Steven Schuster 
With third-party cookies gone in a privacy-sensitive digital world and an increasing reliance on first-party analytics to understand how users engage with content and how content is performing, the connection is even stronger for those deployed on headless CMS solutions. Where the content itself intersects with first-party analytics for an even more feedback loop. Content stored in the CMS (more structured and omnichannel) can be connected to the instantaneous analytics based on behavioral performance that is generated by action taken on first-party channels. This means more effective, informed, data-driven results that increase satisfaction, content performance, and overall project success.
The Advantage of First-Party Analytics in a Headless Environment
First-party analytics is any data an organization gathers about traffic or engagement from its website, iOS or Android applications, or authenticated user-based portals, from its digital presence. Third-party data is gathered by others and disseminated think pixels or tags from vendors and marketing platforms that compile data across clients/partners and gets messy over time, especially with new and forthcoming privacy policies. First-party analytics supports data integrity and transparency. In a headless environment where content can be sent to various front ends and channels instead of one centralized location, adding a first-party analytics layer ensures that wherever the action of content occurs, the organization knows how and by whom it’s being utilized. Integrating this capability within a scalable enterprise platform allows businesses to grow confidently while maintaining data visibility, security, and actionable insights across all digital touchpoints.
Mapping Structured Content to Analytics Events
One benefit of working in a headless CMS is that content is structured. No matter what content needs measurable action (blog article, product card, landing page hero), it lives in its own field and component. Therefore, developers can use the structure to add additional tracking. By tagging components content type, slug, language, taxonomy it’s easy to fire analytics events as users interact with these fields. For example, if you want to see how many people scroll on your hero image or expand on your product detail accordion or click on your FAQ CTA, these events can be tracked and reported against the attributes of the CMS and link back to more relevant metrics than just page views.
Using Metadata and Taxonomy for Better Measurement
Headless CMS solutions exist based on rich metadata/taxonomies to connect like-kind pieces of content. These could include tags, categories, content owners or campaigns. All of this metadata is useful when transferred to your analytics layer. When you can distinguish how someone engaged with a component versus how others engaged with like-kind components with different attributions, you can better segment performance reporting. Instead of generating a report to see how your digital “resource” page performed, generating metrics around “how-to” vs. “thought leadership” pieces relies on engagement metrics tied to content type. This value is inherent in the headless CMS and should be used for first-party analytics measurement.
Custom Dimensions Supported by Your Analytics Provider
To effectively use content data from your headless CMS it’s important that your analytics provider supports custom dimensions or event parameters. Providers like Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Matomo or Segment ensure teams are able to create fields that are not static properties for events tracked. Yet for the purpose of content identification, segmentation and analysis, fields within event payloads may be beneficial. This includes content ID, content version, language or experiment variant. Should your team be able to integrate these values into the corresponding events, it’ll make it easier to slice and dice the subsequent content performance especially in A/B testing or personalization situations where different variants of seemingly the same asset perform differently in engagement and conversion.
Analytics Embedded Whenever and Wherever the Headless Content Lives
Analytics are all the more important for headless content because it resides in multiple places, web, mobile, kiosks, smart devices. First-party analytics should be coded to function wherever the CMS content is rendered. Be it a React framework web app, native iOS experience or voice interface, first-party tracking needs to be established as extensible across the multiple front-end solutions employed by the brand. This is often easiest when determining shared analytics resources which reach out to the headless CMS API for dynamic data collection and registries of common events across experiences. Consistency here is key, especially when reporting across so many different places omnichannel efficacy relies upon it.
Making Analytics Part of the Editorial Process
This is especially prominent when real-time analytics can dictate content creation or changes once published. When first-party analytics dashboards are part of the publishing process it keeps teams on top of performance without having to toggle back and forth between dashboards and CMS. For example, if a team can see bounce rates or scroll depth directly through the CMS dashboard or content brief instead of having to access an analytics integration wholly separate from the authoring experience, they might choose to change their titles or adjust low-performing modules or double down on assets that are performing well. With seamless integration of real-time analytics into content creation and change efforts, editors will feel empowered without having to leave their workflows.
Privacy Compliance in Data Collection
Where there’s a need for GDPR and CCPA (and ePrivacy) compliance, all analytics layers have to be tied to such. For example, when you have a CMS-driven site and you’re tracking behavioral data of objects/content within your site, this needs to be compliant when it comes to users who opt-in, any associated cookies, and data minimization. Therefore, for tracking scripts to be useful, they need to comply with the opt-in. All personally identifiable information (PII) should be anonymized or hashed before storage. You can also integrate consent management platforms (CMPs) with your analytics layer to keep compliant. When users know and can control, you can transparently scale first-party data and gain trust in the process.
First-Party Data to Enhance Personalization and Content Strategy
When first-party analytics has access to the data that connects to your headless CMS content, you can trigger personalization and strategy from the outside in as well as inside out. For example, if a user engages with 3 articles about a specific topic, next-best-action is to render an offer conditionally. Similarly, if they read three out of five articles, the next-best-action could be getting access to a white paper of the same theme. On an aggregate across verticals and departments, first-party analytics helps identify content gaps through the seasons and regions, or trends by state. Therefore, it’s important to execute against this hindsight so teams can prioritize the creation of content based on what people did or are doing instead of speculation, adjusting/editing the editorial calendar in real time instead of waiting until the end of the month or quarter.
Assessing Engagement and Performance
When content isn’t rendered on-page and instead delivered via an API the experience doesn’t just stop with success of content engagement. You need to evaluate how well the content was rendered, too. This is where tracking API performance becomes part of the overall analytics. Whether it’s how fast the API renders the content or other caching errors through an API, assessment of latency goes hand in hand with insights from content. This not only provides greater observability between development and content teams, but also enables faster remediation and resource redirection when performance issues are uncovered.
Reusable Analytics Components for Content Templates
Because headless CMS options rely on componentized front-end builds, using content templates as components that are likely reused throughout the site is common. Adding analytics capabilities inside of the components ensures consistent event logging across however many times they’re used. For example, a CMS content component for a “feature card” would allow for event tracking of impressions and clicks, as the information rendered from the CMS is done automatically anyway. This results in no redundancies, improved accuracy for analytics, and an easier to maintain structure going forward with an ever expanding content library.
Reporting on Content via Dashboards for Non-Technical Stakeholders
No matter how first-party analytics are established, it’s more beneficial when shown to non-technical stakeholders via dashboards. A CMS can integrate with external solutions Google Data Studio, Looker, or visualizations on the front-end interface to provide content-based dashboards to gauge KPIs for engagement by content type, time on articles and most viewed top tags. These analytics are ideal for director of marketing, content strategists and product owners, as they can assess what’s keeping people’s interest for their initiatives and can present any growing trends to senior management for buy-in or further realignment without unnecessary downtime.
Testing and Experimentation Fueled by Events
The more connected your analytics framework is to your structured CMS data, the easier it is to test. Once you establish first-party analytics events to spur an A/B or multivariate testing titles, placement, or content types it helps drive engagement and conversion over time. Moreover, experiments can be spurred from baselines established by behaviors within your analytics layer for a continuous loop of enhancements driven by real feedback.
Resilience with Server-Side and Edge Solutions
Tracking for third-party sites becomes more difficult as browsers become increasingly restrictive for tracking on client-side sites. Having analytics reside within the CMS-driven content helps with server-side and edge analytics to capture all but the most minor of data points. Server-side tracking allows your events to be sent from your backend and/or middleware backends to ensure proper compliance and tracking without relying on front-end scripts. Coupled with metadata information from the CMS, entities can have visibility long after the fact years down the line when third-party scripts no longer exist, less dependence on third-party scripts while minimizing activity relative to the growing trend toward internet privacy.
Conclusion: Bridging Content and Insight for Smarter Delivery
Yet the true power of a headless CMS beyond the architecture flexibility and as part of a more comprehensive, cohesive technology stack nothing can be more impactful than connecting the dots with a first-party analytics solution. For when organizations are able to connect their content creation capabilities with their first-party analytics solution, they go beyond speculating on content performance to making informed decisions based on actual audience behavior. Connecting structured content to first-party analytics creates a feedback loop between creation and consumption between the publisher and real-world performance.
A headless CMS coupled with first-party analytics transforms each click, scroll, hover and getting submitted into a signal. And signals become actionable analytics that inform organizations which topics are eye-catching, which modules convert best and which formats keep people’s attention the longest. Editors, marketers and strategists no longer exist in vacuums with hunches and vanity metrics to guide their work; instead, they have access to rich, in-context information that’s tied back to pieces of content, individual components and specific campaigns. Such transparency not only creates improved editorial accuracy, it allows for ongoing improvements across the entire experience.
Furthermore, when personalization, content performance and data privacy are all vying for attention, an integration facilitates that none of them get shortchanged. A headless CMS and the experiences it can foster combined with first-party analytics allow teams to create content experiences that are responsive and responsible. The content of a message can be customized to the audience’s needs, while still ensuring consensual, compliant standards.
As digital experiences grow web applications and mobile apps, kiosks, voice-activated devices and beyond across all different channels distributing content across countless touch points, the opportunity for measurement to become standardized is key. First-party analytics connected to first-party CMS content supports teams in tracking performance no matter where the experience lives to measure findings, compare insights and act upon them. This omnichannel existence helps teams make experiences relevant at scale.
When organizations prioritize first-party analytics to take a structured, privacy-centric, omnichannel approach to measurement, they go from a reactive perspective to a proactive one regarding their overall content strategy. They are no longer just content publishers they become content-driven entities, empowered by intelligence where every experience gets measured, every insight improves the next and every action is taken based on what audiences don’t just need but want. That’s the difference between being data-informed and data-empowered. That’s the content strategy future and it starts with connecting your headless CMS to the metrics that matter.
About Author
Robert Mueller