One of the best ways to find new story angles—and streamline your content creation process—is to study your website’s KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, the quantifiable and actionable metrics that tell you all about your business.

You know what they are: The number of website visitors, unique visitors, and returning visitors to your site, the time spent on a page, the bounce rate, and so on. There are multiple KPIs to pay attention to for various reasons.

To find new story angles and optimize your content creation, keep tabs on these important KPIs:

Blog Post Unique Visits

The most popular posts in your blog section can tell you a lot. But first, how do you tell what’s popular? Typically, you pay attention to the number of visits each blog post receives, plus the percentage of returning readers, and the time spent on each post (two to three minutes on a page is a usually a good sign the user is engaged). These metrics are important for measuring user engagement and whether your posts remain relevant. Identify those metrics, and you’ll find the most popular blog articles on your site.  

The next step? See if there are any recurring themes in your content. If your popular posts are about more generalized topics, then you can focus your next few articles into breaking each topic down into a three- or five-part in-depth series. If your popular posts are about the features of a product, then you can focus the next few articles on each specific aspect of that product.

Alternatively, you can repurpose all this more detailed, granular content into short form videos or podcasts that visitors can download. Which brings us to…  

Number of Content Downloads

Annual reports, ebooks, research reports are typically downloaded as multi-page PDF files after visitors fill out a conversion page form. Podcasts are almost always downloaded as MP3 files, unless they’re streamed from subscribe to through an app. By counting your most-downloaded content you can figure out whether you should create more of the same or move onto new ideas.

For example, let’s say your podcast episode about the challenges healthcare clinics face when it comes to testing new drugs has proven incredibly popular with thousands of downloads. Your next series of episodes can be about each possible solution for those clinics. Basically, use each popular download’s topic as the jumping-off point for the next batch of content.  

Your Social Shares, Engagements, and Referrals

Besides downloads and website traffic, your social media metrics will tell you which direction your content should take. Link clicks, profile visits, likes, and shares show whether you have a large reach and high engagement with users. If you’re getting a lot of retweets and shares, then your reach is expanding. If you’re getting a lot of conversations in your tweets and LinkedIn posts, then your audience is engaged. You can leverage all this engagement in a variety of ways.

One idea: Gather the best tweets about a product launch or industry issue and compile them into a blog post. That way, if anyone wants to refer to a specific conversation you can point them to that blog post. You can also interview the users who engage with you most. What do they like about your brand? What do they dislike? This kind of testimonial can increase your reputation as an honest and outgoing brand unafraid to talk with its customers. Do you engage with other brands over social media? Team up with that organization for a series of video, a podcast, or a co-branded ebook or event.

There are multiple new story angles and opportunities that you can find by spending time reviewing your KPIs. Study them and you won’t find yourself at a loss for when the next blog or pod episode is due.

Need some new ideas for your blog? Curious about KPIs? Or want to start your own content creation strategy? Get in touch with us for a few more tips.

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