The unbiased feedback provided by presentation analytics provides a boon of insights into which slides are resonating (or falling flat) with your audience so you can both fix an existing presentation, and drive your content strategy going forward.

The presentation analytics screenshot above tells the story of the most recent SlideRocket presentation newsletter. With just a glance you can see that the 4th article/slide was a real stinker, which helped us arrive at our first conclusion thanks to presentation analytics:

#1 Articles about minor product features are not interesting to our audience

With viewers spending 58% less time on this particular article relative to the next lowest performer, the results are conclusive. And because the article has generally the same amount of text as the others, there’s really no other reason for it to perform so poorly.

As the content creator, a surprise that jumped out at me was that slide #7 had the highest average viewing duration. It’s a bit of a shock because that slide is very different from the others in that it’s a “resource slide” that provides links to six articles we thought our audience might find interesting. This brings us to our second conclusion:

#2 Our readers appreciate the opportunity to choose from a menu of content

You can be sure we’ll explore this theme further in our next newsletter. Perhaps for each features article we’ll also provide 2-3 links to articles on the same or related topic.

Another key insight from the presentation analytics is the number of unique views the presentation has received relative to the number of clicks in the email we sent. For every unique click on the email there has been 1.2 unique views of the presentation.

#3 This newsletter was lightly viral at 1.2 views per email click

Because this is the first newsletter we’ve created in SlideRocket I’m not ready to pass judgement on the viral qualities of the content, but this does provide a baseline for evaluating how viral each successive newsletter will be.

Looking at the fifth slide we see that it performed only slightly better than the other slides of similar length and content type. This is interesting because there is an embedded webinar on that slide that’s 9 minutes long. Which brings us to our third conclusion:

#4 “Big content” more than a couple minutes long is not a good match for this newsletter

Given the chunkiness of the asset embedded on this slide, I would have expected the average view time to reach above 1 minute. Live and learn!

Looking at the view duration on slides two and six I can see that the theme of presentation templates is of interest to our audience. This provides me with further evidence I can use to justify deploying more marketing resources to create additional free templates for SlideRocket users.

#5 Our audience appreciates content that is helpful and relates directly to presentations

So, that’s a wrap for how we used presentation analytics to better understand how our newsletter performed. Let us know if you have questions, ideas or a hypothesis you’d like us to test.