This article was written by Stewart Robinson as part of the 'Content Creation Special' with InPublishing
Q: What is best practice?
A: Having worked in both full church and state style publishers and management led publishers, the one thing that has rung true throughout both types is the need for editorial teams to know what is ringing a bell for customers. Whether this content is for or from a commercial sponsor or it’s classic newsroom content being delivered digitally — audience engagement is the most important thing.
We have moved on from publishing a piece and only really caring about the end sales of an issue, to a world in which we can know which single made the entire curated album worth buying, if at all; as well as where the end user came from and why. This knowledge can be incredibly powerful for content when gleaned effectively and put to work against your plans to generate more.
Content strategy is such a broad topic so this piece will focus on how to use your audience habits to steer it in a truly data-driven way, whether that content is purely for end readers or serving a commercial need as well. We like to dig deeper so we can know precisely what the audience is doing and why; not work against what we think they’re doing or legacy assumptions of what might have worked in the past.
For commercial or sponsored content, reporting usage, visibility and who has read the piece are often required as standard. But outside of this, there is a need to deeply understand what topics, underlying themes, campaigns and even basic tags are driving results for our brands. Collating all of this data along the way builds a super clear and useful picture for both internal planning and commercial delivery.
It is obvious that reacting to well performing content and trying to emulate its success is a good idea. What is less obvious is why that content did well. In traditional analytical settings, you know which piece did well but you won’t automatically know why or from what areas this content sprung to life. By setting up analytic tools within your CMS to track and analyse the metadata, you start to understand the trends within the content that consistently bring value to your users and, of course, your business.
Best practice on using your audience to steer your content strategy is to look beyond the basic analytics that you normally get and jump into knowing the habits of tags and topics within your content. Get to the point where you can understand which pieces get the best results from your audience.
Additionally, in commercial content settings where you are producing content for commercial partners, having these tracking and analytics tools becomes part of the delivery of results for clients as you’ll be providing audience, number of viewers, what they read about and how as part of your premium sponsored offering.
Do this by having analytics from tagging content by both the public tags and categories that you use as standard as well as hidden tags, themes and categories that can classify your content, link it back to a campaign or a customer and drive real value from knowing who has consumed it.
Q: What does outstanding performance look like?
A: Understanding individual pieces that are delivering well to audiences — even if that audience is a commercial partner — is easy now and is the absolute base level of content analytics you need to shape your content strategy.
To achieve outstanding performance though, we need to move above the individual content piece to the tags and topics that allow you to really understand the value that customers and readers take from your titles.
All publishers have some way of tagging and storing content within topics but only the outstanding ones have shadow or hidden taxonomies that allow content to be tracked against a collection of terms that are hidden from the reader but allow in-depth, truly actionable research to take place against them.
Even simple actions such as flagging content that has been the leader on a newsletter or attaching a commercial sponsor to an article allows tracking of what is doing well against a set of terms that are not shown to the customer consuming the content. Having these additional tags set against content allows a myriad of opportunities to see what drives growth across your portfolio.
Three top tips
- Fine tune! Always have precise, granular analytics tracking on your content. Don’t settle for top-level data, get super specific.
- Analyse your content against your tags, topics, and custom / hidden terms to highlight the performance of the content groupings for customers and readers. Build a complete and actionable picture.
- Utilise hidden tags to analyse the events that have occurred throughout the journey to and through the content to align with content and commercial strategies. Internal markers for content events uncover valuable insights.
This article was originally published by InPublishing in June 2025, and was included in the Content Strategy Special. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.