Content analytics and digital publishing go hand-in-hand. While old school journalists pounded the pavement looking for new story ideas, digital journalists are turning to content analytics platforms to stay on top of trends and topics that are important to their readers.
Companies like Parse.ly, which provides audience data and analytics for digital media, are changing the way reporters learn about the topics they cover. They’re also making it easier for publishers to come up with the kind of content that generates clicks and shares.
The Latest Trend in Publishing Analytics
Earlier this month, the audience data and content analytics firm Parse.ly launched a new product called Currents. Currents informs content creators’ decisions with real audience attention habits and distribution trends.
What does that mean for digital publishers?
For starters, it means that reporters who work at all types of digital publications can spend less time scrolling through Twitter feeds and researching trending topics in Google News. Instead, they can enter the topics or categories they’re interested in into the Currents platform, and they’ll receive daily or weekly digests with overviews of these topics. That means less time Googling and researching, and more time putting together content to go up on the publisher’s site.
In addition to following topics, reporters who use Currents can also follow categories, market areas, U.S. states, and traffic sources.
Not only can reporters learn more about the topics they cover, they can also see how competing publications are covering those topics. Using editorial analytics, from Parse.ly and other platforms, digital journalists can see what their peers are doing and how their content is performing across the web.
Real Use Cases for Content Analytics
Content analytics isn’t just for reporters and editors. Publishers can take advantage of these tools, as well. Using analytics platforms, publishers can determine which channels they should invest more effort into and which channels deserve more of their paid media spend.
Let’s look at some key examples of how digital publishers are using content analytics to grow their online audiences.
1) Tracking article performance. Using content analytics tools, publishers can collect data on stories, posts, and articles that have already been published and use this information to identify which topics their audiences have responded well to in the past.
2) Pinpointing the best time for content distribution. When is the best time to post links to stories on social media? Does the platform matter? Does the topic matter? Are readers more likely to click on links to sports stories in the morning, and news stories in the afternoon? These are all questions that publishers can answer through analytics.
3) Following reader engagement. With analytics, publishers can track referrals and social media reactions, so they know what readers are saying about the latest content on their sites.
4) Make strategic promotional decisions. What is the best way to promote a certain type of content, or an article from a specific reporter? The longer publishers track this data, the more comfortable they’ll get with using it to make decisions for growing, engaging, and connecting with their readers.
Have you used content analytics yet? If you’d like to learn more about integrating popular analytics platforms into your WordPress website, then reach out to our team at Web Publisher PRO.
