​A new survey shows approximately 26 percent of brands still don't have dedicated staff for analytics reporting.

​Brands may not be spending enough time or money analyzing data to improve their content marketing campaigns. A common rule of thumb is companies should dedicate 90 percent of their analytics budgets toward staffing and 10 percent on the technology necessary to glean insight from the information. However, many organizations flip flop on this principle and focus more closely on technology.

There are many problems with overlooking staff when building content analytics processes. The first being that brands employ inexperienced professionals to dive deeper into data trends and discern patterns that inspire future marketing collateral. Clearly some opportunities are missed through this practice. A recent survey from Econsultancy and Lynchpin shows that only 26 percent of businesses have an employee dedicated to metrics analysis and reporting.

Marketing departments are trying to improve upon this statistic, though. The report shows that since 2012, the number of organizations that don’t have specific employees evaluating web data has declined 4 percent. Analytics reporting will only become more essential for ongoing web marketing campaigns as search engines like Google release new ranking signals that govern content visibility in search.

In June 2013, Google’s Matt Cutts expressed that the search engine continues to battle against spammy web content, introducing smaller algorithms meant to target specific media types like payday loan queries. As more of these updates come to fruition, content analytics will show marketers where their online content may have been hit and help them identify new avenues that lead to additional website conversions.

The Econsultancy survey also revealed that 39 percent of brands outsource content analytics practices, 37 percent using services to implement support and 27 percent for regular reports. Businesses that can’t dedicate time in-house to evaluate web data to build stronger promotional strategies should outsource. Having a plethora of data for marketing purposes can greatly improve businesses’ trajectories in today’s increasingly competitive market.

Ted Karczewski is an Executive Communications Associate at Brafton. He works to develop his own voice and apply his passions to the evolving world of SEO and content marketing, but he doesn't shy away from writing for fun. After graduating from Suffolk University, Ted used his Communications degree to test out Sports Journalism before Marketing at Brafton.