Not that long ago, if you were advertising then all you were really doing was buying some space in print, on a billboard, TV or radio, and if the phone started ringing more frequently than it did beforehand, you’d reason that the advertising was paying off.

It’s a scattergun approach, and the sort of thing that led US department store pioneer John Wanamaker to utter his famous line “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

How does this translate to the digital age? Chances are you’re not buying all your media; paid advertising is likely to be seen as an individual channel alongside things like organic search, social media, blogging and content marketing. That’s a lot of channels to manage, and measuring their success isn’t easy.

For a lot of us, Wanamaker’s words rang true for content marketing: half of it probably worked, but you couldn’t discern which half. You’d create content, send it out on social networks, then move onto creating the next bit of content.

You might be able to track views of blog articles on your site, and network-specific metrics like number of Likes or Retweets, but how do you go beyond that?

One very solid contender to help answer these questions is Squeeze. A new software platform, Squeeze sits between your social network metrics and your web analytics, providing you with the missing pieces of data such as how users are sharing and interacting with different types of content.

Squeeze will handle a lot of different scenarios, but here are some examples:

• Do different content themes work best on different channels? Perhaps your Facebook audience wants a different kind of content than your Twitter audience. Squeeze can tell you who wants what.
• Does content get shared across different networks? If someone sees your content on Facebook and share it on Twitter, any conversions can be tracked back to the initial content posting on Facebook.
• What time of day do audience segments engage? Is Facebook better at lunchtime? Is Twitter better at 6.00pm when people are commuting? Squeeze can give you the data.

Squeeze isn’t for everybody, and how useful you find it will depend on the amount of content you’re producing across different channels. You’ll also need to find some time to analyse all this additional data.

But for the right situation, Squeeze is a great tool to blow the lid off your content marketing. Find out more at getsqueeze.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Damion Brown is Principal Consultant at Data Runs Deep, a web analytics consulting firm based in Melbourne. He works with organisations to help them find the right mix of digital analytics platforms, then trains internal resources in how to work with and interpret the data. To find out more, visit datarunsdeep.com.au.

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