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Content marketers are seeking a better alternative to Universal Analytics (Google Analytics) or GA4.
In the early days of the internet, we visited homepages, clicked around, and left. We didn’t even have tabs, smartphones, or social sharing. It was in this context Google acquired Urchin to form Google Analytics.
That was the old way. Now we live in a multi-tab, multi-device, multi-format world. Content is delivered to our customers seamlessly and on-demand. Users are blind to banner ads.
To stand out, brands have shifted to content, and content goes where the consumer goes. As a philosophical idea, content doesn’t care where it lives, it cares where it is consumed.
And that core shift is why what we measure and how we measure it has to change. It’s content first, in disparate environments.
Google Analytics simply wasn’t built for this purpose but Nudge was.
Why analytics is important for content marketing
They say, ‘what gets measured gets managed’ – it’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s true.
Content analytics helps you figure out if you are making any progress against your content goals. In other words, you need to establish the yard post to see how well you are doing.
For any content marketing program to become truly successful, you do need to understand what works and what doesn’t. To do that, you need to measure the right things.
Every now and again, you might create content that performs above average, but true content marketing success happens when you know the precise recipe to repeat that success again, and again and again.
In other words, content analytics makes up your progress framework. It gives you the tools you need to maximize every last penny of your content investments.
Nudge vs Traditional web analytics
Traditional page analytics tools are great for websites, but when content is a key part of your business, they have some clear gaps, which is where content analytics comes in.
Nudge offers our users a holistic view of clicks, content and sentiment so they create extraordinary experiences.
Find out what considerations you should take into account when selecting content marketing analytics, click here.
Easy to use
Nudge was built to make it easy for anyone to use it.
We get you from insight to action quickly through a clear and intuitive dashboard. With Google Analytics, you get the raw data, but not key takeaways.
With Nudge, however, your data is automatically derived into actionable insights, meaning you can spend your limited time where it matters most, which is on the content itself.
Metrics
Nudge was built for content marketing as a use case, with a blend of content, advertising, and marketing KPIs.
Traditional web analytics, such as GA or Adobe, works well for analyzing websites. It doesn’t work as well for content marketing though – simply because it wasn’t built for it.
Just take a look at the following examples of metrics and how definitions differ between GA and Nudge:
GA’s Time on Page
Measures the time between when you arrive on a web page and when you exit. However, unless you click onto a second page, this time is not accounted for.
Let’s say you’re scrolling through your social feeds as you eat your breakfast. You probably see an interesting headline, you click through, read it, then leave. If that happens, the content has done its job, right? Well, if you use Time on Page, all of that information is lost to the ether.
Nudge uses multiple triggers to accommodate behaviors like walking away from the computer, pausing to watch a video, and resuming a session.
Nudge attention minutes
Think of the attention minutes metric as a stopwatch for your content. Once you open the content, the timer starts. If you swap tabs the counter stops. If you become inactive it stops.
This is important as it provides precision, on exactly what people are paying attention to, and what you’re paying for. The premise is that you only receive value when a consumer pays you attention, so you should measure that way too.
Attention is the best way to gauge quality. Because whether it’s brand lift, awareness, intent, consideration, or sales, using attention as your scorecard is the best identifier of value. It creates those outcomes & tells you the content is doing its job.
GA’s Bounce Rate
Like Time on Page, GA defines a bounce as someone that leaves a website before clicking onto a second page, which again, makes sense for web analysis, but not for content marketing.
Older methodologies like this do not capture people reading the content and then hitting the back button. These could make up 95% of an audience, which is a huge amount of lost data and insights.
Nudge Bounce Rate
Nudge’s definition of a bounce is what percentage of impressions left without engaging with the content.
This is helpful for content as a use case because as we’ve previously mentioned – if you land on a piece of content, actively engage with it, and then hit the back button, your content has done its job.
Nudge’s bounce rate helps marketers reveal any accidental clicks, e.g. if a large banner is covering a piece of content, causing people to accidentally click it. This happens, at least to me, all the time.
A disconnect in the user journey could also be the cause of a high bounce rate, e.g. if a creative is telling the user to click as they’ll receive X, but when they land on the content they actually end up seeing Y (hence why there’s a disconnect), so they instantly leave.
Data sampling
We don’t sample our data, traditional page analytics does. Nudge records a data point for each and every impression, which means you can be 100 percent certain that your insights ring true.
The traditional way generally makes sense for websites with high traffic volumes, but not for content marketing. Think about it this way, if your analysis was based on one-third of the actual impressions that visited your content, how can you be sure you are making a decision if you can’t see the full picture?
Real-time analytics
Nudge has eliminated latency, allowing you to back content that is performing well and allocate spend more efficiently. Time is money, and we’ve engineered a nimble experience for marketers that need real-time information.
Bot filtering
Nudge only shows you humans that are interacting with your content. We eliminate all bot traffic to give you a clear picture of content performance. Traditional page analytics doesn’t.
Industry benchmarks
Compared to Google Analytics, Nudge also offers up to date, industry-specific content benchmarks.
Because without benchmarks, a number is just a number. How else will you know if your content performance is good or bad?
This helps dramatically and answers two simple questions, should I create new content, promote it more or simply improve my existing content?
- If under benchmarks, focus on improving existing content.
- If you’re over benchmarks, focus on more content and distribution.
Social Posts
We have built-in social media reporting, which includes the ability to track impressions, clicks, shares, comments, and reactions across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from within your Nudge Dashboards.
Video
Video is an intriguing landscape. There are many solutions if you’re a vlogger, there are solutions if you embed video, but if you’re a modern video marketer your video often ends up in different places and various formats.
Nudge brought the first aggregate video solution that lets you unify all of the videos into one place and then gives you metrics so you can compare where you’re getting value.
Sentiment
Nudge offers sentiment analysis based on comments on social posts and videos, so you can measure whether your content has been received positively, negatively, or neutrally.
We do this by running the comments and reactions on videos or posts that are being tracked in your campaign through a natural language processor and analyzing that for sentiment.
To wrap
Site analytics are good for understanding the consumption and user journey of your website, from all types of pages. Content Analytics looks at the content first and seeks to understand its impact.
The two are intertwined, you can’t have one without the other (in most use cases). And this is very common; marketers today use multiple tools to deliver on their goals.
At the end of the day, the best platform is the one you use.
This is part of our Guide to Content Marketing Analytics.
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