• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 10, 2013

The battle to predict whether content will drive measurable, financial metrics continues to heat up with the release of technology from InboundWriter that forecasts performance.

Company engineers have been working on several significant advancements to its platform and algorithms to optimize search content. The software now analyzes the quality of the content as well as where it will publish to predict performance optimizing for searches on engine to drive product sales.

"Rather than just follow best practices, the technology can determine whether the piece of content will drive traffic to a Web site," said Skip Besthoff, InboundWriter CEO. "The technology scans the Web in real-time to find similar content and individually analyzes each piece."

The algorithm considers the site where content will publish, along with the audience who will read it, to determine if and how the piece will influence the person. The technology not only identifies the competition, but determines the keywords that trigger performance.

Between 10% and 20% of content drove site traffic for brands, according to InboundWriter research. The technology aims to change those odds by giving content creators the insights to make better decisions that increase financial metrics. A typical customer experiences between 50% and 200% improvement in organic traffic, per Besthoff.

InboundWriter evaluated dozens of companies with significant investments in online content. The team examined traffic patterns measured by organic page views in the past year for more than 110,000 pages and 32,000,000 page views on more than 10 sites.

The research shows that 20% of a company's Web pages drive 90% of its Web traffic on average, and only half a percent of a Web site's content drives more than 50% of Web traffic. The patterns were consistent across all sites in the study. This means for every 10 articles developed for a Web site, only one or two drive meaningful traffic. In some cases, the numbers were even more extreme, with 20% of the content driving 98% of a company's Web traffic.

InboundWriter initially launched to provide support for content creation, but has become a predictive analytics package with the technology. Similarly, Adobe introduced Social in July, which allowed marketers predict the effectiveness of social posts before they are published.