An essential part of any content strategy is understanding what interests your users and where they hang out. If you're writing about a great recipe on the website of a company that sells stationary then you're in the wrong place and not going to engage your audience.
Analytics are key to understanding the success of your content.
Most people are familiar with tracking basic metrics such as page views and referrals in Google Analytics. Doing this will give you an idea how popular your content has been overall, i.e. how many people have visited a particular page since it was published and how long they spent on the page. If your page has a low number of views, or people are abandoning your 500 word blog post after a few seconds, then you know that your content wasn't interesting or was targeted at the wrong audience.
But what if you want to compare the success of a page across different audience segments?
Referral data can be useful for this as it allows you to compare metrics across sources. If you understand the differences between people who follow you on Facebook and people who follow you on Twitter then you can get valuable insights from the comparative engagement of these groups.
Google Analytics URL Builder
More in depth analytics can be obtained using the Google Analytics URL Builder. This tool allows you to create a URL to track custom campaigns. After adding three pieces of information about your campaign - source, medium, and name - you can identify the origin of a visit in your google analytics account.
For example, if you have multiple Twitter accounts with different followers, you'd be able to track the Twitter account where the link was shared and compare engagement across accounts.
The URLs generated by the URL builder are quite long so in addition you'll want to use a URL shortener such as bit.ly before sharing the URL.
Conclusion
Analytics are essential to measuring the success of your content strategy so the more detailed metrics you have the better. Adding Google Analytics Link Builder to your toolset with allow you to identify the individual Tweet or Facebook status which drove visitors to your website. This will give you the insights you need to write better content and target it at the audiences who will find it most interesting.