Basic Analytics to Inform Your Content Decisions

Analytics can be like going on a date with your customer without actually buying dinner.

This isn’t as creepy as it sounds. Analytics show you what your customer wants to see more of. You can see what content they’re spending the most time with. That empowers you to create more content that your viewers need rather than playing a guessing game.

While it’s always good to connect with your audience through messages and in-person interaction, the data can give you more information you need to serve your people!

4 ways to skim your analytics to inform your content creation.

1. Social Media Insights

What to pay attention to…

• what medium works for your audience – video vs. photo
• what content does your audience like – photo of you vs. photo of something else
• what time of day are people engaging – if your audience seems to be paying attention at 3 am, post at 3 am!

While there are many insights to pay attention to, those three are a good start. Getting to know your audience one thing at a time. Here’s how to get started with Facebook and Instagram insights.

Go to your Facebook page and click on insights.

From there, take a look at the top 5 latest posts section to take a look at reach and engagement. These are depicted through a yellow bar and a purple bar. Reach is how many people encountered your post. Engagement means how many people took action on your post. Click “see all posts” to check out how your other posts are doing in comparison.

You can click these images to enlarge or zoom in.

Go to your Instagram page and click the three horizontal lines at the top right corner. Then click the word insights.

From there, you’ll see your last 7 days of insights. This is an overview. Click on the posts section to get a more in-depth view. At the top, you’ll see filters that you can sort by. Sort by reach within the last year and then sort by post interactions. 

You can click these images to enlarge or zoom in.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps to take some of the guess work out of marketing. My go to spots within Google Analytics are the pages report and the acquisition channels.

Pages report – learn where your traffic spends the most time on your website. Your homepage will always have the most views. Focusing on the pages that are most visited and a high average time on page are key.

Acquisition channels – find out where viewers are coming from and how you can create opportunities on social media channels and email traffic.

Learn how to install Google Analytics to your website here.

3. Jetpack

Jetpack gives you less to work with than Google Analytics, but it’s a nice dashboard to see where users are coming from and what posts are most impactful for your audience.

The referrers section is great because it gives you tangible data from the social content you put time and effort into. Looking at the change in this data per post and overtime is helpful to get a feel for growth and seeing what content lands with your people.

Something that goes hand in hand with your website traffic is search engine optimization (SEO). If you have a WordPress website, I recommend getting Yoast, an SEO plugin. It explains key SEO decisions and builds them into your posting process. 

4. Email communications

Do you send newsletters? The occasional email blast? Take a look at the analytics your email provider gives you! The most important data:

1. Open rate (relies heavily on subject line)

2. Link clicks 

Don’t get lost in the rest of the numbers. Pay attention to what’s working and do more of it.

This is just about the highest level overview of analytics. There are so many tools to utilize and numbers to crunch, but the best way to learn is to get started.

Do you want the Analytics Report Template for Beginners? It’s free!