Seeking Out Hidden Content Metrics

Tracking content requires you do a bit of stealth thinking. If you make the tracking obvious, the content won’t be good, and people won’t come back for more — one hit wonders are fine, but you want those visitors and shares to convert into leads, sales, supporters, or enthusiastic fans, not just wander off.

Hidden content metrics may be a strange way to think about it, but you can get information back from anything you put out into the web, if you set it up correctly. For example, the comment system you use on your blog matters.

Some comment systems offer social sharing, a feature you want, but you also want them to either offer their own metrics tracking or integrate with your URL shortener of choice so that you can track those shares. A favorite in my office is Disqus for its social shares, mention tracking, and integration with Bit.ly.

Using your permalinks (the links that lead users to a specific post) matters as well. If you’re a WordPress user, then you’re familiar with its date and number-based default links. Having a link that is http://yourdomain.com/?123 doesn’t help you find and track your content. Going into your WordPress settings and changing the default post link to end with the title of your post is much smarter and makes your links more metrics-friendly.

Use trackable links for things you link to inside your content as well. If you’re going to link to a source, tag it with a Bit.ly link so that you can see how many people were interested in that source and what happened with the sharing.

Use full titles, descriptions, alternate text, captions, and image tags for images and photos. (This not only helps your metrics tracking, it helps you come up in more image search results.) Make sure to have a featured image that shows up when the content is shared if it’s a written post. (In fact, every written post should have a trackable image in it.) Be sure to include alt tags in the image (right-click the image and add the tags in the Advanced section of the image edit window that pops up).

If you use PDFs, you can do a lot of interesting things with the files to track their metrics. (Unfortunately, this functionality is often used by malcontents to spread malware or viruses via PDF, so you may find that choosing PDFs to enclose tracking data causes a drop in attention.) If you use them sparingly, you can use PDFs to not only track metrics and follow shares and open rates and more, but also for lead generation through embedded forms and other multimedia content.

Layering your content helps as well. For example, you can easily imitate a SlideShare Pro feature in a PDF or video file. You can insert a lead-qualifying screen that asks for contact info at the halfway point (or end point) of your slides. This technique converts well and is a fairly non-intrusive tactic for voluntary information gathering from self-identifying customers.

Audio content can be a bit tricky for metrics. In the case of audio files, it’s fairly simple to track the page where the file is hosted, but if someone manages to download the file, it’s easy to lose track of it. If you’re strong in programming, you can embed some tracking in the audio file format (similar to what they do for DRM or for the track and album information that you see in iTunes when you select Get More Info on a file. You can also choose to use a service such as Blubrry (www.blubrry.com ), libsyn (http://libsyn.com ), or Podtrac (http://podtrac.com ) for recording audio that tracks this information for you.

Trying to use hidden metrics is a great reason to learn some basic coding as well. You can create many hidden metrics that would make this a totally different book. You can find fantastic, free online resources for learning to code, including free online courses from Stanford (http://see.stanford.edu/default.aspx ) and MIT (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm ), but my current favorite is Codecademy (www.codecademy.com ) — it makes learning code fun. Wherever you start, learning code will make doing advanced metrics work easier (and have other benefits for your business as well).