Analytics and metrics help marketers gain insights into the health and the performance of their strategies.
In this context, content marketing is an area that requires special attention.
Content is often the foundation of digital marketing, yet it can be hard to directly track the impact that a content marketing strategy has on an overall digital marketing program.
In order to get the most out of content marketing analytics, you need to have the right tool for your brand and your business goals.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what content marketing analytics is and its benefits before taking a deep dive into the 21 best content marketing analytics tools that your brand can pick from.
What is Content Marketing Analytics?
Content marketing analytics is the tracking and reporting of key content metrics that impact your content and digital strategies.
It helps you measure the scope of your content and understand the effects it has on meeting different marketing goals and achieving desired outcomes.
At the core of content marketing analytics are the key performance indicators or KPIs that will determine if your content is reaching your target goals.
These KPIs are the specific metrics that relate to your goals, and picking which KPIs you want to include in your content marketing analytics reports will help you learn the measurable impacts of your content strategy.
For example, if you started the year with the goal of increasing your blog subscribers by 30%, then your social media metrics probably aren’t going to be as important to track or include in reports.
Content marketing analytics can help your organization answer important questions about your content strategy, such as:
- How can we tell if our audiences are interacting with the content we produce?
- Who is reading our content?
- Which form of content produces the best results?
- How often do people bounce from our blog or website pages?
- Which messages are resonating the strongest with our audience?
- How can we narrow down the best days and times for publishing new content?
- How much of our content is being read and how much is being skipped?
- How can we tell if our content strategy is driving conversions and bringing in leads?
- How can we find gaps in our content marketing strategies?
The Benefits of Content Marketing Analytics
Content marketing analytics is what drives the decisions you make to improve your content marketing strategy.
When you don’t understand the largest impact that your content strategy is having on your end goals, you won’t understand what areas need improving or be able to identify gaps in your program.
When you have strong content marketing analytics that help you discover the results of your content strategy, you can improve your content marketing efforts and create a better digital marketing approach for your brand.
Improved content marketing tactics have many benefits for your business, such as:
- Increased brand awareness.
- Audiences that stick around.
- Higher SERP rankings and SEO performance.
- Better performance across your content channels.
- More industry authority and reliability as a thought leader.
- Improved lead generation and conversion funnels.
- Brand advocates and loyal return customers.
Content marketing analytics also help you gain a better understanding of how your digital marketing strategies are working as a whole.
While content is only a part of a well-rounded digital marketing program, it serves as the foundation of your planning and plays a key role in other initiatives like advertising and SEO.
When you can learn more about your entire digital marketing program, you can gain additional benefits for your brand, such as:
- Using data visualization to see across your organization.
- A full view of your customer behavior and habits across channels.
- Personalizing experiences for your customers with improved customer journeys.
- Discovering better uses for your data.
- Engagement strategies for real-time interactions with customers.
- Becoming more effective and able to make proactive decisions.
- Better sales, advertising, and social media strategies.
21 Best Content Marketing Analytics Tools
Now that you understand the value that content marketing analytics can bring to your organization, let’s take a look at some of the different tools that can help you get the most out of your data and metrics.
While these are the 21 best tools on the market, each one is slightly different in cost, scope, and the types of data and reports that are generated.
Before picking the tool that will be right for your business, it’s important to define your content marketing end goals so you know which tool is the best fit for your brand and strategies.
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the best platforms for content marketing analytics. It has a user-friendly dashboard and can pull real-time data and insights into customized reports for your team.
The tool can trigger touchpoints, track custom interactions, and monitor customer behavior to tell when a conversion might be possible.
You can also create custom reports and use attribution reporting to track all customer interactions to specific records and events.
2. Google Analytics
As one of the biggest content marketing analytics tools, Google Analytics gives you the ability to integrate your content analytics with all other aspects of your Google business tools.
This can help you organize all your data in a single location and compare your content marketing performance with the other parts of your business. Unlock the full potential of Google Analytics with our free guide.
3. Moz
Moz is a household name in SEO analytics, but the platform also extends to your content marketing performance.
It helps you learn how your content strategy is affecting your SEO and can help you discover important keywords, topics, or ideas to cover in your content planning. It also tracks your SERP results and gives detailed reports.
4. SEMrush
Similarly to Moz, SEMrush is a great tool for tracking your SEO and keyword performance, especially in comparison to your competitors.
It allows you to monitor brand mentions and gives you cross-channel tools to look at your content strategy across your platforms and channels.
5. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps you visualize real-time marketing trends by analyzing your content and finding ways to tailor it to specific audiences.
This can help you understand customer concerns and identify trends to discuss in your content strategy. You can also use BuzzSumo to customize your feed and reports.
6. Databox
This content marketing analytics tool combines many key aspects of your overall digital marketing program into a single tool, allowing you to understand the success of your strategies from a single location.
Databox also provides real-time reporting and organizing data from across your business in one tool.
7. Demand Sage
Demand Sage helps you move your important content marketing analytics reports from HubSpot to Google Sheets to help you share your insights and create editable reports.
This also allows you to organize your spreadsheets however you want and create specific reports that match your exact business goals and content marketing performance outcomes.
8. Plecto
Plecto is a content marketing analytics tool that helps you measure your goals and target outcomes with dashboards and different visualization tools.
This helps you to filter your data and display it in the most helpful ways that match your organization’s needs.
You can also use Plecto to create custom reports and track your employee’s engagement with internal reports.
9. Adverity
Adverity is the best tool available for those interested in data-driven decision-making and marketing.
This allows you to take data from hundreds of sources and compile it into a single tool that then organizes, analyses, and identifies key data points.
You can use those insights to find areas of improvement, current strengths, and new opportunities.
10. Grow.com
Grow.com is a business intelligence platform that helps you import and transform your business data that comes from various sources into a single report dashboard.
This helps you to organize your many different data points and specify which metrics matter to your goals and outcomes. Then you can sort and build customer reports and charts to help visualize your data in the best ways possible.
11. Supermetrics
In the same vein as Demand Sage, Supermetrics is a content analytics tool that helps you display your data and analytics results in easily shareable formats by using Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Excel, or Snowflake platforms.
This allows you to visualize your data in the right format that makes sense for your brand and filter data into specific analytics reports.
12. Kissmetrics
This content analytics tool helps you discover more about your customer engagements by providing you with details about audience interactions on your website, apps, and social platforms.
This helps you understand your audience segments and allows you to more accurately map customer journeys and improve your personalization strategies to create happy returning customers for your brand.
13. Quintly
Quintly is a tool that helps you track the content performance on your social media platforms.
Using customizable metrics and analyzing social media marketing strategies, Quintly can help you gain important details of your marketing campaigns and provides actionable insights for improving social media performance.
14. Hotjar
This is a great content marketing analytics tool for tracking customer visits and using data visualization in the form of heat maps to track specific customer movement on your pages.
This allows you to see exactly where your customers spend time on your site and helps you see which buttons or offers get the most interest and conversions.
15. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb helps you understand where your current content marketing performance ranks in comparison to industry standards for similar businesses and competitors.
This can be useful for determining how you stand compared to key business competitors and gives you specific insights into beating the competition.
16. Buffer
Buffer is a great tool for marketers who want to understand detailed channel performance and create customized reports for their content marketing analytics predetermined KPIs.
This allows you to build reports based on your specific goals and customize your metrics. You can also view performance on a channel dashboard and gain customer demographic data.
17. Cyfe
Cyfe is a content marketing analytics tool and business software solution that helps you track all your KPIs and important data in a singular location.
You can customize your report dashboard and track different metrics and KPIs in real-time and add extra plug-ins and widgets to increase visibility on your channels.
18. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a cloud-based content marketing analytics tool that helps you track website performance and learn about different keyword rankings and performance on your web pages.
You can also create audits and track page rankings.
19. Oribi
This content marketing analytics tool helps you identify actionable marketing and content insights to make better business decisions.
You can analyze your marketing funnels to find performance gaps and learn which of your channels is bringing in the best conversion.
20. Clicky
Clicky tracks user behavior and helps you identify key points in the customer’s journey by tying it to real-time traffic metrics.
It also provides heat maps and a user-friendly interface to view your analytics and results.
21. Whatagraph
Whatagraph is a multifaceted platform that offers solutions tailored to Google Analytics 4, facilitating the creation, automation, and sharing of reports. With features allowing users to connect GA4 data with other data sources seamlessly, Whatagraph provides a comprehensive view of marketing performance. Its integrated GA4 reporting tool ensures that clients have up-to-date access through automated sharing and live links, making GA4 data analysis easier for agencies and marketers focused on tracking their digital KPIs efficiently.
Wrap Up
Content is the cornerstone of a successful digital marketing program, and having the right tool on your belt to get the best content marketing analytics is important.
Without the right software or program at your side, you can miss out on the impact of your content and lose track of important insights that can help you while planning for the future.
Planning your content strategy depends on many different factors.
In order to truly grasp the full picture of your marketing strategy, you need to understand the maturity of your content and how it fits into a larger long-term strategy.
If you are interested in learning more about the maturity of your marketing stack, then check out our free marketing stack assessment!
This will help you determine if there are any gaps in your tool stack or marketing strategy and give you a customized report with technology suggestions and recommendations to improve your digital strategy and tool stack.
