The average internet marketing company uses analytics are used to justify almost everything on-site… except content effectiveness. You can use Google analytics for free, but many companies pay for analytic services. Whether it be for pay-per-click, organic search, or on-site conversion, every website is competitive and needs to be optimized according to analytic data. However writer created copy and editorial does not get statistically analyzed as commonly.  The first step to getting unbiased data about content is to filter out writer and editor IP addresses. Writers visit their content multiple times to edit or check comments, and this will bloat figures.

Some of the most common performance indicators for writers are:

Writer Impact – This can be measured as simply as reads per writer. For commercial sites, conversions per article and length of visit are good metrics. You can tie a custom variable to the page that records an article as read once a viewer is on the page for a specific amount of time.

Writer Cost per Reading- Many news and other content creation sites have writer quotas. A more effective measurement is cost per reading. This calculated by dividing writer cost by the number of readings generated.

Time Spent Writing compared to Reading- If you spend more time creating content than people spend reading it you have either failed in marketing or creating appealing content. This is valuable with websites with low traffic. This will evaluate how writers are spending their time, but can only be accurately measured if all writing time is done through one piece of software.

Satisfaction Surveys- This is the old-school survey. You can integrate individual ratings into a page, or have the page pop-up a survey after viewing a site. These can be annoying, so use with discretion.

Unread Page Counter – Large sites with thousands of pages will have problems with sites that do not get any views, because these sites do not show up in Google analytics. Filtering out unvisited websites will significantly skew data. You will need to do a match list of pages from your CMS with the analytics page-view data. A simple list of unread pages is also useful in determining why those pages do not receive any traffic.