Let data show you when to STOP writing

What an awesome world we live in! You no longer need to guess what works and what doesn’t’. Data gives you the answer.

Do you know if anyone actually reads your entire blogpost? Or do they just stay on your site for a couple of seconds then drop of. The answer to this was until recently determined by the bounce rate of our posts. Google Analytics told us how many dropped of and how many stayed for a while. But, this does not give the entire picture. You might stay on a page while on the phone, or while you are using a different application on your computer.

By using data from services like Crazyegg we’ve started to get the whole picture of how people consume our content, what we should share where. And even learned how we can optimize the design around it. All based on actual data from our blog.

We have a constant discussion around the office, if people actually read long blog posts. And now we know. The answer is that posts that take over 4 minutes at our blog usually don’t get scrolled all the way through. Without data, we would still be discussing. Now we know.

Another thing we learned is that a lot of people clicked “Want an email with new blog posts?” instead of actually clicking and filling out the form. So we decided to make the text clickable and sent you to a signup page. Now our signups are increasing. Again, only with data could we have made this decision.

The last thing I want to touch on is something Crazyegg call “Confetti”. A really powerful tool too that gives you where people clicked – but sorted on different variables. So for example I can see where people that came in just via Twitter clicked, or where people click sorted on time of day. Again, you can learn a lot from this! We used it to learn that visitors from Twitter are more interested in case studies than others, so we focus on sharing our case studies here first.

We are having a lot of fun on our content adventure, and we will continue to share as we learn and reflect.

Have you used any tools for measuring more then just traffic? Please share in the comments below. A cookie to the first comment!

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