As search engines now have a major impact on consumer behavior, content has become one of the most powerful ways to drive website traffic and generate leads.

However, to remain competitive you need to take advantage of the right tools to ensure your content marketing efforts have maximum impact. Here, we’ll uncover some of the best free and paid content analytics tools to help you power up your content marketing.

Website Analytics

Around 69% of marketers analyze page views and unique visitors to measure the success of their content while less than half are examining the time users spend on their site. However, these tools could help you get a fuller picture so you can gain a more competitive edge:

1. Google Analytics

With such a wide variety of content stats and reports to delve into, it can take a while to get the most out of Google Analytics, but it’s worth it.

Discover the number of clicks on web pages, stats on keywords, time users stay on your site, content sharing stats, and so much more. One of its best features – especially for retail users – is the goal funnel tool. Here, you can set up a row of URLs that users have to go through, so you can see how many users complete your conversion funnels, and how many drop off.

2. SEMrush

SEMrush isn’t as widely used as Google Analytics, but it’s just as powerful in terms of competitor and keyword research. Just enter a URL or keyword in the search bar, and you’ll receive a ton of information about a web page. You can even see live stats on keywords, including keywords used for paid ads.

Alternative 1: Webtrends

This analytics tool helps you measure customer behavior across numerous channels, including your website and social platforms. Crucially, Webtrends gives you real-time data that helps you create different customer segments for more effective content targeting.

By segmenting your users by age, location and more, you can maximize your content’s reach. With SEO and A/B testing tools, Webtrends helps you identify the strong and weak spots of your website’s content and your social media marketing effectiveness. It comes with many video tutorials, webinar classes and constant email and telephone support and provides a great mix of all around analytics.

Get a weekly dose of our best content marketing tips, trends, and insights.

Alternative 2: Hotjar

This awesome tool lets you record users’ sessions on your website. This means you can watch videos of real users as they click around and scroll through your pages.

This tools helps you answer questions like: how much time do readers spend reading a particular blog page? On which pages do they scroll down more? When do they click away from your site? Having this real data at hand means you can identify your best and worst performing content and tweak your content and design elements to improve your website experience.

Engagement Analytics

3. BuzzSumo

Renowned as one of the greatest content research tools, BuzzSumo will give you stats on the most popular content in your industry, taken from social media sites and other domains. You can view backlinks from any web page, compare engagement between domains, get a list of your most popular social media posts, and much more. There’s a free plan, but if you’re after in-depth stats, consider one of the paid packages.

4. Impactana

Some experts think this tool is even more impressive than BuzzSumo for measuring content engagement. Using its platform, you can search for the most engaging content on your site, then sort it by “Buzz” or “Impact.” The “Buzz” signals show you how the content is shared on social media, while the “Impact” signals measure actual engagement, including backlinks, clicks, views, comments, downloads, and more.

5. Clicky

For websites with fewer than 3,000 views per day, Clicky is free to use. One of Clicky’s best features is its heatmapping technology, which visually shows you how visitors engage with your site. You can even view heatmaps for certain audience segments. For example, you can view the behaviour of visitors who don’t make a purchase, so you can see when they’re dropping off.

Alternative 3: SqueezeCMM

Through straightforward analytics and conversion measurement, SqueezeCMM will help you quickly uncover the ROI of your content efforts. It shows you how different content performs at different stages of the buying cycle, highlighting which content assets are more successful at moving prospects along the sales funnel.

Find out which of your social media channels are driving more clicks and conversions while discovering which content is the most profitable by channel and audience.

Social Media Analytics

53% of buyers say Facebook informs their purchase decisions, so it’s clearly important to regularly evaluate your social media activity. If you’re not, or you’re looking for some new options to help rate your content’s performance across all your social channels, here are a few tools to check out.

6. Followerwonk

If you do any marketing on Twitter, Followerwonk can give you a wide range of data to help you target your audience more effectively. Find out the most popular hashtags for your account, or discover when most of your followers are active to maximize the impact of postings. As well as analyzing your own Twitter account, you can also research the accounts of competitors.

7. Buffer

Buffer is another powerful social media analytics tool, and free to use for up to three social media accounts. The analytics is more basic on the free plan, but you can still compare the performance of your social media posts in terms of engagement and reach.

Alternative 4: Tweriod

This tool will show you what time of day your audience is most active on Twitter and analyzes your previous posts so you can start tweeting at the right times to reach more people. After analyzing your tweets and your followers’ tweets, Tweriod sends you a no-nonsense overview of what time of day you should be tweeting. If you’re looking to create more engagement on Twitter, this could be a fantastic tool.

SEO Analytics

8. Google Search Console

While Google Analytics is more useful for discovering how website users interact with your site, Google Search Console is more focused on how search engines interact with your site. Basically, it has three main functions:

  • Search analytics reports, showing you click-through rates from search engine results pages to your site, including which queries prompted those results.
  • Alerts for any website errors or issues.
  • Through Fetch as Google, you can see whether Googlebots can access your pages correctly.

9. Acrolinx

The Acrolinx platform is built on an advanced linguistic analytics engine, and is more concerned with helping content marketers achieve a consistent content output.

The tool will make sure your content aligns with your company’s standards in terms of tone of voice, style, language, SEO, readability, and other factors. It can even make suggestions on how to alter content according to which audience segments you’re targeting.

Acrolinx has its own scoring system, so you can constantly monitor the standard of your content according to its rules, and make improvements based on its suggestions when necessary. This is especially useful for teams with multiple writers, to ensure your brand’s voice remains consistent.

Alternative 5: MarketMuse

This powerful piece of software is able to identify gaps in your content strategy. It will analyze keywords and build a custom keyword strategy that details the steps you need to take to optimize your onsite content for search engines.

As well as content and competitor analysis, MarketMuse also has a site audit tool that reviews your site and generates a report detailing which topics are well covered and which are not.

In Summary

Good content marketing starts with unique and engaging content, but if you don’t regularly analyze how your content performs and make the necessary adjustments, your content marketing efforts may never pay off.

Test out some of these analytics tools and see which ones fit in best with your content strategy. You may need to use a select few to cater to all your needs, but with the right data at your fingertips, you can streamline your content marketing efforts and unlock the potential of your business.