The data formats we developed are especially easy for Python, R, Spark, Redshift, BigQuery: you name it. We also have standard integration schemas and recipes so that the data can be used in ad-hoc querying and dashboarding tools, such as Looker, Periscope, and Tableau.

For every piece you publish, there’s data to tell you how your audience is responding. Writing content can be deeply personal—and even today most content is still written because “it seemed like a good idea.” At the end of the day, however, content is written for the impact it creates on the business. Analytics for content marketing helps teams identify what content is creating the impact that they need, so they can work smarter, not harder.

Parse.ly helps surface these insights in a format that writers and creators understand, so they don’t need to turn to the analysts in order to become data-driven. Keep an eye on which direction your core KPIs are heading as you execute your content strategy, expand the content that works, and iterate.

With an at-a-glance breakdown of the traffic of days, weeks, or months across multiple channels, marketers know what pieces of content are performing. Track 30 unique attention metrics to understand how readers are interacting with your content. Parse.ly tells you which channels, campaigns, referrals, topics and more are creating customer conversions that move your business forward.

Marketing analytics vary based on what type if business you run and which channels you use to attract and retain customers. Each channel includes its own set of metrics—for example, web, email, social media, and in-person events all have different objectives and means of measuring them.

Here are some of the common marketing channels, and the metrics they care about:

• Email analytics: Views, unique visitors, campaign impressions, paid ad performance
• Social media analytics: Audience size, mentions, shares, likes, impressions, click-through-rate
• Web analytics: Views, unique visitors, campaign impressions, paid ad performance
• Content analytics: Content conversions, leads captured, subscriptions, purchases, views, engaged time, social interactions, and more

Parse.ly tracks your content as it is deployed across all your channels, and helps you identify which content leads to the engagement and “conversion events” that create revenue for your business and connections with your customers.

Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much revenue you earned from your content program divided by what you spent.

Measuring all the ways content creates value for your business is the most important part—and there are many ways that it does. This could mean driving leads, selling products, advertisement revenue, or many other avenues. Keep in mind the lifetime value of a customer, and all the ways your content builds loyalty in your customer base.

Attribution can be tricky. Setting up a flexible, comprehensive tool like Parse.ly to track and attribute content interactions makes it easy for your team to understand the true value of your content.

Then you measure all the ways your business spends money to make your content program happen. These will include technology, salaries, partner fees, ad spend, and more.

Return on investment is the single most important measure of successful content marketing. Parse.ly helps you make your content programs data-driven, so you can make sure they have maximum impact and generate high ROI.

The general rule of thumb for marketing ROI is typically a 5:1 ratio. The most important thing is to understand how to create engaging content that motivates your readers to take the kinds of actions that create a return for your business. Measuring content ROI with Parse.ly is one of the best ways to learn how much value you bring to the table.

Whether or not content marketing is valuable for your business depends on how your business creates and retains customers. At some level, nearly all businesses have content—for example, a website.

Many businesses have found that digitally interacting with their potential and existing customers leads to improvements in customer perception, acquisition, retention, and overall satisfaction.

These content programs can be incredibly sophisticated, with thousands of pieces of content, and many engagement channels—or they can be barebones and straightforward. What matters is that the content program is set up in a way that contributes to both the lives of their customers and to the business in some way.

The most successful programs are two fold:

• First, they create content that prospects and customers would be interested in regardless of whether they are interested in your business.
• Second, they structure their digital experiences in such a way that simply being interested in and interacting with their content leads to revenue generating or retaining events for the business.

With Parse.ly you can truly see what content is working for you, without getting lost in the data. Thanks to this easy data access, teams can enact a more data-driven content strategy, proving the value of content to the greater organization.