Analyzing content usage
I often get asked about simple ways to analyze website content - mostly by internal communications managers who are trying to improve the effectiveness of internal communications on their intranets.
Many commented they had no idea how effective their internal communication has been, which is delivered via their intranet in the forms of news items, Q&As, banners, streaming media, etc. Let’s call all of these content for simplicity.
Basic content usage analysis techniques that some of you might be familiar with from website analysis are transferable to intranets.
The objective is to understand how the content is being used on a site, and develop strategies, tactics for more effective content development and promotion.
The basic ingredients of the content usage analysis are:
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content viewed
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date of viewing
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duration of viewing
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person viewing the content
This information is captured in your webserver’s log files, or via your browser-based measurement solution, or could be even in your content management solution. Consult with your intranet manager / webmaster to find out how you can get hold of this information.
Glancing through a simple consolidated report produced from this information might provide amazing insights.
To produce the report, first decide on the reporting time interval such as monthly or weekly, and produce a report that lists the content items, total number of times they have been viewed and average viewing duration. You can do all of this in an access database or a spreadsheet. Focus on top few, up to 15 - 30 content items. Look at which content items are ranking higher in terms of page views, average duration of viewing. Look at the same data in different time intervals and in an aggregated way. Compare high ranking content items across time intervals to spot trends, similarities. Work out the ratio of visits vs. high ranking content items. This would tell you what percentage of people view your content. If there are spikes, and there would be some, try to understand what might have caused them.
When I do this with my clients, this is when I get the vows. They often say they had no idea that so few people were reading these news items…
To expand on this, include additional elements to your report and start segmenting it. For instance, you can analyze the same information by content type to see the relative popularity of different types. By promotion techniques to establish which ones are more attractive in bring people to the site. By department and location to understand the differences across these segments.
Producing content is expensive. Through simple content usage analysis, you can develop content closely aligned to the interests of your target audience and select suitable content promotional techniques that have been proven effective.
There are more advanced topics of content usage analysis such as:
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intent in viewing the content
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success in fulfilling the content objectives
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affinity / influence of content on other content items
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profiling users by interest areas
For example, in one of my recent projects, we have found out that the feature stories targeting executive managers were mostly read by job-seekers and we had to develop alternative techniques to reach executive managers with these feature stories.
Please note that there is a research disciple called “content analysis” which is completely different than “content usage analysis”. Content analysis deals with the quantitative analysis of texts, transcripts, and images used in various forms of communications.