Analytics platform actually helps boost web traffic

Echobox is a new app for content creators that gives them actionable tasks to help their writing go viral.

Web analytics tools are great for website owners who need to know how many visitors they’re getting, where they’re coming from and what content they’re engaging with. However, it’s typically left up to them to figure out the hard part — working out how to optimize content to give readers what they want. Echobox is a new app for content creators that actually gives them actionable tasks to help their writing go viral.

Aimed primarily at news publishers, the app eschews the bare facts, figures and graphs offered up by other analytics service. Rather, it uses algorithms and machine learning to give users plain English recommendations for tailoring both their site and writing to make it more suited to the way audiences already engage with it. The important numbers are instead encoded within these task suggestions. For example, the app may tell site owners that 75 percent of people stopped reading a particular post because it was too long, and that they should try cutting it down to a similar length to their most popular posts. It also offers advice on the optimal times to share certain posts on social networks to boost the number of eyes on their work.

By giving publishers actual tasks to help them improve their site for readers, Echobox not only gives website owners data but also crunches it for them too. The service is currently in private beta, but is already being used by a major new publisher, according to TechCrunch.Are there other data services that could be automatically processed to offer a more human-friendly interface?