The business landscape is rapidly evolving. As the battle to gain a competitive edge becomes more difficult, it’s up to business leaders to track their individual success and adapt accordingly using content analytics tools.
Using a powerful set of content analytics tools allows a company to analyse its content engagement, social reach, organic traffic, and audience behaviour, all factors that play a significant role in the success of an online brand.
Analytic tools leverage consumer and business data to provide valuable insights into how your demographic connects with your content and which topics and trends drive the most engagement to your brand.
The key to integrating analytics into your organization effectively is to choose the tools that best support your individual business goals and actively solve any challenges you may encounter along the way.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a guide to choosing the best content analytics tool for your business growth in 2025.
What are Content Analytics?
As a content editor, it’s essential that you know which content is performing and which is not. Gathering data on content engagement, page views, user visits, and dwell times could provide you with a powerful set of insights that tells you which topics, trends, and channels are most effective in your content marketing strategy.
Content analytics is the measurement of this data, often collected by analytic tools that help you measure the success of your content cross-platform.
Not only can analyzing content data be a complex process, but depending on what you’re looking to monitor, your approach is likely to change.
When it comes to choosing a data tracking tool for your business, there are four main types of analytical infrastructures to choose from:
- Predictive Analytics: This type of tool looks forward and forecasts future data patterns.
- Descriptive Analytics: This type of tool looks at what has already happened and analyses your current data set.
- Diagnostic Analytics: This type of tool looks into why something has happened, usually comparing several sets of data.
- Prescriptive Analytics: Similar to predictive analytics, this type of tool suggests a step-by-step plan based on real-time data.
Depending on your individual goals, you’ll need to choose the right analytical infrastructure to achieve the best results.
For example, if you’re planning to monitor your social engagement on content that is already live, you’d need a descriptive tool. However, if you’re aiming to forecast content trends for future campaigns, a predictive tool could be the best fit for you.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a guide to choosing the content monitoring tool for your business.
How To Choose The Best Content Tool For Your Business
There are a few things to consider when choosing the right content analytics tool for your business.
With so many on the market to choose from, ensure that you work out what your business needs from a content tool, what key goals you’re trying to achieve, and what channels you’re most active on as a content marketer.
Once you’ve established a list of key features that you’re looking for in a content analytics tool, we’ve shared a few of the best tools on the market for you to choose from.
1. Work Out What Your Business Needs
While it can be easy to get lost in a sea of analytical tools on the market, the first step to take as a content marketer is to understand what your company needs from a data tracking tool and what specific challenges you need to address.
In order to make an effective plan, here are some key factors to consider before you invest in an analytical tool:
- Goals and objectives: What do you hope to achieve by tracking your content data? Are you trying to improve or raise your customer retention rates? Are you aiming to grow your social channels? Depending on your individual business goals, you can work out whether you’re in the market for a descriptive or predictive tool.
- What type Of data are you tracking: Assess your data sources. Where is your information coming from? For example, if you’re looking to track your customer relationship data, you’ll need to invest in a tool that can be integrated with your CRM system.
- Assess your user skills: Take an audit of your team's technical proficiency. Can they handle an in-depth analytics tool, or are they better suited to an automated alternative that requires little to no intervention?
Business Example: For instance, a retailer requires analytics to track sales trends and customer engagement to create content surrounding popular products. In order to monitor these sources of data effectively, an analytics tool would need to facilitate CRM integration, and POS reports to collect all data efficiently.
2. Create A List Of Key Features
Depending on the content tool you choose, you’ll have different features to choose from.
In order to see the most success, focus on analytical features that best align with your individual goals.
Here are some common features to consider when choosing the best content analytics tool for your business:
- Social Media Analytics Tool: Track metrics like likes, shares, and follows to grow your social platforms.
- SEO Analytics: Use tools that analyze views, clicks, devices, and conversions to succeed in search rankings. More insights here.
- Content Marketing Automation: Automate content strategies with AI suggestions and easy distribution across channels.
- User Behaviour Data: Monitor user interactions and sentiment trends on your website for campaign insights.
- Mobile Analytics: Test content success on mobile devices with tools that track user interaction and A/B tests.
- Real-Time Alerts: Get instant notifications for brand mentions on social media to respond quickly.
- User Collaboration: Choose tools that allow team collaboration for shared data analysis and reporting.
During this stage, make a list of your non-negotiables and prepare to start comparing different tools.
FYI: StoryChief eliminates the need for various tools such as social media tools, automation tools, AI tools, SEO tools, and analytics tools. Create a free account and start publishing today. 🙌
3. Start Comparing Tools On The Market
Finally, before you make your decision, the most important part of the process is the comparison stage.
Here, you should have a clear list of the non-negotiable features, information on the essential factors for compatibility and integration, and an idea of your core business goals. For example, if your business has a lot to do with content outreach, the tools you select must have several non-negotiable features, like email integration and list saving.
With this in mind, take a look at some of the popular content analytics tools below to kickstart your discovery stage:
StoryChief
StoryChief helps you track and improve your content with powerful content analytics tools, forever free with the freemium account:
- Content Audit: Weekly, automated reviews to analyze your existing content to identify gaps, outdated info, and opportunities for improvement.
- SEO Analytics: Get insights on readability, keyword use, and meta descriptions to optimize your content for search engines.
- Keyword Positions: Monitor how your keywords rank, spot underperforming ones, and get tips to boost visibility.
- Social Media Analytics: See how your content performs on social media with data on likes, shares, comments, and reach.
- Views, Reads, Engagement: Track views, read times, and engagement to see what content connects with your audience.
With these features, you can easily adjust your strategy to create content that performs better online—at no extra cost.
Optimize your content effortlessly with StoryChief’s free Content Audit. Instantly boost SEO, readability, and engagement with our automated tool—start seeing results today!
Google Analytics
Most famously, we have Google Analytics, a free tool used to monitor website activity, online search trends and site bounce rate.
After coming out with an updated version in 2023, otherwise known as GA4, this analytics tool is the perfect companion for an online business looking to stay ahead of search trends and track their site engagement levels.
Google Analytics integrates well with most online platforms, including WordPress, for site monitoring at any scale and can be used as a descriptive analytics tool.
Ahrefs
Next up, we have Ahrefs, a top-notch SEO tool used to track your website’s content performance.
With the ability to track keywords, backlink engagement and even competitor websites, this tool is a must-have for businesses looking to improve their search position in the SERPs.
Some of Ahrefs best features include its content planner, which helps users identify and save high-performing content topics from a search engine database of 11 billion web pages.
You can also track your backlink growth and engagement trends easily with Ahrefs, as this tool comes with a number of data visualisation modes, such as graphs, charts, and year-on-year comparisons.
Ahrefs starts at $99 per month for its Lite plan, however, for an Advanced plan with more features, prices start at $399.
Mention
For those of you aiming to track content sentiment with an analytics tool, Mention is a brilliant option on the market.
As a streamlined tool dedicated to social listening, it tracks brand mentions on social channels in real time, allowing you to map customer sentiment surrounding your brand with ease.
Mention also keeps tabs on social content engagement, competitor sentiment and any spikes in topical conversations surrounding your brand. These insights can be used to adapt your content strategy in an attempt to improve your brand reputation on social platforms.
Mention Solo starts at just $41 a month and offers users a free two-month trial when they opt to pay yearly.
Buffer
Buffer is a brilliant two-in-one analytics and posting tool for all of your content endeavours.
With a goal to support your content marketing strategy from start to finish, Buffer offers automated content posting on multiple channels as well as built-in analytics that measure post-performance, stories analytics, and hashtag engagement.
Using Buffer, you can also access numerous content interaction reports that alert you to the levels of engagement on each of your social channels, allowing you to compare platforms and identify which channels are most effective for communication with your target audience.
Starting at just $5 per month per channel, Buffer is also extremely affordable for brands only just embarking on their analytical journey.
Wrapping Up
Investing in an analytics tool for your business is essential in a competitive market. Harnessing the power of analytics allows you to forecast future content moves and stay ahead of the consumer curve.
“Beating the competition is how businesses stay in the game. But winning strategies don’t appear out of thin air. Leaders need reliable data analytics to guide, predict and improve what their companies do. Attempting to lead a modern business without data is like leaving everything up to chance.”
- John Hall, advisor for growth at Relevance.
This said, the best businesses take time to choose the right analytics tool for their specific business needs. While the most popular tool on the market may serve others well, it’s crucial that you opt for a solution that ticks every box on the list.
Free tool: Analyze your target audience, brand voice, content pillars and competitors. Try it now.
