Analysing content: beyond Google Analytics

Jonathan Richardson

ConsideredWords.com #SeriouslyLDN

Introduction

Recap: Google Analytics• Tells you about your users.

• For those of you unfamiliar, it can tell you:

• how people reach your site

• what search words they use to get there and on there

• how people are reaching your goals (eg clicking on buy, subscribing etc)

• what your most popular pages are and where they leave your site

• what people are doing on your page

Case study

Our team had a problemAt Defra (UK environment department) - how do we measure success?

How to convince others we had succeeded in improving content when Google Analytics fell short.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130221085659/http://www.defra.gov.uk/animal-diseases/a-z/bluetongue/ https://www.gov.uk/guidance/bluetongue

Add to what we measureIf Google Analytics is a measurement of output, then text analysis is a measure of input.

Know yourself v know your users.

National Gallery

1. Readability

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

8.5

2. Structural data• headlines - longer is better

• shorter content - shorter is generally better, at least on such a large sample

• readability - better content is easier to read

• keywords - GOV.UK has a style guide so what could we look for?

• user needs - rank those and see which pages had them and which don’t 

Make comparisonssimple

3. Combine• Combine with Google Analytics data to measure more,

eg:

• sub-headings use

• wording used on links

• readability and conversion rates

Combine withGoogle Analytics data

Results

• better user needs - set up a panel to review them

• improved heading use

• more visitors to the site

• improved sub-editing and training on what to look for

• improved testing

Summary• you can go beyond Google Analytics and combine it to

squeeze out more insight

• you can analyse your own content before you hit publish

• you can use it to investigate anomalies

• measure yourself

Final thoughts• you still needs an editor's eye

• not measure is going to be 'correct' and many are criticised (eg readability), but we use them knowing the limitations

• choose the measures you understand and can give you a simple output to interpret

• more of the right measures give you more ammunition and evidence for your content

Useful links• Readability:

• MS Word has this feature built in

• hemingwayapp.com offers this (and more)

• Python tools for scraping many documents

• Structural data

• your own eye/count

• Google Docs ImportXML

• scraping (Python, Perl, dedicated tools)

• Combining & visualising data:

• Google Sheets/Excel

• Google Fusion tables

• RAW

Questions?