One of my responsibilities at Uberflip is to speak with people interested in our platform and help explain our many features. Some parts of the application always generate excitement, such as embedding videos, social sharing tools, image slideshows and custom branding. Other features – despite being truly ground-breaking – are sometimes overlooked by prospective Customers.

We’ve spent a lot of time developing our Metrics platform, which gives you real-time insight into reader engagement with your content. Metrics allows you to see how your audience is interacting with your content, everything from what devices they’re using to where they are located to what they’ve clicked on. Unfortunately, when I explain these amazing capabilities, the response can often be, “oh, that’s ok, I don’t really need that.”

With all due respect, I could not disagree more. Whether you’re a huge multinational corporation or a small mom-and-pop shop, the ability to gather feedback on how your content is being interacted with is essential for knowing more about your audience as well as how to better design your content marketing materials. We have 20+ Metrics comprised of 130+ Reports, so the insight that matters to you will vary depending on your particular use case and goals. To better understand the value that Metrics provides, I’m going to walk you through my own use of Metrics and how it helps me.

Going Digital

We publish a monthly content marketing newsletter, Going Digital, which I work on with our Marketing Specialist, Aaliyah Madadi. Before we even discuss what stories to include in the upcoming issue, I take a look at past issues’ Metrics to better inform the next month’s edition.

Who’s Our Audience?

Whenever creating anything, it’s important to first understand who it’s for. In this case, Going Digital is for content marketers and those interested in Uberflip. While this is helpful, it is missing important details about our audience. Metrics allow me to see what devices our readers are using, where in the world they are coming from and how many people we’ve reached. This helps us measure the success of our newsletter and can even help us decide on content that will be more interesting for our audience.

What People Liked

After getting a better idea of who our audience is, we can then see what about our content people found particularly engaging. We can know what embedded videos people watch, slideshows they flipped through and songs they played. We can see how long they spent on each page, what links they clicked, and even exactly where on the page they zoomed in. This level of insight is extremely useful because it tells us what content worked and therefore what to focus on in next month’s issue.

What People Didn’t Like

Perhaps even more important than knowing what worked for us in a past issue is knowing what didn’t work. Seeing which links were not clicked, what multimedia widgets were skipped over, and which pages were skipped over allows us to better understand what content people were not interested in. This can then contribute to creating an issue that has been fully optimized for our readers based on their own behavior. Better yet, if something is not working for the current month’s issue, we can go in and swap it out in real-time!

To summarize, I’ve found Metrics to be essential in the creation and ongoing analysis of the content that I help to create with Uberflip. How do you use your Metrics? Let us know in the comments below!