Perhaps you are creating beautiful infographics, publishing quality blog posts, and deliver meaningful but quirky tweets on a daily basis. But, even with all this, if you aren’t delivering the needed results of your content strategy then this content isn’t worth much, is it?
With any content strategy, tracking and measuring to determine ROI is essential. It’s important to know how well your content marketing strategy is working and if you’re getting the reach and identified results wanted. There are so many choices to use in order to measure the success of your content marketing strategy but one that you’ll find most marketers using is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, but it can be really confusing at times too. In order to not get lost in the innumerable amount of data Google Analytics offers it’s important to determine your content marketing goals. Once you determine your goals you can then look for the exact subsets of data that’ll tell you what you need to know.
Here are a few ways you can use Google Analytics to your advantage and get the measurements of your content strategy.
Time on Page
When measuring traffic on a page is important to remember that seeing a high volume of visitors on a page doesn’t mean your content is a success. You may have a great headline, or the SEO tactics you’re using on your page may be working. However, in order to determine if the high volume is really related to your content you should pay attention to the average time-on-page data.
If you visitors are spending a significant amount of time on your page then you can safely say there’s a reason for that – your content is working.
Conversions
Each company has a different definition for what a conversion is. For some it’s an email and contact info (a lead), for others it’s a complete purchase. When it comes to content marketing, anything from a sign up to a download can be measured in order to determine a conversion rate. With Google Analytics, you have to set up a “goal” in order to track conversions effectively. There are different types of goals in Google Analytics:
- Destination
- Duration
- Pages/screens per visit
- Event
By completing a specific goal a conversion rate can be tracked. For example, if “destination” is set as a “thank you” page for downloading an eBook when a user downloads the eBook and lands on the “thank you” page once done then that creates a conversion tracked by Google Analytics.
Knowing your conversions is essential because you learn how many people are consuming your content.
Referral Traffic
Did you know that referral traffic is another way to measure your content marketing success? Basically referral traffic is traffic to your site that originated from another source. Google Analytics tracks referral traffic when a user clicks on your site or page from a source like Facebook or Twitter. There are a couple of different ways that you can measure this traffic, by using the referral traffic report or from the list of secondary dimensions on a page-by-page basis by choosing “referral path” or “full referrer”.
There are a number of different ways to use Google Analytics to measure your content marketing strategy depending on your specific goals. Whether you want to measure overall traffic or conversions Google Analytics provides an analysis that is abundant and useful for measuring the success of your strategy.
Image source: http://www.eqtm.com
Tags: content marketing, marketing
