Measuring Success Analytics
The Center for Junior Officers (CJO) takes a look at online presence and which metrics measure publishing success.
In the Armed Forces Officer, Swain and Pierce highlight that expertise in the military profession involves continuously developing a specialized body of knowledge—a Corpus of professional discourse. Soldiers must critically contribute, through discourse and scholarship, to this knowledge by leveraging their experience, education, and training to ensure the profession evolves to meet future challenges.
But how can we measure the success of these contributions?
First and foremost, when it comes to measuring success, if people aren’t reading and engaging with your contributions – they are unfortunately denigrated to words thrown on a page.
In partnership with the Harding Project, The Center for Junior Officers (CJO) at West Point, an already established, military publishing platform for scholarship and resources, looked to reenergize itself by engaging its audience through targeted social media and search engine optimization of its content. The CJO sought to continue publishing scholarship and developmental products on the profession of arms geared toward junior officers and definitively measure its efforts in its new marketing approach.
To measure success, publications need to focus on key metrics that give a detailed picture of audience engagement and growth. For a publication, whether large or small, metrics provide the feedback loop necessary to assess impact. Without data, you're flying blind, unsure whether your content is reaching people at all, how they may be finding it, or if it is driving meaningful engagement.
At its core, measuring success helps you answer three fundamental questions:
Is your content being consumed, and how?
How are you acquiring your consumers?
What steps can you take to improve?
With these questions in mind, let’s explore three essential metrics that publications should focus on: page views, users, and engagement behavior. Each of these metrics provides critical insight into your content’s reach and resonance, helping you shape future content and refine your publishing strategy.
The Center for Junior Officers leverages Google Analytics on its website and Meta Suite on its social media to build a detailed picture that answers the above questions by analyzing these essential metrics.
Page Views – What They Do and Don’t Mean
Page views serve as the most basic indicator of content consumption. They are the bread and butter of even beginning the conversation regarding measuring a publication's output. Page views can be measured by linking a website's pages to a web analytics service, like Google Analytics, to see how many times a given webpage is opened over time. Social media applications like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn also have these features organic to their service for creative accounts that track impressions over time.
Page views set the stage for a discussion on measuring success, but the number of views alone can be misleading if it isn’t paired with other metrics to assess impact. While a high volume of page views may suggest visibility, it doesn’t necessarily mean the content is resonating or driving more profound engagement. For the CJO, page views offer a starting point to measure how widely its publications are circulated. They are an important measure of performance, but are only the first step in understanding true engagement.
Google Analytics screenshot indicating viewership from 30JUN-29SEP of https://juniorofficer.army.mil/. Provided by CJO.
Users – The People Behind the Views
Beyond page views, it’s important to understand that actual people are consuming the discourse you are publishing. The other baseline metric that makes analysis possible is user data. User data is scraped by using IP addresses aligned to a device. With this, unique, new, and revisiting users over time can be seen. Essential data such as acquisition sources can also be collected to understand if your users are finding your content via social media, organic search, or direct links.
Paired with page view data, one can answer the following questions: How many new users are coming to your site to view specific content? How many users are repeat consumers of your content? Are your new efforts increasing new users while still retaining previously acquired users? And finally, through what means are new users finding your content? Still, through these baseline metrics, even when combined, we fall short of understanding the true resonance of published discourse. The behavior of users is the final layer to being able to measure effectiveness in publishing discourse.
Google Analytics screenshot indicating through what means new users are finding content (Google, Direct, Email etc.) from 30JUN-29SEP on https://juniorofficer.army.mil/. Provided by CJO.
Engagement Behavior – Beyond the Numbers
Engagement behavior metrics, such as time spent on a page, social media interactions and shares, and repeat sessions, provide a deeper understanding of how users interact with content. Through tools like Google Analytics and Meta Suite, the CJO tracks this type of user behavior to understand the range of behavioral outcomes based on the different forms of content.
Seeing an article recently published on the site, with a corresponding social media post, drives social media click-throughs to the article, with a corresponding uptick in new users, and a long page view time, begins to paint a picture of successfully marketed and engaging discourse. As an enduring effort, leveraging and cataloging citations of a publication source can show long-term downstream impact on the utilization of scholarship. These metrics, in isolation, form a myopic view of how the publication is performing. Only when these measurements are observed holistically, does a mosaic of effectiveness informed by data begin to take shape.
Continuing Education and the way ahead
The Center for Junior Officer’s data-informed and marketing-driven approach may be novel among military publications and forms of outreach, but it is far from groundbreaking when compared to private sector publications. As Army Officers occupy positions that are aimed at revitalizing scholarship and writing across the Army, they must leverage the best practices of marketing analytics to measure their effectiveness.
Domain knowledge and studying the topics below are all now important in the modern publishing space:
The customer journey and marketing fundamentals
Data analytics and data visualization
Social media and web-based communities of practice
Limited understanding of web design, graphic design, HTML and JavaScript
Ultimately, using a marketing-driven and data-informed approach allows you to understand what truly engages your audience, turning insight into meaningful outcomes. By analyzing metrics like page views, user behavior, and engagement, you can refine your strategy and continuously improve your content’s reach and impact.
 | A guest post by
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Engagement behavior is the thing that sticks out the most to me. I am not educated in Marketing and Behavioral Economics, but when I receive feedback on something I wrote, it makes me feel like I succeeded at something and that my message was heard. When that feedback is negative, as there is always something negative, I might feel a certain way about it, but still important to remember that the message was consumed. Beyond looking at a chart or graph to measure engagement, adding a call to action and seeing the fruition of that request might be the most rewarding, even if difficult to measure.