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Okay, so you’ve started your content marketing strategy. You’ve written some blogs, begun establishing channels for promotion and set up analytics to track everything that’s happening.
If you’ve done all of this, then you’re probably seeing an increase in traffic to your site! Congratulations!
But what does it all mean?
How do you know which blogs really captivated the audience and which were duds?
Did you generate more traffic to a specific blog because the topic was interesting, or because the title was captivating?
To find out the answer to these questions and more, here are 3 important metrics to look to in your Google Analytics.
1. Popular site pages
First you’ll want to take an inventory on what’s happening on all of your pages – not just your blog. What is the goal of each page and are people achieving it? What is the difference between the pages that have more visitors completing the goal from the ones that don’t?
Remember, your blog is there to generate interest to your site through valuable information. Ideally, you’re promoting the blog in front of potential customers who will want to know more about what your company does. They will be browsing through your other site pages so it’s important to optimize them for conversion as much as possible.
Here are some tips to get started:
Go to the all pages report under the behavior tab in Google Analytics
Find the pages with the highest conversion rates
See which important pages are not converting well, and see how you can create content around them
2. Popular blog pages
Of course, the blog analytics hold a great deal of importance as well. The first thing to note is the amount of time that you would ideally want someone reading your blog post. The number of visits that you’re getting is a good measure of interest, but it doesn’t mean much unless people are actually reading.
To measure this effectively in Google Analytics, simply set up a goal that triggers after a certain amount of time reading the blog post. That will give you quantitative feedback on the interest and success on the quality of your blog post.
3. UTM Parameters
Set up UTM parameters to ensure you understand everything about how and when your posts should be shared. This will allow you to see which blog topics are the most effective through which social media channels. Some content may be more effective with your Twitter followers than those you reach out to on LinkedIn. Also, your “quick reads” may be more effective in the afternoon, and your more valuable content more effective in the morning.
To find this out, simply enter the title of the blog post and the time it is shared in the content field of the UTM tag.
All marketing – content, email, even guerrilla – is all about trial and error. You need to try a lot of different tactics to see what sticks best with your audience. Why analytics are so important is so that when the right marketing tactic works, you know it. By using analytics, you remove politics and biases from the equation and allow the results to dictate your marketing strategy.
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