When you are in the business of growing other businesses like SMA Marketing, analytics play a key role in everyday choices. The right statistics will point you towards the content that is best connecting with your persona and give you an idea of the different subjects people are seeking information around. A great set of analytics will tell you which content is most popular, as well as the most popular time something is being viewed.
Whether you are creating and publishing your own content or paying an agency to create great content for you, digital marketing is an area where the phrase “time is money” rings true. There are only so many hours in a day that can be spent on your website and marketing content. Figuring out how to maximize each blog post, social media interaction, and email can feel overwhelming until you understand the numbers.
So how do you find the numbers without spending a ton of extra money? To be honest, even a free analytics plugin is going to cost you some money. The plugin itself may be free, but your website hosting and domain fees will need to move past the 100% free stage in order to take advantage of most if not all analytic plugins.
WordPress inches around the annoyance of blocking plugins on their free site or “.com” section by offering their users basic data. Connected to each blog that is created is a page collecting stats.
Insights offer the following breakdowns:
- When a post was posted
- How many views per month
- An average for the day are listed in a grid of year
- How their most recent post is trending against the statistics of the top rated ever post
- How many followers a blog has
- Ways in which people are connecting to the content (Social media, email and following via WordPress.com are all listed)
- a grid shows the most popular time your blog content is read
- Comments by authors ranked by top commenters
- a list of WordPress followers
- a breakdown of when and where blog content was posted via social media
- what countries views are coming from
WordPress free statistics continues with an additional analytics page breakdowns of days, weeks, months, and years offer bar charts with the same information given on the Insights page.
Your website isn’t the only place that you can collect analytics from. Your social media pages are also collecting statistics for you. If you’ve set up a Facebook page specifically for your business or website, you might notice a number under each post telling you how many people your post has reached. Since Facebook algorithms are not set so that you see everything you follow. One quick way to see if your post is visible is to check how many people it reached.
Tracking your social media “likes” and “shares” will give you a snapshot insight into not only the content that resonated with your viewers but if they saw it as content their friends would also like. Each “share” is an indication that the content resonates with a larger audience in some way.
With the basic information from these two areas, you can begin to create a focused content schedule as well as social media strategy what will help you reach the largest amount of people at a time. Posting content around times they are most likely to view it. Posting on the social media spaces that your readers engage with you on will help make sure content is where it needs to be, in the reader’s sight.
Growth drives a business forward. In the digital age, a company’s business has the ability to reach people anywhere in the world their product or services may be useful. Creating useful, quality content will serve your clientele well. It will also help you to build a relationship built on trust.
Spending time analyzing the data is the first step towards growth. There is another piece to the puzzle. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the strategy that allows your carefully planned and created content to show up in a web engine search.
Check out Ryan’s post on Keywords and Optimization for more information. And then take some time to create a plan for the next month. What content should you create? When and where should you post it? I think you will find that it won’t take long for your to create a rhythm that better serves your clients and builds your audience.
