Announcing Revive: A Free Tool to Find and Prevent Content Decay

Traffic growth can be measured just like a SaaS company's MRR:

New blog posts drive new traffic (Acquisition)
Old blog posts drive recurring traffic (Retention)
Old blog posts decay (Contraction)
Refreshed blog posts drive increased traffic (Expansion)

It’s much faster and more efficient to grow a SaaS company by expanding existing accounts and reducing churn. The same is true for traffic growth, but most content teams focus exclusively on new, new, new.

At Animalz, we think of content like a product. It helps us take a more holistic view on content and prevents us from churning out content just for the sake of creating something new.

If you look at content through this lens, your priorities may shift. Finding content decay—i.e. posts that are losing organic traffic over time—then regularly refreshing that content is an excellent use of your time. This doesn’t fit neatly into most content marketing workflows, but it’s perfectly intuitive. Our new tool Revive automates a sometimes-tricky part of this process.

Find Content Decay—Without Manually Combing Through Google Analytics

We’ve learned a lot about content from working with the best SaaS businesses in the world. And we want to share those learnings at scale so that many more people can benefit from our experience. Today, we are excited to announce Revive—our very first (free!) SaaS tool and the first step in making content marketing easier for every SaaS company.

"Content refreshes are a really important part of a content strategy, but it's difficult to keep track of decay. "Revive" finally makes this really easy to do."
—Kate McDaniel, UiPath

Here’s a scenario that every content marketer is familiar with. Traffic is growing, but more slowly than you’d hoped. You login to Google Analytics and start digging around. Inevitably, a few posts that consistently drive organic traffic have tapered off. Without manually filtering out other traffic sources and checking each individual post, it’s impossible to tell which posts are trending up and which are trending down. Without custom reports and above average Google Analytics skills, content decay—the loss of traffic to a URL over time—is nearly invisible.

Revive does all of this automatically. Once you authenticate your Google Analytics, our algorithm will assess every URL on your site to look for pages that are losing traffic over the last 12 months. We’ll flag these so you can refresh them. Just like it’s easier to grow a business by upselling existing customers and reducing churn, checking for and preventing decay is the most efficient way to grow traffic.

Our Formula for Detecting Content Decay

We’ll explain how to use the tool, but first, here are some quick insights on how we do the analysis. Content decay, as it turns out, is somewhat subjective. Sometimes it’s obvious that posts are losing traffic over time. Other times, perhaps because of fluctuations in search algorithms or seasonality, it’s very difficult to tell.

After much testing, we settled on the following framework for assessing decay:

We’d only look at traffic coming from organic search. This helps us filter out noise from paid campaigns and social media. Organic traffic is what you want to grow, so Revive helps identify these opportunities.
We look for trends over a 12-month period. This is enough time to smooth out most fluctuations in search volume as well as algorithm updates.
We then look for the percentage of traffic lost, how many months have seen a decline and how recently, and whether the URL continued a decline in traffic throughout the year.

We will continue to refine the algorithm to be as accurate as possible, but we feel confident that it will highlight your biggest opportunities.

How to Use Revive

Revive is dead simple to use. Just authenticate your Google Analytics account, then sit tight. We’ll send you a report within 24 hours. Here’s a quick video walkthrough as well as step-by-step instructions.

First, enter your email address. This is where we’ll send your report when it’s ready.

Next, authenticate your Google Analytics account. Many teams use shared Google Accounts for Analytics. Choose the account that contains the site you wish to analyze.

We’ll then ask you to select the view you’d like to analyze. Choose the view that you normally look at it in Google Analytics. Keep in mind that the view needs at least 12 months of data in order for us to analyze it.

Once your view is selected, we’ll run our algorithm. When it’s ready, we’ll send you an email with a link to your report. It will show all of the articles that we recommend refreshing, along with how much traffic the article has lost since its peak.

We are really excited to finally launch this to the public and we are very eager to hear your feedback. There are two surveys in the product, but you can also email us with any and all feedback.