Google Analytics for Marketers
Marketing campaigns are essential to the success of any business. Successful marketing strategies lead to new customer acquisition, and customer retention, and can ultimately lead to sales and profits for the business. Using content on a website or blog is an essential portion of a modern marketing campaign. Many business owners focus on trying to create the perfect content, but if a search engine can't locate your site, your content is virtually useless.
Using content marketing analytics, marketers can determine how best to optimize content and see benefits from their content marketing efforts.
What Is the Difference Between Content and Optimization?
Many don't realize that there is a difference between content and optimization. Each term applies to two distinctly different audiences. Content, for example, appeals to readers.
When readers find the content interesting, they will continue to read. Great content keeps the readers interested. The content encourages readers to invest in your products or use your services.
Optimization, on the other hand, is for search engines. Search engine robots translate your text into SEO rankings. If your content isn't optimized, your website or blog could be overlooked. Overlooked content won't make it onto search engine results pages and will therefore go unread.
How Does Content Optimization Work?
Content optimization is the process of writing your content so that it reaches the largest possible audience. The content optimization process includes having associated keywords, meta and title tags, and relevant links present with the content. Optimizing content involves intricate details, and search engine robots weigh content, HTML, and backlinks.
Tips for Optimization
Optimizing content may seem difficult, but it doesn't have to be. Some of the websites you view may have a professional behind the content optimization. However, even a beginner can learn to optimize site content to bring more traffic to your site. Here are some tips to improve your SEO ranking:
Write great content: Content isn't everything, but it is a large part of the strategy for increasing the number of site visitors. Increasing your SEO ranking will increase organic traffic to the website. Page views alone aren't enough to increase SEO rankings. To increase your SEO ranking, create content that is original, engaging, and written for your purposes. No one knows your business quite as you do, so creating content that describes products and services, or that provides business updates should be relatively simple for you.
Keep the content fresh: Returning visitors and SEO robots alike love fresh content. Constantly update your site content.
Use headings: Headings and subheadings on the landing pages, blog posts, and other individual pages will help to draw the attention of search engines. Make the headings and subheadings large or bold and use keywords in them to increase SEO rankings.
Optimize the text: Add some key optimization tools within the text to help drive traffic to your site. Title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and URLs added to your pages are all ways to optimize your text.
Optimize your images: People love images. Maximize the effectiveness of the images on your pages by optimizing them. Add alt tags, and image tags to provide hidden descriptions and optimize further by ensuring the file size is correct for the images to upload and be seen properly.
Optimize your videos: Like images and large, bold headings, videos grab the attention of your readers and keep it. You can embed your own videos or use clips you find on YouTube. Use keywords in titles and descriptions, add videos to social media platforms, and use videos as calls to action to guide traffic.
Stop writing for search engines: Search engine robots can determine if you've written content solely for search engine optimization instead of for the reader. If the search engine robots determine you aren't writing your content for your users, it will hurt your rankings. Don't write content simply to get published. Instead, write quality content to keep your readers actively engaged with your content and add optimization tools such as keywords and linking after you have your content set.
Social media is your friend: If you aren't using social media to your advantage, you are missing a key component to content optimization. Posting a link or status update isn't enough to generate traffic to your landing page. Instead, create social media pages people will interact with, and that will organically lead those people to your website. Use your social media to connect with your customer base.
Clean content or no content: Search engines won't include illegal or hard-to-find content in their results. Use original content, be creative, and keep your code clean.
How Do You Know if You've Written Great Content?
If you think that great content is a subjective idea, you aren't alone. However, you're missing the point if you overlook the benefits of an excellent content marketing strategy. Great content will add value to your business. It's as simple as that.
If you aren't recognizing a monetary benefit that is in proportion to or greater than your investment, you may begin to have a hard time justifying the expenditure for creating content.
Commercially Defining Great Content
Great content is that which is most often seen prior to conversion or transactions on your website. Google Analytics has a formula for calculating content greatness based on economic value added monetarily to your bottom line by a piece of content. Page value is the metric that Google Analytics uses to determine content greatness.
Prerequisites to Using Page Value Metrics
There are some things that you should set up before you start relying on page value metrics to analyze your content.
ECommerce tracking or enhanced ECommerce tracking: As the name suggests, this is for those individuals who run an eCommerce website. Any eCommerce tracking you use should be free from issues, especially issues of duplicate transactions.
Goal conversion tracking: This tracking is for non-transactional goals. Think newsletter signups, form submissions, page views, and other interactions that don't require the exchange of money. You want no issues in your goal conversion metrics.
Assign the correct values to all non-transactional goals: As an example, if you're tracking newsletter signups, assign that a monetary value (most businesses assign $1 to newsletter signups, but you might place more value on it).
Before you use page value metrics for data analysis, you need a minimum of 30 days of clean data.
Google Analytics Data Must Be Purged Before Measuring Content Marketing Data
The key to effective Google analytics for marketers is determining which goals are relevant and which are irrelevant. For example, page views are generally an irrelevant piece of data, and so are randomly determined values for non-transactional goals.
These practices have the effect of skewing other data such as page value, website goal conversion rate, per session goal value, and other metrics in various analytics reports, especially multi-channel funnel reports.
When looking at content marketing analytics, you should question where the data comes from. Only measure the goals that are beneficial to your business. Ensure that you are measuring the correct values for each goal. If you haven't purged your Google Analytics data, you will make decisions that are wrong for your business, and that can cost you money.
Facts About Page Value Metrics
Here are a few facts that must be considered when you are using page value metrics:
You must have eCommerce tracking in your Google Analytics account to get value from the page value metric when you run an eCommerce website.
If you don't have goal conversion tracking set up in your Google Analytics account and correct values assigned to non-transactional goals, the page value metric won't be of value to a non-eCommerce website.
Google Analytics will report a page value of $0 for each piece of content if you don't have goal conversion tracking or eCommerce tracking capabilities.
The lowest page value will be assigned to pages that are the least frequently viewed before transactional or non-transactional conversions.
Those pages that weren't viewed before non-transactional or transactional conversions will be assigned a zero page value.
The highest page value is assigned to pages that were viewed most often before transactional and non-transactional conversions.
Page value is useful as a point of comparison but not as a standalone metric.
Don't use page value as the only measurement of success for a piece of content. Look at the economic value that has been added to the business bottom line.
Justifying the Content Marketing Budget
If you've got a large (thousands of dollars) content marketing budget, how do you justify spending the budget? Reporting social sharing and links won't help you if the content adds low or no economic value to your bottom line. Social shares, brand visibility, average session duration, and backlinks are secondary benefits that can't be easily measured against your monetary bottom line. In other words, it's difficult to prove those things impact the bottom line. If you're only looking at these secondary benefits it can be the equivalent of looking at walls with no foundation or icing with no cake.
If your content production isn't adding monetary value, then at some point, it will become more difficult to justify spending the money required for production and marketing campaigns. If you look at page value metrics, you can easily see which pages on your website aren't adding value to your bottom line.
Content consumption and engagement are often seen as a measure of success in content marketing, but the driving force behind the consumption and engagement may not be from the correct audience for the right reasons. For example, if your content has nothing to do with your target audience, the products you sell, or your niche market, the consumption and engagement metrics will be useless. So, you may be seeing a lot of engagement on your website or social media where users interact with your content, but that content may not be adding actual value to your bottom line.
If you look at your page value analysis and every piece of published content has zero page value, then the content isn't adding monetary value to your business. At least, you can't easily prove the value. When that's the case, it's time to reconsider your content marketing strategy.
A Hit on Social Media Doesn't Equate to Success
If your contact marketing efforts have gotten a lot of likes on Facebook, pageviews, backlinks, or tweets they aren't necessarily a success. When you see social traffic and shares, you can feel good about your business and marketing efforts, but if there's no real economic value attached to those social shares, then you can't really count that as a success.
Content must have monetary value to the bottom line and it must be a calculable value that is added. For many industries, the following kinds of content won't add economic value to your bottom line.
Curated content
Ego bait
Interviews
Infographics
Content that complains about the industry or criticizes businesses or bloggers
Content with nothing to do with your niche, target audience, or the products you sell
If your content marketing strategies focus on the kinds of content listed here, it is likely a wise idea to adjust your strategy. When looking at content marketing analytics, pay attention to the content that is performing the worst. Often, people are surprised to find that will be infographics because they are the least profitable.
Why are infographics less profitable? They usually have a high cost per acquisition and a high cost to produce.
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, mistakes marketers make is producing content that has nothing to do with their niche or target audience. Aligning content marketing goals and business goals is crucial to improving the bottom line.
What Is Profit Index?
A profit index is a database of website data based on which pages on your website were viewed the most before transactional or non-transactional conversions. So, it catalogs all the profitable pages on your website. It can also be an inventory of the items on your website that sells best. The idea behind having a profit index is that you gain insight into what sells well and you can sell more of that item.
Profitable content is that content that adds value to the bottom line while providing simple, smart solutions that improve customers' lives while at the same time influencing purchasing behavior. If a piece of content is profitable, it will trigger transactional or non-transactional conversions which will make it the most often viewed content prior to conversion. To improve your website's conversion rate, you require large amounts of profitable content on the site.
Is a Profit Index Necessary?
The profit index is a piece of content marketing analytics that only includes the pages that can trigger conversions. If you can isolate the web pages that are performing well from the rest of the pages on your website. You can then use the data to optimize just those pages. The profit index can help you improve your bottom line, especially if you have multiple pages on your website, and you don't know where to begin with optimization. The profit index can help you determine if it's the landing pages or exit pages or somewhere in between.
Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle? The Pareto Principle is the 80/20 rule. That means 80% of your output, sales, or conversions come from 20% of the input, products, or content pages. So when you find the 20%, you focus on it to reap the 80% benefit.
Why Are Content Marketing Analytics Really Important?
While you are processing all of the information we've been throwing at you, consider the reasons for trusting content marketing analytics. There's been proof that using content marketing analytics helps you to create a successful content marketing strategy. In fact, a content marketing survey showed that 90% of people who took the survey ranked their content marketing strategies as a successful measurement of content performance. Only 34% of the people who responded to the survey and reported disappointing content marketing results actively measure the content's performance.
Content marketers should use data and content marketing analytics to help guide decisions about content marketing campaigns. The marketing performance data can answer questions about how well your marketing strategies are working.
Key Metrics to Use to Track Your Content
You should have a content strategy when you are talking about content marketing. Creating and promoting effective content is work that you don't want to waste by having the wrong content on your pages.
Google Analytics is a good place to start when planning your content strategy. The platform is free and has various tools that allow you to analyze data and track your marketing strategy's success.
Some of the metrics that are helpful to measure are:
Organic traffic and landing page metrics: One of the most valuable ways to gauge SEO success is to track a website's organic site sessions over time. This helps you recognize whether organic traffic is growing, declining, or staying the same. Understand content performance by knowing details for each landing page rather than focusing on overall traffic only.
Keyword rankings: Keyword ranking determines the bulk of website traffic and lead generation. It also helps you to strategize how to create more effective SEO content.
Bounce rate: This is how many site visitors you have that don't click links or travel to other pages within the site. This shows you pages that aren't generating interest. Lack of interest could be from outdated content, not enough backlinking, not enough relevant content, improper formatting, or they could be slow to load or to work well on mobile devices.
Page views: Evaluate your top-performing content to learn what site visitors find valuable. Page Views will help you understand which content is getting attention whether that's organic or paid traffic.
Referral traffic: Typing a URL into a search bar is the direct method of finding a site. Other ways to find sites are through social media, email campaigns, organically using a keyword search, or using a link in a promoted or paid ad. Referral traffic sources are those sources like social media, email, or websites with backlinks.
Organic click-through rate (CTR): This determines how the content on your website meets the needs of your audience. This metric measures whether users click on your link to get to your page or click other links while on your page.
New vs. returning visitors: New visitors are seeing your page for the first time. Returning visitors are those who come back for additional content. Returning visitors are better than new visitors because they found something helpful on your site and came back again.
Final Thoughts
Using Google Analytics to determine how to create marketing content that fits within your overall marketing campaigns is a wise decision. Remember to purge old data before acting on marketing data. The data you should focus on is related to the strategies that are driving conversions and positively affecting your bottom line. That will help you determine what you already have optimized appropriately and what you need to optimize.