Content Managers: fall in love with your data. And data will love you back

Data-driven. Result-oriented. User-centered.

Every time one of these expressions is used, an abandoned dashboard living in a cold folder in your Google Drive cries in silence.

This could sound too harsh for many of us, marketing leads, but experience has shown that many times data is left aside on strategy and execution of many, many projects in digital.

This article is a love letter — or a high-level treasure map — dedicated to data and all the benefits it brings to our projects on a daily basis. It is focused on helping those who need to get back on track with their results and decide which indicator should be followed first. And what is their impact while managing a content marketing project.

Users: After all, every path has its beginning

Keeping track of how many people get in touch with your platform on a monthly and/ or weekly basis is mandatory. That is the starting point to develop your acquisition strategy, to monitor your engagement indexes and your growth forecasts.

New users: Who you know, who is new

Are your platform and its distribution strategy attractive enough to attract the interest of new cohorts of users? Comparing the total of users versus the new users on a certain timeframe will provide you this information. The key challenge to increase your platform’s audience is to keep a constant migration of new to returning users over time.

Bounce rate: You only get what you give

There are a few reasons that invite you to be restless on interpreting the bounce rate of your platform. It goes from discovering if there’s a perception of a match between what is delivered versus what was expected on the traffic generation channels to finding if loading time issues are affecting your content consumption, going through signs that your pages are offering attractive interactions to the audience.

Time spent: You know they are coming. But are they staying?

Is your strategy to keep your audience entertained for a certain amount of time? Or it is just to grab and go a piece of your content? There is no right answer if it fits your goals. But it is highly recommended to be aware in case of sudden changes. The pro tip is to combine this analysis with the number of new visitors and its source of traffic. This view will allow you to have a landscape of the quality of the traffic you are generating.

Source: Diversify. And iterate until you make it

The sources of traffic are a major part of any content strategy. To find out where the right visitors for your business are make all the difference when you want to capture their attention.

The source of traffic also will tell you how many people are getting to your platform through search engines or directly, just by typing the URL on the browser.

It fits for life, it fits for content strategy: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. A good mix of traffic sources is highly recommended. If for some reason the numbers start to go down on one side, your platform will still keep receiving users from the others while you fix or improve your strategy.

Pages x Pageviews: guide your users on your funnel

A good mix of upper-funnel, broad awareness articles and publications, mid-funnel, with a more detail-oriented content, and bottom of the funnel, persuasive and conversion-oriented pieces, may also give you a track of how much traffic they will get.

Rank them. Tag them by their funnel position. Discover which are your most visited pages and learn with them what your audience enjoys the most on your platform. And put some effort into enhancing the quality of those which are important for your game but aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

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And at last but not less important: spread the word. Share your data with your stakeholders. Be sure everyone in your boat knows where it is going. And which are your plans regarding the data you are gathering.

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