Is Knowledge Power Without the Means to Act?

eZ Market extensions are the route to gaining and maintaining your competitive edge by empowering personnel and giving them freedom to create and manage content smarter and more rapidly.

How many times have we seen marketing managers and their creative teams receive just weekly or monthly performance analysis on the campaign sites they have had built and are running live? How many editors have we seen refused personal access to traffic data tools by "IT" as internal protocols have developed with lines of knowledge and responsibility trapped in siloes? How many journalists have we met that have been given direct and real-time access to the audience stats of the stories they have labored on so that they could alter their editorial planning and focus real-time?

In organizations where full access to the analytics tool is given we then sometimes find another problem: the end users - journalists, editors, sub-editors, marketers and the rest - are simply confused, nervous, baffled or worse…bored!

As eZ Publish Enterprise continues to evolve into a full CXM solution suite the careful selection and implementation of agile high performance extensions is key to rapidly transitioning towards a smarter user-centric content strategy.

eZ Systems recognizes that though the use of advanced analytics tools is encouragingly widespread in our industry, the regular daily use of web analytics for tactical purposes is often lacking when it comes to those actors who are in the driving seat of content creation, management and business success. In cases where it is available and used the content management software to then rapidly adapt to the data's findings can be the next obstacle preventing a coordinated and proactive rapid response.

"Ah yes," we hear, "the data shows our hits are up/down/flat (delete as needed). Now what?"

eZ Publish now offers two solutions that are intended to solve this pain: eZ Live Viewer and eZ Exceed.

eZ Live Viewer is a unique and highly visual analytics solution that is so intuitive it needs little written explanation. It is a simplified analytics tool kit that is CONTENT CENTRIC - it reports on the popularity of articles or pages in real-time and creates a color-coded box for each story. The larger the box the higher the traffic. It's that simple!

With this easily understood and quick to learn to understand tool the editorial and content team can change the site's content on the fly by reacting to audience trends and usage. If stories are trending strong they can consider tweeting or sending email alerts to keep up the trend and capitalize on traffic has that shows genuine real audience interest.

To ensure a smooth working process eZ Live Viewer is integrated into the back office of eZ Publish since it is intended for direct use by content creators. There is no need for them to exit their primary working content management tool and log into another system…or wait for a report to be emailed from IT (next day).

eZ Exceed offers a new and intuitive editing interface that allows the whole team to rapidly collaborate and organize content as well as edit IN CONTEXT directly from the web page. Its ease of use and teamwork approach means that content creation and modification cycles can be cut from days to minutes. This translates into higher productivity with the agility to react to the analytics data that is served to them by eZ Live Viewer.

With the agility to react to the analytics data served to them by eZ Live Viewer this translates into higher productivity for your teams.

Intuitive user experience and user-friendly "non-techy" interfaces are the drivers behind both these extensions. By design eZ Systems has carefully selected "best in breed" extensions for business users to help simplify and empower their relationship with their working software.

Here are some images for you with brief explanations:

eZ Live Viewer

A site can be split into channels or sections and colour-coding lets us see which stories and sections are trending strong or weak. Here we see the blue business section is largest of all sections with the Natural Gas Bags story the leader.

Look at the clock in the upper right corner - it shows the data reported as the number of visitors in last 10 minutes only.

By clicking on just one section we get a wider view of all its content. The Business channel editor can now see that his "Work Boredom" story has had the highest viewership but the line graph shows it is in decline to flat. The "Need female execs?" story and "London mayor matters for women" story both show healthy increases in just a short time frame.

Perhaps both these stories could be pushed higher up page or front of site to gain higher traction. Maybe a tweet too can be sent to highlight the new content and give it a further boost.

A story's life cycle is interesting to see. By clicking the story we can see more - the peak and then slow decline in reader interest. Long term a journalist can understand their audience interests by editorial themes as well as their reactions to headline styles, story positions and perhaps image selections.

History of story performance will tell the journalist that the article would have large traction with the audience but something perhaps is wrong - is it time to re-write the headline, choose a new photo image or maybe move to a different section and see how it performs?

Time parameters are key to eZ Live Viewer. Seeing a story's history in the last 5 minutes, 10 minutes hour or day gives the editorial team a wider view. Perhaps the site is a global site and impact of time zones means multiple views are needed to make a correct decision?

Every site has a different structure with different analytics needs and potential. eZ Live Viewer is embedded into the content management platform and is highly customizable. Access rights to the dashboard can be given to any editorial user while configuration rights can be more tightly allocated.

eZ Exceed

eZ Exceed offers a new intuitive editorial interface to eZ Publish that is designed for speed of use by all, and especially non-technical, users. What's more it is designed for touch screens so mobile and tablet editing is further facilitated. Front-end, in context editing is now available with eZ Publish. Once in editing mode all fields and attributes can be modified with much greater simplicity than before.

Access to digital assets like image galleries is fluidly presented to the end user for their selection. The discovery or search process for digital assets is greatly improved.

Image editing, such as cropping, is highly intuitive for the non-technical end user.

Content archive and organization is improved with a drag and drop folder system.

Collaborative working is enabled with a built in messaging service. In real-time the team can now communicate within eZ Publish on a story or section to rapidly share and agree on needs for content development.

The trail of messages between team members is recorded so that different team members with different responsibilities can access and complete their assigned tasks.