Enhancing a Headless CMS With Content Analytics

Marketing teams are under pressure to tie campaign performance to revenue. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done, as content teams can be left to operate in silos, relying on multiple systems to publish content and report performance across various channels.

A headless CMS enables enterprises to centralize all their content in one platform and manage it across the entire customer journey. Combining the flexibility of a headless CMS with the power of content analytics can answer several content management challenges. 

In this blog, we’ll explain content analytics, why it matters so much to the modern customer journey, and how enterprises can leverage an API-first headless content platform like CrafterCMS along with content analytics to drive positive results.

What Is Content Analytics?

Content analytics measures and analyzes how customers interact with published content. When a user reads a blog article, listens to a podcast, watches a video, or engages with content, content analytics records that interaction.

It is a way for organizations to understand content performance and draw insights that help them understand audience preferences and customer behavior and optimize content to improve engagement and impact business results. 

Content analytics involves the use of various tools and techniques to collect data from websites and other content assets. With digital content, a key component is also the content management system (CMS) used to publish content in the first place. But businesses must be able to connect that CMS to analytics tools, including Google Analytics, marketing attribution software, or other content intelligence solutions. 

Why Content Analytics Matters

Since the first CMSs were established, businesses have been able to track the traffic their content brings them on their website using content analytics. 

However, the introduction of the headless CMS brought with it the ability to publish content to multiple channels, including not only websites butr also mobile apps, e-commerce front-ends, OTT video apps, digital signage, AR/VR experiences, and more. This explosion of content channels also led to other challenges. 

• Content Fragmentation: Enterprises can publish content across multiple channels but may struggle to maintain consistency without content analytics. This often results in diluted brand messaging and potential missed engagement opportunities. 
• Behavioral Blind Spots: Without content analytics, businesses can struggle to understand how content impacts different customer journey stages and which channels are most effective. 
• Lack of ROI Measurement: Measuring the return on content investment is difficult without content analytics, particularly at a time when marketers and sales teams are asked to tie campaign creation to customer acquisitions and revenue generation.
• Personalization Struggles: Lacking content analytics means companies struggle to tailor content to individual customer preferences and implement true content personalization. 
• Inefficient ContentOps: Content teams waste time and resources on trial-and-error approaches when they lack the insights provided by analytics. This inefficiency leads to slower time-to-market and less impactful content strategies.

How Enterprises Benefit From Content Analytics

While failing to include content analytics can be problematic for enterprises, companies that introduce robust content analytics into their workflows can realize a number of benefits. 

Better Decision Making

Content analytics provide actionable insights, allowing enterprises to make data-driven decisions that improve content effectiveness and ROI. With better insight into how content influences the customer journey, content teams can have more targeted and effective content marketing efforts.

Improved Personalization

By understanding audience behavior and preferences, content analytics empower companies to deliver personalized experiences that drive engagement and customer loyalty.

Content Optimization & Efficiency

Analytics help identify top-performing content and areas for improvement, enabling continuous optimization of content strategies to meet business goals. By highlighting what works and what doesn’t, content teams can also streamline content production processes, saving time and resources.

Competitive Advantage

Access to data-driven insights gives enterprises a strategic advantage, allowing them to stay ahead of trends and competitors. 

Improving Audience Understanding and Content Performance with CrafterCMS

CrafterCMS is an enterprise headless CMS solution that uses content analytics to help businesses better understand their audience and content performance. 

Internal Content Analytics

CrafterCMS provides an internal event and auditing system that captures user actions and allows organizations to understand how different users, roles, teams and departments use the CMS. CrafterCMS also includes DevContentOps metrics on the dashboard for all CMS users, so they can track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) around content operations.

Integrations with Google Analytics and Other Web Analytics Solutions

CrafterCMS offers a Google Analytics plugin via the CrafterCMS Marketplace, enabling businesses to get a complete understanding of their site users across devices and platforms. 

Additionally, CrafterCMS is an API-first and composable CMS solution that can integrate with best-of-breed analytics tools from third-party vendors. This means enterprises can fully integrate their analytics stack and feed data into their content experiences. 

Building Custom Analytics Solutions

Companies can also build custom analytics solutions to serve different use cases. For instance, a company that provides a CrafterCMS-powered knowledge center used by customer service agents to answer questions via site search and an AI chatbot.

Content teams can analyze how the agents use the system via simple events tracking to see what articles are being viewed and how often. Using CrafterCMS, developers can quickly build a custom analytics engine that triggers events, build scripts with Groovy, put events into a simple database, and provide raw data to analyze. 

Learn More

Content analytics is essential for powering content experiences and helping enterprises to truly understand what is working for their audience and what isn’t. With CrafterCMS, that becomes much easier. Try CrafterCMS Enterprise for free to learn more.