Predictive Analytics: When Content Marketers Start Looking Forward Instead of Back Posted on : May 05 - 2015

Savvy content marketers pay close attention to analytics and measure much of what they do. They want to know, for example, how many page views they’ve generated, what the open and click through rates of their most recent newsletter were, and often most important of all, how many prospects they’ve converted into leads. That’s all well and good, but if you reread that last sentence closely you’ll see that it reveals a fundamental limitation. Here’s a hint: look at what tense we’ve used to construct the sentence.

The reality is that today’s analytics often offer only a rearview mirror’s look at how your content performed in the past.

Make no mistake, there’s certainly tremendous value in looking back at past performance data across a number of metrics, including but not limited to:

Sessions

New vs. returning users

Page views

Time on page

Traffic sources

Bounce rate

Social impressions

Conversion rates

Tracking and analyzing metrics like these is an important exercise that content marketers should do regularly. Getting into the discipline of doing so is helpful not only to facilitate reporting and demonstrate your ROI, but also to inform your strategy. By reviewing performance metrics over time, you can identify trends, pinpoint specific tactics that do and don’t work, and ultimately form hypotheses about what you could do differently to get a better result. View more