The following guest post was written by Mike Petroff, digital content strategist, Harvard University. Content strategy typically starts with planning for and managing content on your own website. Words, images, videos, and other elements all fit within your carefully constructed design. But, what happens when people discover your content in spaces like Facebook and Twitter? How can we prepare our content to visually stand out when it … [Read more...]
Web Focus Groups: Know Your Users, Know Your Content
March 12, 2013 by
For most organizations, the go-to method of content analysis is web analytics. People love numbers: 2,000 inquiries, 500 sign-ups — oh, baby! Unfortunately, these numbers don't tell the whole story, and if we base our content strategy on quantitative data alone, we're missing a big piece of the content measurement puzzle. Web analytics is great at answering "What?" What pages do people view on our website? What actions do they take? … [Read more...]
Tracking Content Goals With Web Analytics
November 27, 2012 by
Okay, now that you're up to speed on a goal-driven approach to web analytics for content analysis, let's look under the hood of Google Analytics to see how you can track those killer success metrics (KPIs) you defined. There are many important steps involved in configuring Google Analytics — or any other web analytics tool — to properly record, organize and label data. However, defining your analytics goals is probably the single most important … [Read more...]
Planning for Homepage Content
November 26, 2012 by
If there’s one thing that the infamous XKCD university homepage comic reminded us, it’s that we need to strike a better balance between tasks and messaging on our homepages. And if there’s one thing that the commentary stemming from that comic reminded us, it’s that our homepage is one of the most political entities we will ever manage, and the solutions don’t come easy. But if you think about, there really is no separate homepage strategy, is … [Read more...]
A Web Analytics Framework for Content Analysis
November 8, 2012 by
Last month we kicked off a series of posts on web analytics by discussing the value of web analytics for content measurement. So, now that you're on board with adding web analytics to your content measurement toolkit (right?), let's talk about making use of it. Author Lou Rosenfeld describes two approaches to using web analytics: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down analytics is when you start with a narrow set of goals to identify a larger set … [Read more...]