Glossary

Content Analytics

Content analytics is the measurement and analysis of visitor traffic and engagement with published content, such as blogs, articles, and podcasts. Also known as content intelligence.

What is content analytics?

Content analytics, also known as content intelligence, is the measurement and analysis of visitor traffic and engagement with published content, such as blogs, articles, and podcasts. Content analytics metrics include pageviews, engaged time, social interactions (for example, Facebook shares and Twitter retweets), conversions, and acquisition sources.

Content analytics is valuable to everyone who creates content, including teams in content marketing, digital publishing, internal communications, SEO, and sales enablement.

Learn moreWhat is content analytics?

Why is content analytics important?

Content analytics enables teams to create and optimize their content strategy and ultimately understand the value their content provides. With content analytics, you can understand what content resonates with your audience, how different audience segments interact with your content, and learn what content converts and drives revenue.

How does content analytics work?

Most content analytics tools “tag” websites, apps, and other content properties with a snippet of code. Using the information provided by this snippet of code, they perform the analysis required to discover trends and insights.

What’s the difference between content analytics and web analytics?

Content analytics includes web analytics along with mobile app analytics, podcast analytics, social analytics, and other measures important to understanding content performance. Web analytics only focuses on small part of the content experience, the website, whereas content analytics focuses on the entire content experience.

Content analytics and Parse.ly

Parse.ly is a great content analytics provider. Parse.ly believes in instant content insights without any hassle. You can get started with Parse.ly today.

Data examples

Content analytics data

  • Content performance data
  • Audience data
  • Content groupings
  • Audience behavior
  • Acquisition data

Content performance data

  • number of visits
  • number of unique visitors
  • new vs. returning visitor ratio
  • engaged time — how long a visitor is engaged and active on a page
  • Facebook shares
  • Twitter tweets and interactions
  • Reddit posts
  • ranking Google search keywords
  • evergreen pages

Audience data examples

  • geographic location
  • what browser or device they are on (desktop vs. mobile)
  • Google search terms

Audience behavior data

  • most popular pages, real-time and historically
  • common visitor content journeys and paths
  • subscriber behavior vs. returning visitor behavior vs. new visitor behavior

Acquisition data

  • campaign medium breakdown, such as email vs. social media
  • traffic breakdowns:
    • which campaigns drive the most traffic
    • which websites referred the most traffic
    • which platforms drive the most traffic
    • which keyword searches drive visits

Content grouping data

  • authors
  • sections
  • tags
  • URL path
  • social media platform
  • device
  • marketing campaign

Content analytics software

  • Parse.ly
  • Google Analytics
  • Adobe Omniture