The Need
The client is a leading American online news portal. Being a news portal, the content is the top priority. The client needed content analysis to gain clarity for the following points:
- How to measure if the content is effective?
- Do we need to write longer articles?
- What would be the optimal size of an article launched on a particular day of the week?
Since it is a news website, content keeps getting updated frequently. It was difficult to conduct a web content analysis as data changed every day. Also, the website had more than 50,000 URLs, so deciding which URL to track was a crucial decision.
About Client
Nabler helped a US based leading online news portal to formulate a better content strategy. The client was facing problems with conducting efficient web content analysis which was resolved by Nabler using SiteCatalyst and WordCount Tool.
The Solution
Nabler’s team first identified the key metrics that would help in assessing the nature of the content on the website:
- Total depth and breadth of the site
- Total number of documents or content items
- Content structure
- Variety of formats of items included on the site
- Identification of patterns and relationships between the content items
After this, they tackled the problem of selecting the URLs to be tracked, out of the 50,000+ URLs on the website. The ‘Four Quadrants’ approach was used for this:
To segregate the articles from the Homepage, ‘Column Text Formula’ was used in Excel database.
To find out the launch date of the article, so that analysis for the lifecycle/span of an article could be done:
- The entire month was taken for the launch date range.
- Even if an article had a single visit, it was considered as its launch date.
- The whole list was segregated into weekend launch and weekday launch.
Finally, the trends and the articles’ content effectiveness were analyzed.
The main tools used for the entire analysis were:
- SiteCatalyst
- Word Count Tool (to get the words used per article)
- MS Excel
The Benefits
- The client was able to formulate a strong content strategy with the help of these findings.
- It became easier to measure the effectiveness of different types of articles and find out which topics were popular and which were not.
- The client was also able to determine which days were most suitable to post those articles. For example, we found out that weekends were the best time to post sports related articles, whereas weekdays were most suited for world affairs.
- With the help of better targeting and scheduling of articles, the client was able to post better content and attract more traffic to the website.