold and clear CTA. “Give this a try,” “Download the free eBook,” and “Leave a comment are examples of clear CTA.”

Related Post: Tips and Tricks to Creating Sharable Content 

 4. Poor Ranking on Search Engines

Poor SEO strategies can cause your blog or website content to rank low on search engines. It could be due to using irrelevant keywords, a lack of title optimization, meta description, and low-quality content. 

Besides these, slow website load time frustrates readers, and they will leave.

• Find relevant keywords with low difficulty that answer your audience’s intent and questions. 
• Use longtails (more specific) keywords instead of broad keywords. For example, this keyword best lipids for dry skin rather than lipids.
• Link your content properly by adding internal links (your related content) and external links (links to other websites) to your content. 
• Create valuable content, place keywords in your titles, meta descriptions, and visual name files, and update your content regularly.

You can use Google Search Console to track your keyword rankings and SEO tools for more SEO analysis.

Learn the role of SEO in content creation and SEO writing tips.

5. Weak Visual Appeal

Lack of visuals or low-quality images makes your content unattractive. Also, a lack of consistency in your branding can confuse your audience.

• Always use high-quality images and videos for your content; GIFs and memes are great for grabbing attention.
• Maintain consistency in branding with your fonts, colors, and logo.

You can find high-quality visuals on Unsplash and Pexels; some are free, and others are not. Canva and Adobes are also helpful for branding your visuals.  

Find out how to boost your content with visuals.

Understanding Your Audience With Analytics

 Analytics can help you understand your audience and improve your content.

Demographic Insights

Demographics reveal the age group, location, and interests of your audience. Are they mostly baby boomers, Gen Z, or millennials? Where do they live, and what are their interests? 

Google Analytics and each social media analytics platform can reveal the answers to these questions. Sometimes, you have to meet specific criteria to get all the data.

Here’s an example of how demographics can boost your content.

• If your audience is mostly Gen Z, they will likely prefer short videos like TikTok, reels, and shorts. 
  
• Health-conscious mothers will like content that focuses on organic food and family meals.
• If your audience members are in a different time zone, you can post when they are most active online.

Behavior Tracking

Understanding how your audience interacts with your content can tell you about their behavior.

Your most visited page or most viewed content interests them the most. Also, the time spent on your content counts. 

• Create more content around topics or themes with more clicks and improve the low-performing content.

Device and Platform Analysis

More people search and visit websites on their mobiles than on desktops, and they also consume content differently on different platforms.

• Mobile device users usually want short-bit content that loads fast, while desktop could follow through with an in-depth guide. 
• The audience on different social media platforms also has their preferred content format; Instagram is visual, and LinkedIn is more text-based.  
• In addition, make your website mobile-friendly by optimizing your web navigation, loading time,s and buttons. You will find data on devices in Google Analytics and Social Media Analytics.

Don’t miss our post on how to analyze your audience for better content.

Improving Content with A/B Testing 

A/B testing allows you to compare multiple versions of your content to know which performs better.

You can split-test your headlines, images, thumbnails, and CTAs to find what your audience resonates with your audience the most.

• Conduct A/B testing on Convert, Crazy Frog, Social Media Ads, and email marketing tools. Stick to the one that gets more clicks, conversions, and engagement.

Take note of when your audience is more active online. Google Analytics shows this under user behavior and social media insights as well.  

Publish new content when your audience engages with your content the most, and if engagement drops, test it to see if it could be the topic.

 Improve Your Content by Experimenting with New Formats

Your audience will likely prefer some content types, and it’s essential to know.

• Videos like explainers and behind-the-scenes are excellent for social media. 
• Infographics are great for breaking down complex ideas in blogs, articles, and Pinterest pins. 
• Create carousels for platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram and interactive content for emails and social media.

Monitor the click-through rates, engagement rates, and time spent on the page to track performance. 

Then, create more content types with higher engagement and repurpose high-performing blog posts. 

Data-Always Wins

Content is indeed king, but it will rule over a kingdom in ruin without measuring its performance. 

Blind guesses can hinder your content success and amount to burnout. Don’t just create content; track the traffic, engagement, reach, watch time, open rate,, and conversion.

This guide will show you how to use analytics to improve your content. Start today and let data guide you.

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