Analysis

The Essentials:

Measuring Your Results

Content Strategy Framework Lesson

6/6

This module teaches you how to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital efforts by treating data as the voice of your audience. You’ll learn how to uncover insights in order to refine your user journeys, adapt your strategies and increase your overall spiritual impact.

Behind every screen is a person.
And every person matters to God.

Digital Strategies aren’t ultimately about content, platforms or tools. They’re about people. And if we want to reach people effectively, we must learn how to listen.

Analysis is a key way that we listen.

Within our Content Strategy Framework, Analysis is the fifth component — after Audience, Goal, Content and Distribution. It’s not an optional add-on at the end of a campaign. Instead, Analysis is the step that helps us understand whether we’re truly getting the right content to the right person on the right channel at the right time.

If you’re new to Digital Strategies, analysis may feel intimidating.
If you’ve been practicing for a while, it may feel routine.

But in both cases, analysis is vital work. Because analysis helps us steward our calling well.

What Does “Analysis” Mean?

Also referred to as Data Analytics, analysis is the process of examining data to discover useful information, inform conclusions and support decision-making.

Analysis is more than collecting numbers. It’s interpreting them.

Analysis asks:

What’s happening?
Why is it happening?
What should we do next?

In Content Strategy, analyzing data begins by returning to your goal. If you don’t start with your goal, your data will only confuse you. Your goals and understanding of the audience are critical context to make sense of the data that analytics gives you. Your goals provide structure to the results you collect. And these results give a voice to your audience.

Analysis is a learning step in the Content Strategy cycle. It closes the cycle and prepares you for your next decision.

How Does Analysis Connect to the Content Strategy Framework?

Audience

Analytics act as the “voice of your audience,” providing vital clues about their behavior, interests and challenges. By listening to this data, you can test your assumptions and ensure your strategy is truly meeting their needs.

Goal

Analysis must always begin by returning to your goal, which provides the critical context needed to interpret your data accurately. Understanding your goal allows you to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so you know what metrics to measure to determine success.

Content

Data analysis measures the effectiveness of your content by revealing where the audience engages and where they drop off during the user journey. These insights allow you to iterate and refine elements, such as your message or call-to-action, for greater impact.

Distribution (Sharing Methods)

Analytics show you where your audience is coming from and how they interact with your chosen channels. This information helps you evaluate if your distribution methods are effective or if you need to test new platforms and timing to reach people more successfully.

The Analysis Process

The analysis process includes five steps:

Revisiting your goal.
Identifying key data.
Running a report.
Gaining insights.
Taking next steps.

These steps are not separate tasks. Together, they form a continuous rhythm of learning. Each step builds on the previous one and helps you move from information to understanding to action.

1. Revisiting Your Goal

Before opening any dashboard, analytics report or spreadsheet, start with your goal. Revisit the goal you set for the campaign, initiative or platform you’re evaluating. Ask yourself:

What was the goal of this strategy?
What steps did we want our audience to take?
Is that goal still aligned with our ministry priorities?

Be sure to use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) as you evaluate your work. If the goals you’ve set aren’t clear and measurable, you’ll have difficulty knowing whether you’ve accomplished them or not.

Clarity at this stage determines everything that follows. If your goal is unclear, your analysis will be unclear.

2. Identifying Key Data

Now that you’ve reviewed your goal, it’s helpful to revisit the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you identified. The Goals section guides you through selecting KPIs. However, if you haven’t yet chosen yours, now is the time. KPIs will help you identify what data matters.

As a reminder, a KPI is the single metric that best reflects whether your strategy is successful.

To set a KPI, ask:

What is the one number that best reflects success?
What action represents the step we hoped our audience would take?
What supporting data will help us understand what is happening?

Different goals require different data:

If your goal is awareness, you may want to focus on reach or impressions.
If your goal is engagement, you may need to look at interactions or return visitor rate.
If your goal is action, you may focus on steps that your audience takes as a result (i.e., signups, messages sent, links clicked).

Anything measurable can be a KPI, but not everything should be. Focus on what best represents the movement on a person’s journey that you want to help facilitate.

We’ve curated a list of example KPIs for you.

3. Running a Report

After identifying your key data, you need to retrieve it. This is when you run a report.

Most data lives within the platforms you already use. Depending on your strategy, this may include:

- Social media platform analytics (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) for social media channels
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for website behavior
- Advertising platforms (Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, etc.)
- PowerBI for CCC organization-related metrics

At this point, you’re not yet interpreting your data. You’re simply collecting the information that connects to your goal and KPI. You will interpret in the next step.

Key Terms to Understand

As you analyze data, you’ll encounter common terms:

- Engagement — How people interact with your content (e.g. likes, comments, shares, saves, session duration, bounce rate, pages per session).
- Reach — The number of individual people who saw or were exposed to your content.
- Impressions — The total number of times your content was displayed on a screen. “Impressions” is always higher than “Reach” because your content can be shown to someone more than once.
- CTR (click-through rate) — The percentage of people who click on a specific link, ad or email after seeing it. The formula is as follows: (Total Clicks ➗Impressions) x 100
- Conversion — When someone completes a desired action (e.g., signs up for an event, fills out a form, makes a decision).
- Bounce rate — The percentage of people who leave a page without taking action.
- Time spent — The amount of time a user spent on a specific page, site or content experience.

Understanding these common terms will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies.

4. Gaining Insights

The analysis fun starts here.

You move from data to understanding by looking at the results and drawing conclusions. The following questions can help guide your analysis:

What trends or patterns do you see in the data?
How did your audience respond to what you offered?
What results surprised you?
What outliers (data points that differ significantly from the remaining data) exist? What are some possible explanations for those outliers?
What variables might you change to test your conclusions? What might you do differently next time?
What encourages you? What discourages you?
What story does the data tell?
Where do you see God working? What can you celebrate?
What’s your overall conclusion based on the data you see?

We track and review analytics to observe what stories the numbers tell. Analytics can lead us to ask deeper questions to understand those stories and to determine what we’ll do differently in future iterations.

5. Taking Next Steps

Analysis is only valuable if it leads to action.

Remember: Running a digital strategy is an iterative process. In the Analysis step, we distill what we’ve learned from our strategy in order to make changes that will make our strategy more effective.

The following questions will guide your next steps:

What should we change based on what we learned?
What should we continue doing?
What should we test next?

Your next steps could include:

Simplifying a form or call-to-action.
Adjusting your content or message.
Testing a new format, platform or timing.

Here, analysis reconnects to the Content Strategy cycle. What you learn shapes your next decisions.

Need help reviewing your analytics?

An Example:

Imagine your goal is to increase signups for a student discipleship group among university students over the next three months. You decided to run an ad campaign on your campus Instagram channel targeting students who have indicated they’re Christians or who follow specific Christian social media accounts. The ad leads to a landing page, where they can learn more about your groups and fill out a sign-up form. The key piece of data that you’re using to determine your success — your KPI — is the number of completed signups.

🧐 After running your ads for one week and reviewing your data, you notice the following:

Reach is high — Many students have seen your ad. It looks like you’re exposing high numbers of students to your ad content.
Engagement is moderate — Students are liking, commenting or clicking on the ad to learn more.
Signups are low — Few students are completing the call-to-action. The actual number of students who’ve signed up for a discipleship group is small.

At first glance, this can feel discouraging. But your insight begins here.

These results suggest that interest exists, but the students don’t move from curiosity to commitment.

❓ To understand why, you ask deeper questions:

Where are people dropping off — before clicking or after arriving on the sign-up page?
What does the signup experience feel like from the audience’s perspective?
Is the value of the group clear and compelling?

As you explore further, you discover patterns such as:

Many users click the link but leave quickly. The landing page may not clearly explain what the group is.
Users start the form but don’t complete it. The process may feel too long or intrusive.
Engagement is happening, but few users click the link to sign up. The call-to-action may not feel relevant or urgent.

The patterns may point to specific opportunities:

A confusing or weak call-to-action that doesn’t clearly invite the next step.
A complicated sign-up process that creates unnecessary friction.
A lack of clarity or perceived value — students may not understand why this group matters for them right now.

🔍 From here, your next step is not to abandon the strategy, but to refine it:

Clarify the invitation.
Simplify the form.
Better communicate the value of joining.

This is the heart of analysis. Insights help you move beyond surface-level observations (“what happened”) to meaningful understanding (“why it happened”) so you can make the changes needed to increase your effectiveness.

Analytics Tools You May Use

To run a report, you’ll need to go to the platform where your analytics are available. This will be different based on what kind of strategy you’re using and how you distribute your content to your audience. Most analytics data is available directly on the platform you use. For example, if you run a campaign through Instagram, you’ll be able to see post performance for your content on your Instagram page.

Similarly, if you utilize an advertising platform, you can view the ad performance on whatever platform you run your ads — whether Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads Manager or a similar advertising platform.

In addition, GDS makes several analysis tools available to national ministries, including GA4 and Metricool. See the Toolset section for our complete list of tools and to request access.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

GA4 helps you understand website behavior:

Where users come from.
What pages they visit.
How long they stay.
What actions they take.

GA4 is especially helpful for understanding digital journeys across multiple touchpoints.

If you use a website as part of your strategy, it’s vital to have Google Analytics running on your site.

Onboarding Guide:
Fill out this form to request access to Google Analytics or to connect the Google Analytics from your site into our ministry’s results dashboards.

For help, email: global.analytics@cru.org

Metricool

Metricool is our global platform for social media management. It allows you to schedule posts, manage multiple channels and analyze engagement across platforms — all in one place. It also simplifies developing your reports. It helps you track:

Engagement trends.
Follower growth.
Post performance.
Comparative performance across channels.
Ad performance for social media ads.

Onboarding Guide:
Start by creating a free account at metricool.com using your ministry email.
Then fill out this form to request access to Metricool.

For help, email: content.strategy@cru.org

A Final Thought

Sometimes analytics can feel uncomfortable. Seeing clear results may sometimes make us feel like our work is not effective or doesn’t matter. Or, you may feel like you’re turning people into numbers.

Our vision is to make Jesus and His mission available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. We want to give audiences an opportunity to respond and take a next step in a way that makes sense to them.

We can’t do that without analytics.

Analytics does not replace prayer. It does not replace dependence on the Holy Spirit.

It supports wise stewardship so that our vision can become a reality.

When we measure our results, we aren’t chasing numbers. We’re seeking fruitfulness. We’re asking how to better love and serve the people God has entrusted to us.

Because every number represents a person.
And every person matters to God.