How to create great content without analytics

Web content and analytics are to many a back box. You know that you need great content to make your site convert. As much as 95% of all traffic is lost on users that never convert into customers.

So, making your site content work well for you can very well be the most vital part of making your website perform. When we talk about content we mean all elements that can be seen on your site. Like text, pictures and video.

So how can we then claim that analytics is not important to create great content? You would say that analytics is the way we measure the success of what we are producing. So why not measure it so know how you can improve it?

We will get back to that question later. For now, we will just leave you with a claim that a great deal of common sense can take you a long way. Common sense and some core analytics finding can place you in a sweet spot where you know that your content is properly working as it should.

Before we get to that part, we need to start with the purpose of your site and the content that you create on it.

The most important fact, when it comes to content is that nothing on your site is more important than your content. Your users will accept a relatively poorly designed website with a navigation that does not work well if you have great content. But not the other way around. The best looking and most intuitive site will never succeed if the quality of the content is not relevant to the user. They will leave, never to come back.

So, now you might say.: Yes, that is a very lovely postulate. But it is true? And do you have data to back this claim up? And our answer will be yes we have.

First, let´s start with why your users visited your site in the first place. They did so because they had a problem that they needed a solution for. They might have started their search for this problem on Google. They might have known your brand and typed in your site URL. No matter what they were looking for, they search for a solution. This solution could be a product, information or entertainment. There is always a reason for a site visit and it can always be linked to a search for a question.

This fact is the reason why your content is always the most important part of your site. Because of the answer to their question has almost everything to you with your content. This does not mean that a nice site does not sell, or that a great designed user flow will not do miracles for your business. But they will always be secondary to the performance of your content.

Hopefully, this makes sense to you. That your content is what drives user users to visit your site. Just like it is the case with the content of this article.

There are two purposes of this article that you read now. One is to create a fascinating and sharable article that let you – the reader – into the word of how to work with content om a site. The idea is to share my experience and knowledge of the topic in a way that you find interesting. This will make you stay longer on this site and perhaps also make you interested in the other elements that we have on it.

And this brings us to the real purpose of this text, and that is to sell our product to you. The concept is this. The article has been designed to help you answer the question that potential users of our solution might have. Should I do some analytics of my content? You searched for it and ended up on this page.

Like many others, you search for answers, find an interesting article (this one) and reads it. And perhaps you then decide that you want to know more on who made it. So you browse around on the page, You look at the links in the box next to this text. This will convince you that Canecto is a trustworthy company that knows how to do web analytics. You might also click on my picture to see if I look like an honest person that you would be associated with.

If all these factors fall out to Canectos advantage, then you might browse into to product part of the site, and learn about our product. It might be that it is just what you are looking for, and then you sing up for a trial version of our product. Success for Canecto, and hopefully for you too, if you like the product. You start using it and tells your friends about it.

All this has been driven by your interaction with the content on this site. And now we are back to the analytics part. Canecto´s strategic purpose with this article is for you to be aware of our product. If we were to measure this, then what can we do so it makes sense to us?

Or lets put it in another context. How much of what we what you to do has to do with common sense? With my ability to write appealing content? Pretty much everything. Right. Of cause, we can measure how many that have seen this page that eventually ends up using our product. And we can measure if the call to actions is placed at a logical part of the page.

But all those factors are not the core factors. It is not the placement of a button that convinces you to sign up for Canecto or not. You will only do so if you are convicted that Canecto is a trustworthy partner and if the product just happened to be something that you would be open for trying out right not. If not then a sales will never happen, since this is statistically will be the last time you visit Canecto.com – if you do not sign up right now.

And now we get back to the analytics part because analytics is not a goal; it is a new of measuring what is essential to your business.

What you read now is the first version of this article. I will probably go back in two to three months to check the performance of this article. I can get data that tells me if it performs well or not. But now why it does or does not. I would have to be creative, perhaps make the text longer or shorter. Move some sections, ad pictures or a video. All of this could have an impact on the performance of the article. But as you can see they are all related to the editorial quality of this article. And this is not measurable in web analytics terms.

So what you need is to improve on your site is not more analytics data. It is (perhaps) better content and a process, or method to follow up on what you have created. https://www.youtube.com/embed/D7nmHqCkvB0?feature=oembed