7 ways to listen to your data and transform your content strategy

Photo credit: Pixabay.

I switched to digital publishing after five years of working in book publishing. I have now been working on digital content for the past three years. This article is meant to highlight a few things that I had to learn (and learn fast) in order for me to be successful in my digital publishing career.

The challenge

I had targets when I was still a book editor. There was a certain sales volume (and profit margin) thsaat I needed to secure for every book I commissioned and/or edited.

The challenge with being a digital content editor was completely different. The target was month-on-month percentage growth of monthly active users (MAUs). In a content startup, demonstrable user growth is crucial for fundraising. And since our revenue model was native advertising, the number of users was what we were selling to our clients to generate business.

In the first couple of months of being in digital publishing, I focused on setting up editorial processes and workflows to streamline content production. I figured that if the team got more efficient at ideating and writing, we’d be able to publish more stories, and having more stories would mean more page views and users.

But it didn’t work out like that. We published more stories, but our page views and users still flatlined. I needed to figure out how to publish better, not just more. And understanding the granular data from a digital content platform was key to that. I needed to radically change the way I used data to inform my editorial strategy.

So, here’s what I learned.

Lesson 1: Embrace the beast aka your analytics dashboard

I had been shying away from exploring anything other than the Overview tab on Google Analytics simply because it seemed, well, complicated. That was stupid. Whatever analytics tool you have access to, take the time to familiarize yourself with it. If looking at it by yourself isn’t helping, get someone else who has been using the tool to help you.

You can even use online tutorials to make your life easier. Google, for instance, provides online courses in using Google Analytics. You might also want to bookmark this comprehensive article from Moz.

Don’t just look at your topline numbers such as page views and users. There are other signals that your users are sending to you: bounce rate, device information, referrers, session duration, and so much more. Learn to read those numbers and see what they are telling you.

Lesson 2: Segment your traffic to see what’s driving your numbers

One of the first things I looked at was device information. Ninety percent of our total page views came from mobile users. It meant that I had to make sure that the majority of our stories were mobile-friendly. This is one way data really made a difference in our editorial strategy.

We were publishing a lot of lists with GIFs because popular wisdom dictated that people wanted to read visual stories rather than boring chunks of text. However, the fact that people were primarily reading on mobile—with 3G network or even, perhaps, 2G back in 2014—meant that those stories had incredibly slow loading time. People were probably frustrated with looking at a blank page for several seconds while the story loaded, and therefore disinterested in reading another story.

We made a simple change. We put an outer limit to the size of a GIF (

Lesson 3: Optimize for your top referrers

If you’re not running paid campaigns, chances are that the majority of your page views are coming from either social channels or search, especially if you’re doing non-news content. (Of course, you also have a certain percentage of direct views from people arriving directly to your homepage, but this depends largely on how well-established your brand is.) Keep looking at your referring domains and optimize your content for them.

Lesson 4: Write for your reader

Lesson 5: Spend time on session details

Lesson 6: Track all your experiments

Lesson 7: Turn your whole team into a data-lovin’ one!

In summary