Leveraging Enterprise Content Engagement Analytics to Drive Measurable Outcomes

For years, content management systems (CMSes) were viewed as asset creation tools and storage repositories. Your content creators input content, and those content assets become destinations to attract specific demographic targets. More content increased the surface area for attracting the right visitors.

Historically, there’s been a disconnect between hitting publish and demonstrating contributions to revenue generation. The CMS is where you work, but your work is evaluated in a separate analytics dashboard. 

Often, that analysis lags by weeks, which makes it feel like a post-mortem instead of an opportunity to optimize. If your team is like most content teams, you also have numerous new requests on your plate, making it challenging to find time to use analytics to optimize existing content, which would only exacerbate the backlog.

With constant scrutiny of content budgets, there’s a growing need to demonstrate the value of content as a revenue driver rather than a cost center. This means being able to measure engagement outcomes beyond basic pageviews and bounce rates. Engagement metrics help you understand outcomes like:

• Engaged time or session duration to understand which content resonates and draws users in.
• Recirculation rate or depth of visit to know which content leads visitors to dig deeper.
• Conversion events, which include lead generation and sales, but could also be other conversions like a newsletter subscription or white paper download (among others).
• Return visits to understand which content increases trust and brings users back for a future relationship.

To move the needle on these key metrics, organizations need to adopt a conversion-driven content strategy by leveraging enterprise content engagement analytics.

Engagement starts with analytics

There was a time when measuring content performance yielded very low-fidelity insights into your users. You examined the number of views a piece of content received and whether visitors proceeded to view additional content or left immediately after encountering the first asset. 

But pageviews and bounce rate never served to provide a complete picture, and in today’s environment, they are no longer an effective way to understand your customers.

A full understanding of content engagement requires a deeper set of analytics. Going beyond pageviews, you need to understand things like:

• Engaged time to know what people are spending time with.
• Recirculation rate to understand which content keeps people on your site.
• Audience Segments to understand the difference between readers, customers, and subscribers.
• Content journeys for a clear picture of how users move through your site.
• Multi-touch attribution for a better understanding of which sources lead users to the conversions you track by properly crediting all touchpoints involved.

This more comprehensive picture provides a clear understanding of how website visitors engage with your content and what moves the needle.

When your CMS and content analytics are integrated, you can see the data associated with an individual content asset without needing to connect the dots between multiple tools. Analytics letting you know which content is delivering your desired engagement outcomes are right there, associated with everything you publish. On the flip side, you can also quickly see which items didn’t work. For WordPress VIP customers, Pares.ly provides that view.

Behavioral segmentation and personalization at scale

Classic user segmentation focused on common attributes of a set of users, like job title, income level, education, gender, and age, among others.

Behavioral segmentation clusters users by their interaction patterns. Knowing how users interact provides a deeper understanding. Imagine finding a group of users who: 

• Interact with the same content, which provides a common entry point for engagement.
• Follow a similar content journey, demonstrating a common curiosity to understand more, following a similar pathway.
• Convert on the same conversion events, showing a strong signal that you want to target more users like this cohort.

Personalization drives even deeper engagement. When you tailor content based on what you know about a user, you reinforce the idea that you understand the user’s needs. AI is increasingly able to identify user characteristics and adapt an experience as the user reveals more about themself. 

However, even without AI, signals such as where a session originated or what a user is looking for can be used to personalize their experience as they navigate your site. Something as simple as recognizing that someone is from your customer’s marketing team and not their finance team, because you had a previous engagement with them, provides the opportunity to recommend content that’s relevant to them.

This is a simplistic example, but imagine you know that 80% of users who:

• Clicked on a specific LinkedIn post…
• Also read a specific page on your website…
• Causing them to immediately request a whitepaper…
• And ultimately submit a request for a product demo at 4 PM on Wednesday.

Personalizing the experience for each new user who reaches the whitepaper step by proactively suggesting a product demo around 4pm on Wednesday has the potential to further engage some of that remaining 20%.

Enterprise CMS capabilities that support engagement outcomes

An enterprise CMS typically includes a number of capabilities that boost engagement outcomes. Integrated analytics, like Parse.ly in the case of WordPress VIP, provide near real-time engagement data to editorial teams. 

Content recommendations suggest the most relevant related content for the new asset you are publishing. 

Smart linking within the editor simplifies adding related content to a new content asset. It also helps boost engagement for new content by identifying related high-performing older content and linking to the new content automatically.

These features, coupled with performance data integrated throughout the CMS, make it easier to be strategic about authoring additional content designed to boost engagement and conversions.

Building a conversion-driven content strategy

One of the keys to moving toward outcome-driven content is to align your team around a conversion-driven content strategy. Building a strategy involves several steps.

Start by auditing your existing content for outcome-based impacts. Look beyond the content that is getting engagement and assess whether that engagement is resulting in conversions. With Parse.ly, you can configure conversion events to simplify understanding the quality of engagement.

Once you’ve identified low conversion content, you need to understand what needs to change. Use engagement data to answer questions like: 

• Should you be recommending a different next action to the user? 
• Does that next action exist in your content library or do you need to create it? 
• Or is the content truly a dead end?

Integrating the understanding from behavioral segmentation will also help clarify how to proceed with a specific content asset.

Use the learnings from your content audit to create a playbook for publishing new content. With each new asset, start by identifying the metric you want to influence once you hit publish. The exact goals will be slightly different for every organization.

Finally, align around a single source of truth. If some of the team is using one analytics tool and others are using different tools, there will be disagreements around how outcomes are being measured.

Bridging CMS, analytics, and engagement value

It is tempting to default to only thinking of your CMS as the publish tool. But the best CMS is a customer engagement outcomes engine, where both publishing and analyzing outcomes take place side-by-side. 

When you have that integrated feedback loop, you can start demonstrating the value of content as an asset to your organization, rather than just something that results in discussions about its cost. Given the tendency of organizations to restrict content budgets, it could be a stretch to say a CMS that provides engagement outcomes will help you increase your budget, but the data can certainly help make a stronger case.

Tools like WordPress VIP and integrated Parse.ly analytics provide a foundation for building an engagement-driven content strategy. Parse.ly Journeys help uncover behavioral segments as users engage with your content. Content Intelligence baked into the WordPress VIP experience makes implementing your engagement strategy easier.

As the saying goes, you can’t grow what you don’t measure. Aligning your content engagement metrics to business-driven outcomes provides a clear path to improving content performance.