As a digital publisher, it's important to understand how analytics can help inform your content creation process. By using analytics, you can get a better understanding of what your audience is looking for and tailor your content to meet their needs and interests.

Key steps There are several key steps you can take to use analytics to inform your content creation process:

1. Identifying goals and long term expectations Before embarking on any content creation process, it's important to identify your goals and long term expectations. This will help you create a clear plan and strategy for your content, and ensure that it aligns with your overall business goals.

To do this, start by considering what you want to achieve with your content. Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website, or generate more leads? Once you have identified your goals, you can then set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives for your content. This will help you track and measure the success of your content, and make any necessary adjustments to your strategy.

2. Find a tool Set up analytics tracking on your website or app. The first step in using analytics to inform your content creation process is to set up tracking on your website or app. This will allow you to collect data on how your audience is interacting with your content. Spiny is a tool that provides insights into your performance, but it will use AI and human expertise to ensure digital publishers get the best recommendations on how to achieve their goals.

3. Identify KPIs Identify your key performance indicators (KPIs). Once you have analytics tracking in place, the next step is to identify the metrics that are most important to your business. These are known as your key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, as a digital publisher, your KPIs might include pageviews, time on site, and bounce rate.

However, from our experience it is clear that the best KPIs to focus on are revenue based e.g. eCPMs and RPMs. These revenue based KPIs can be broken down by article, traffic source, authour and more in Spiny, ultimately helping you focus your content strategy on the thing most important to your business, revenue.

4. Understand audience Use analytics to understand your audience. By analyzing your analytics data, you can get a better understanding of who your audience is and what they are looking for. For example, you can use tools like Spiny.ai to see which sources are driving traffic to your website, what types of devices your audience is using, and what content is most popular with your audience.

5. Use analytics to identify trends and patterns. By looking at your analytics data over time, you can identify trends and patterns in your audience's behavior. For example, you might notice that certain types of content are consistently more popular than others, or that your audience is more engaged on certain days of the week. By understanding these trends and patterns, you can tailor your content strategy to better meet the needs and interests of your audience.

6. Share data with team Once you have identified your goals, accessed the information needed and have a clear vision of what your audience is looking for, it's important to share this information with your team members. This will help everyone understand the purpose and direction of your content, and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. To do this, create a shared document or project management tool where team members can access and update the data. For example, with Spiny.ai all team members can access necessary data, by looking at the dashboard that illustrates the data and metrics in a concise and understandable way. This will allow everyone to see the latest information, make sure that everyone is on the same page and working todards the same goals.

7. Optimize content Use analytics to test and optimize your content. Once you have a good understanding of your audience and their behavior, you can use analytics to test and optimize your content. For example, you might try publishing different types of content at different times of day to see which performs best, or experiment with different headlines and images to see which ones are most effective at driving engagement.

8. Hold meetings Regular meetings are an important part of any content creation process. They provide an opportunity for team members to discuss the data, share ideas, and identify any challenges or opportunities. It’s not enough to just optimize your content and leave it at that. Digital publishers and their team need to hold these meeting to make sure that the findings are shared and new ideas and goals are discussed.

To hold effective meetings, start by setting an agenda and sending it out to team members beforehand. This will help everyone prepare, and ensure that the meeting stays on track. During the meeting, encourage open discussion and collaboration, and make sure to take notes and follow up on any action items. Carry out surveys with existing customers

9. Carrying out surveys with your existing customers is a great way to gain first-hand feedback on how they like your service or product. This can help you understand their needs and preferences, and identify any areas where you can improve.

To conduct a survey, start by identifying the key questions you want to ask. These should be focused on the areas that you want to improve, and should be relevant

Conclusion Overall, using analytics to inform your content creation process is a crucial step in ensuring the success of your digital publishing efforts. By regularly monitoring and analyzing data such as eCPMs, RPMs, audience demographics, engagement levels, and traffic sources, you can gain valuable insights into what resonates with your audience and tailor your content accordingly. This, in turn, can help you attract and retain a loyal reader base, as well as drive revenue through targeted advertising and sponsorships. By adopting a data-driven approach to content creation, digital publishers can stay ahead of the curve and deliver the most engaging and relevant content to their audiences.

At Spiny we go a step further by combining relevant analytics with AI to produce intelligent reccomendations that can boost your business, with no data work needed from you. If you would like to find out more, click the link below to book in a demo today.