Reader Engagement Analytics From The Water And Wastewater Market

By Bill King

We’ve been thinking a lot about the users of our website recently. Obsessing in fact. Not to sound too much like a private detective but we call it following. We’re not interested in chasing them around the Web evaluating every which way and under they turn. But we are conscientiously making an effort to understand which content our readers engage with. At a very simple level, we want to provide them with more of what they read and less of what they don’t.

The similarities to the migration that is taking place in the water and wastewater industry are uncanny. If you were at ACE recently, you will have noticed that the aisles of the exhibit floor were filled with exhibitors promoting their data solutions built off cloud-based storage capacities and intricate algorithms for interpreting data. Travis wrote about it recently here.  

Similar to the data-logging that’s now taking place throughout the water distribution system, our data-loggers surrounding content performance have been evolving too. Just like the utility that can follow a drop of water through the treatment cycle and out into the distribution system, we can quickly analyze a reader’s journey through the content they are engaging with.

The findings aren’t necessarily surprising but they are actionable:

1. Content aimed at helping an engineer or utility dissect current issues and that helps them establish how they are going to accommodate those issues into their business plays very well.
2. Individual reads are informative but recognizing the volume of sharing that takes place with a piece of content is a great indicator of value.
3. The vast majority of Web activity takes place as readers begin to explore options. Recognizing that they have yet to engage with a sales rep during this phase should be very concerning for those companies who have limited content assets to help readers understand alternatives.
4. Unlike consumer behavior which can migrate from read to shopping cart in the same visit, reader engagement on a topic within an industrial community can be spread out over years making the need for both “evergreen” and fresh content over time important.
5. There is no such thing as enough content. The more content produced, the greater the volume of engagement. The gating factors are resources, both in terms of the labor willing to write and the financial investment in content creation. But readers remain insatiable and will continually engage in good quality content without fatigue.

Just like your customers embracing data to inform their asset management programs and repair and replace their most stressed assets first, a comprehensive review of your web analytics can let you know where to focus limited marketing resources when still looking to shore up your more traditional go-to-market channels.

Image credit: "IMG_3202," Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing © 2014, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/