Do you know which page of your website is visited most? The answer may surprise you. It’s also a good starting point for discussing informed content creation and customer engagement. Page visits are only the tip of the iceberg and one of the most elementary metrics for digital content effectiveness, but they are still useful information. The wealth of information generated by website analytics tools is astounding and this data should be the driving force of your content creation strategy.
A colleague of mine worked at a consumer electronics company that spent a great deal of time and money documenting the celebrities that used its products. Interviews, photos and other media were incorporated into the website and expectations were high that these celebrity endorsements would generate “buzz” that would have a positive impact on sales.
Nearly two years later, it was discovered that the most visited page on the site was still the specifications page for a popular product. In fact, the top 10 visited pages were product specifications and the celebrity-related pages appeared to have no measureable impact on website traffic, let alone sales.
While it was a costly mistake to continue with an ineffective program for as long as it did, the more egregious mistake was the company’s failure to understand its audience and what they wanted from the company via its website. The company eventually scrapped the “buzz” approach and directed resources into enhancing its product specification pages.
It’s not about you
Regardless of what you think you know about your customers and their behavior, the only way to know for sure is to collect and analyze data about them.
Whether you employ free website analytics from Google, Yahoo or others, or more advanced measurement software from highly-rated companies like Coremetrics, Omniture and Webtrends Inc., the actual behavior of your customers is the best way to know what they find most important. This information makes up the basic building blocks of your content creation strategy.
Today, even the simplest embed tools come with their own analytics. Indianapolis-based measured marketing service providers like Formstack LLC, Compendium, Delivra, ExactTarget and more offer vast quantities of actionable data. It is important make sure this data is put to good use as you develop content.
