Analytics to Deepen Your Relationships

Introduction

Understanding your website’s audience and how they interact with your content is crucial for developing an effective content strategy. With the wealth of analytics data available, you have the opportunity to gain valuable insights into your readers in order to create content that resonates.

Key metrics to analyze include traffic sources, content performance, user behavior flow, loyalty and recency, engagement, conversions and industry analysis. By regularly reviewing these metrics, you can identify content gaps, optimize existing content, and produce new content tailored to your audience’s needs and preferences.

For example, observing which topics attract the most organic search traffic indicates opportunities to expand on that subject. Monitoring content engagement shows what resonates with your readers and what fails to engage. Tracking user flow and drop-off points highlights content areas to improve.

In essence, analytics empower you to create a user-centric content strategy. Rather than guessing what your audience wants, you can leverage data to publish content designed to satisfy their interests. This data-driven approach leads to higher-quality content and a better user experience.

With a firm understanding of analytics, you gain insight to produce content that attracts, engages, and converts your target audience.

Audience Overview

Understanding who is coming to your website is crucial for optimizing your content strategy and marketing efforts. When analyzing your audience, there are several key factors to examine:

Total Users, New vs Returning

• How many total users are visiting your site each month? Is this growing or declining over time?
• What percentage of users are new versus returning visitors? This helps indicate whether you are expanding your reach or developing loyalty.

Demographics

• What are the age, gender, and location breakdowns of your visitors? This reveals who you are resonating with currently. You may want to adjust your content and messaging to appeal to a wider demographic.

Interests and Intent

• What brings people to your site? Are they seeking program information, trying to submit a donation, or looking for help with an issue?
• Analyzing landing pages and top content can uncover visitor interests and intent. For example, high traffic to your program pages signals opportunity for more educational content and articles.

Getting clarity on who your current audience is and what motivates them to visit your site will enable you to shape content that better speaks to their needs and interests. Focus on creating content that provides value and solves problems for your target advocate profiles.

Traffic Sources

Understanding where your website traffic is coming from is crucial for optimizing your content strategy. There are three main sources of traffic:

Direct – Traffic from people typing your URL directly into their browser or clicking on bookmarks. This indicates strong brand awareness and loyalty. Direct traffic should be a large portion of your overall traffic.

Social – Traffic from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This traffic indicates how well you are leveraging social media to drive visits. It’s important to track which social platforms drive the most referrals.

Search – Traffic from organic search engines results. This includes Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Optimizing content for search is key for websites relying on search traffic. Analyze keywords driving the most organic traffic.

In addition to traffic sources, identifying your top referral sites provides insight into partnerships and external links driving visits. Look at which publishers, blogs, directories and other websites are sending you traffic and aim to expand those partnerships.

Keyword analysis is also important for optimizing content. Look at your top organic keywords to identify user search intent and which topics and keywords should be targeted in your content to drive more relevant organic traffic. Analyze keyword difficulty to prioritize keywords, and add relevant keywords to pages to improve chance of ranking.

Content Performance

Content performance analytics provide valuable insights into how your website visitors interact with your content. By tracking key metrics for each piece of content, you can identify your best and worst performing content. This allows you to double down on what’s working while improving or removing what’s not.

Some key content performance metrics to analyze include:

Pageviews and Unique Pageviews

Pageviews tell you how many times a page was loaded, while unique pageviews tell you how many distinct users loaded that page. Pages with high numbers indicate content that resonates with your audience. Compare pageviews across your content to find your most popular assets. Unique pageviews show if traffic is concentrated to a small audience or distributed across many users.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of users who land on a page and then leave without any further interaction. High bounce rates signal content that fails to engage users. Look at the bounce rate by page to identify poorly performing content. For example, a blog post with a high bounce rate may require improved writing or visuals to better capture attention.

Time on Page

Time on page reveals how long users spent interacting with a page. Longer times indicate engaging content. Compare time on page across content to find pieces that do a good job holding visitor attention. Low times suggest content needs improvement to increase its ability to captivate users.

Analyzing content performance provides data-driven insights to inform your content strategy. Track these key metrics over time to continuously refine your content for maximum impact.

User Behavior Flow

Understanding how users navigate and interact with your website can provide tremendous insights for generating effective content. By analyzing user flow, you can identify the paths visitors take through your site, where they enter and exit each page, and potential drop-off or exit points.

Funnel analysis is especially useful for optimizing conversions. Examine the journey users take from initial page view through to a desired conversion goal, such as newsletter signup, contact form submission or campaign donation. Identify any major drop-offs in the funnel, which may indicate content gaps, technical issues or unclear calls-to-action. For example, a landing page may generate lots of views but have a low conversion rate, signaling the need for revised content.

Clickstream data visualizations can illuminate user behavior patterns. See which pages attract traffic versus which pages drive conversions. Find out how users arrive at high-converting pages, such as through site search, internal links or referrals. This shows content opportunities to better assist the user journey toward conversions.

By leveraging user flow and funnel data, you can create targeted content that speaks to user needs at each stage. Reduce drop-offs by addressing friction points and information gaps. Guide visitors seamlessly through to conversion goals with relevant, high-quality content tailored to their interests and behavior.

Loyalty and Recency

Understanding your audience’s loyalty and recency provides valuable insights into their engagement with your content. This can reveal how well your website retains visitors over time.

Repeat User Visits

Analyzing repeat visits shows how many of your users come back to your site frequently versus one-time visitors. A high percentage of return visitors indicates you’re providing content and value that compels readers to keep coming back.

Compare your loyal visitor rate to industry benchmarks to assess how you stack up. If it’s lower than expected, it may suggest opportunities to improve engagement and incentivize return visits.

Dive deeper into your loyal users – who are they, what content brings them back, and how can you better cater to them? These insights can inform content and site optimization.

Recency of Visits

Recency metrics show how recently visitors have been to your site. This helps gauge whether you’re able to continually attract both new and repeat visitors.

Ideally, you want to see consistent levels of both new and returning visitors over time. If return visitor rates drop off, it may indicate issues retaining audience interest.

Analyze what changes preceded declines in repeat visitors. Did you alter your content strategy or topics? Identify causes to reverse the trend and bolster loyalty.

Regularly attracting new visitors while maintaining repeat engagement ensures your content stays relevant, provides ongoing value, and sustains growth. Balance between the two is key.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics provide insight into how your audience interacts with your content. This helps determine what content resonates and drives the desired actions.

Scroll Depth

Scroll depth measures how far down a page a user scrolls before leaving. Content that holds attention and interest will have higher scroll rates. This indicates the content was captivating and provided value to the reader. Shallow scroll rates may signal content was not compelling or relevant to the user.

Click-Through-Rate

Click-through-rate (CTR) tracks how often users click on links and CTAs within content. Higher CTRs show content encourages clicks to other resources. This helps lead users deeper into the site or funnel. Low CTRs suggest optimization opportunities to make calls-to-action more prominent, compelling and contextually relevant.

Social Sharing

Analyzing social shares reveals how often users actively promote and pass along content. Popular and high-quality content gets shared frequently across social platforms. This amplifies reach through readers’ own networks. Low social shares imply the need to create more shareworthy assets that provide value. Useful benchmarks include social shares per thousand visits.

Conversions

Conversions are the actions you want your website visitors to take after interacting with your content. These can include signups, donations, email list subscriptions, downloads, and other goal completions. Tracking conversions allows you to measure the effectiveness of your content in driving your desired actions.

When looking at your analytics, pay attention to the following conversion metrics:

• Signups: How many people created accounts or profiles on your site after reading your content? Signups indicate you’re producing content compelling enough to convince readers to join your community.
• Donations: For nonprofit sites, note how many donations occurred after someone read a blog post or visited a certain page. See which content is directly leading to conversion.
• Email list growth: Are more people subscribing to your email newsletters or promotions after consuming specific content? Prioritize and promote the pieces encouraging list growth.
• Goal completions: If you’ve set up goals in your analytics, you can see which content results in completing those goals, like downloading a resource, watching a video, or submitting a contact form.

Optimizing conversion rates involves understanding your audience’s journey from discovering your content to taking action. Pay attention to drop-off rates between stages. For example, a blog post may get 100 visitors but only 10 signups – a 10% conversion rate. Testing headlines, calls-to-action, page layouts, and other factors can improve conversions.

Analyze conversions over time to spot trends and identify your best performing content. Doubling down on what converts gives you the biggest return on investment. Ultimately, conversions reveal the content truly resonating with your audience.

Industry Analysis

To fully understand your own website’s performance, it’s important to benchmark it against additional organizations in your space. Here are some key areas to analyze:

Traffic Volume

Look at another organization’s overall traffic volume and how it compares to yours. Understanding the traffic landscape can help you to identify opportunities.

Top Performing Content

Analyze what content resonates most with audiences who follow similar organizations. Look at metrics like pageviews, time on page, and social shares. Identify any content gaps where you can create something similar for your own site.

Backlink Profile

Study the domains linking to external organization sites through backlinks. This sheds light on their overall authority and SEO strategy.

Social Media Presence

Audit similar organization’s social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Look at followers, engagement, and types of content that performs best. See what you can emulate in your own social presence.

Conversion Funnel

Try to analyze steps in other nonprofit conversion funnels, from traffic source to converting actions like email signups, downloads and donations. Identify any dropout points you can optimize for your own website.

Regularly monitoring similar organizations in these areas will provide an essential benchmark for your website. It helps reveal gaps, opportunities and areas to emulate for improving your own content and conversion strategy over time.

Key Takeaways

Summary of key audience insights

• Analyzing your audience analytics provides valuable insights into who your visitors are, what content resonates with them, and how they interact with your site. Key insights include identifying your loyal visitor base, understanding user behavior flow, seeing top-performing content, and recognizing where drop-offs occur.
• Look at traffic sources to see where your visitors come from. This helps determine opportunities for expanding reach. Evaluate social media, search engine, referral, and direct traffic.
• Examine engagement metrics like time on page, scroll depth, and click-through-rate. See which titles and topics hook attention. Find out when visitors lose interest to refine your content.
• Check conversion rates on calls-to-action. See which CTAs and pages encourage conversions. Identify friction points losing donation conversions.
• Complete an industry analysis to benchmark your performance. Compare traffic sources, engagement metrics, and conversions. Learn what similar organizations do well and note opportunities for improvement.

How to apply analytics to improve content strategy

• Create content that attracts and engages your target audiences based on interests shown in analytics. Optimize for search by using popular keywords. Promote top-performing content.
• Improve underperforming content by refining titles, intros, length, and design based on engagement data. Or replace it with new content on better-performing topics.
• Strengthen weak conversion funnels. Improve page design, content, and CTAs where dropoffs occur. Remove friction points to improve their user experience.
• Expand reach by leveraging high-potential traffic sources. Optimize content for those sources. Promote content on new and existing referral sites.
• Set measurable content goals and track performance over time. Adjust your strategy based on changes in traffic sources, engagement, and conversions. Continually refine content based on latest insights.