Improving content with Web data and analytics

Web content analytics give content creators an unprecedented look at what people like and which content garners the most traffic.

With Web analytics, content creators like writers, bloggers, photographers, database developers, etc can find out which content is getting the most page views and visits and from where those visitors are coming from. Content creators can also find out which search terms most often land people on their content.

This isn’t to say that content producers should only produce content that gets large amounts of traffic, but individual content producers now have data that they never had before. This data allows content producers to adjust their content to better suit the needs and desires of their users. Sometimes content producers are producing exactly the content that users want, but they are releasing it at the wrong time of day or they are not pushing content onto the right platforms.

Newspapers have long had eye tracking studies, but this information was largely available on the macro level. Individual content producers like beat bloggers now have access to very detailed and minute information about their content. They can see which topics are popular, what kinds of content (written, photos, podcasts, etc) are most liked by users, what time of day it is best to release content, where their traffic is coming from (bookmarks, RSS, Twitter, Google, Fark, etc) and more using today’s site analytics.

Let’s look at some real-world examples:

I recently launched a new hyperlocal beat blog, Chagrin Valley Sports, and I have already altered my content based on the search engine terms that people have found my site with. It’s clear to me that I’m not covering certain schools enough — West Geauga and Chagrin Falls in particular.

People looking for those two schools are able to find my site because it is one of the top search queries when someone types in "Chagrin Falls football," for instance. Unfortunately, I don’t have much content up for Chagrin Falls. Someone who lands any my site looking for content about the Chagrin Falls football team will quickly leave my site.

Because of my site analytics, I now realize that I need to cover certain schools more than I had originally thought. I can also see which kinds of content are most popular and produce more content like that.

Another example comes from Mark Luckie. He is a print journalist, who has combined his love of multimedia and journalism together and runs the blog 10,000 Words. He says that Web analytics made him realize that his most popular posts were lists.

"It definitely forced me out of the old media model of writing long paragraphs of text, but I think that is a good thing," he said.

This doesn’t mean everyone should make a lot of lists, but for 10,000 Words, it’s probably not a bad idea to make more posts that are comprised of lists, instead of long paragraphs.

Monica Guzman, who runs The Big Blog at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, says she checks the traffic on her posts at least once an hour. Guzman said this data is very helpful for her, and it allows her to do her job better.

"Seeing this data is
extremely helpful – not only to my understanding of my audience and
what they want to read, but also to my daily schedule," she said. "If the posts I wrote in
the morning aren’t doing well, I’ll prioritize a post with higher traffic
potential for the afternoon, and vice-versa."

The timing of posts are important, as I noted last week. In general, after lunch and after work are the two peak times for Web traffic. This, however, is not universal, and detailed Web analytics will allow content producers to know the peak times to release content on their Web sites. In fact, different beat blogs at the same paper might have different peak traffic times.

Many newspapers dump print content onto their Web sites after the last print deadline, usually between 10 p.m. and midnight. That is typically not a good time to release content, unless there is breaking news. Most beat bloggers would be advised against releasing content that late.

Guzman said that audience and topic trend information only becomes useful over longer periods of time like weeks and months.

"You start to see trends in what keywords get
more clicks, what the hot topics are," she said. "And you inform your idea of what your
audience wants to read, and how they want to read it."

If you or your company is looking for good, detailed analytics, Google Analytics is a strong choice, and it’s free. There are other options available, but it’s important for news organizations to make sure they have detailed analytics. Many content producers, however, tell me that they do not have access to this data and wish they did.

More news organizations, however, are allowing employees to access Web traffic data. This is becoming more important as more content producers move to the Web.