Analyzing the impact of your content doesn’t need to be a costly endeavor. These nine analytic tools are free (or almost free). Identifying which ones help inform your content marketing goals, using them regularly, and adjusting your content so your results are aligned even better with your objectives will boost the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.
1. Google Analytics
The first, most important, and the ultimate tool that every website manager and marketing expert needs is Google Analytics. It’s among the best ways to get vital information about the performance of your website and the content with which your audience engages the most.
Google Analytics gives comprehensive demographic data about your audience. It measures engagement, helps you determine which topics are most liked, and identifies where the audience is coming from. You can rely on Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts, as well as your other custom campaigns.
Content Marketing Strategy: 3 Ways to Measure Success with Google Analytics
2. Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is equally important for measuring the results of your marketing efforts.
You can track keywords for which your website has ranked, the number and quality of backlinks, as well as the number of indexed and broken pages. You receive error messages and reports that can be used to improve your website’s performance and boost the effectiveness of your SEO efforts to reach the right audience.
3. Scoop.it
Free for personal use with the ability to upgrade, Scoop.it is a content curation and analytical tool used by over 1.2 million people and companies.
Basically, its own network publishes and shares your posts and plugs into any mainstream social tool (like Buffer).
Analytically, Scoop.it measures your views, visitors, comments, and shares per day, and integrates with Google Analytics. Its guide center offers product guides, case studies, demos, and FAQs on how to use this extensive tool.
4. Buffer
Buffer performs analytics on social media posts and shares. You can see what your most popular tweet or post was over time. Buffer’s free plan gives you access to information on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn, widening the scope for your social media outreach. You can pay for more extended metrics if desired.
The Buffer-provided statistics are valuable to determine if you’re hitting your social media goals and to identify where you can improve your outreach. You can easily tell whether you are getting the most from your social networking or if you need to do more to increase your audience. It also enables you to compare your average social media post’s performance to the average current post performance to see how well it did.
5. Followerwonk
Followerwonk analyzes a Twitter account’s followers and tweets to present a range of information useful for targeted marketing. The data is broken into charts that make for a simplified graphical representation. Followerwonk also allows you to figure out most-used hashtags for an account as well as optimal times for tweeting (when most of the followers are active on Twitter).
As a tool, Followerwonk is a statistics-based treasure trove. The insight provided by Followerwonk allows you to streamline posting times and use Twitter more effectively as a marketing channel. You can even research your competitors since Followerwonk is not limited to providing data for a single Twitter account.
6. Quintly
Although there is a pay option for Quintly, if you use it solely to manage up to three Facebook pages then this analytics train is free. It’s a good solution for small and medium enterprises that need an analytics solution but don’t have the budget for it.
Quintly’s straightforward analytics give some good insights on the trend of data and growth of a page.
You can review basic engagement metrics (such as “likes,” shares, etc.) at a glance through a clean and unobtrusive interface. You can add other pages to see how they match up against each other via graphical representations of their metrics.
7. Tweriod
How important is it to publish your social media updates at the right time? Curating content, when the biggest portion of your target audience is online, should boost engagement and help drive more traffic to your website.
Tweriod analyzes your tweets, their responses, and the times during which your followers seem to be most active on the social network. Tweriod will do a free analysis of your Twitter account and behavior to shed some light on your content marketing successes and mistakes.
8. Cyfe
Cyfe has been featured in a number of magazines as a useful tool to help businesses amalgamate their metrics in one handy dashboard. It can monitor multiple websites on multiple different platforms, allowing you to draw conclusions across the board. Through the app’s separation of dashboards into intuitive groups, you can focus on one specific element of your marketing plan, such as social media or finance.
For most businesses, the free options, which limit the number of dashboards you can view, should suffice. Even the premium option ($168/year) is reasonably priced given what Cyfe offers.
9. Addvocate
Addvocate gives you data about the people who share your content the most on the largest number of social channels. Such data can be invaluable for the creation of a strong and effective content creation and social media marketing team. Working with the top influencers and the individuals who are most committed to doing content marketing will drive up engagement and ultimately affect the online reputation of your company.
Addvocate also provides data about which content has been shared the most and which channels have produced the highest audience response. Apart from enabling enterprise sharing, this tool is great for figuring out what the audience wants and which social network is the best one for reaching the right crowd.
Conclusion
Smart content marketing is data-based and data-driven. A lot of data can be accessed using these free (or low-cost) tools to help you make your campaigns more focused and more effective.
There is one thing to remember, however. Good content marketing starts with well-written, unique, and engaging content. Tools cannot help if you’re missing this foundation.
Looking for more cool tools? Check out these 7 tools to improve productivity or these 6 free tools to help with keyword research.
Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo, via pixabay.com
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).