Why is Google Analytics important for content marketing?
In order to improve any part of your business, you need to be able to measure it, as management thinker Peter Drucker was right. The easiest way to measure is by using a tool that offers incredible reporting features at no cost from a company that is already collecting data from your company and customers.
Google Analytics can help you improve your marketing performance by giving you data-informed marketing decisions.
If you have an idea for a piece of content, it is likely that your customers are waiting for this content. This is because content marketing is designed to solve the same problems that your product solves, through the creation and promotion of media.
You do some research on the internet to find out what would be the best possible content on the subject you are interested in. You create this content and then publish it.
Without analytics, you can’t gauge the success of your content. All you can do is hope that it resonates with your audience and brings in new leads.
Analytics can help you understand how well your content is performing and give you insights into what else you can do to improve it. Google Analytics is a great option that is free to use.
What are all the individual pieces that resulted in the conversion, with people coming to your site?
Goal-setting can help you not only to establish what you want to achieve, but also learn how to create a plan and take action to achieve it efficiently. You can also use goal-setting to come up with new content ideas and learn how to make adjustments to your existing content to make it more effective.
And not only that, Google Analytics can help you answer questions like:
- How effective are my Content Marketing efforts?
- What are the pieces of content that are the least effective and turn visitors away?
- Are my efforts improving over time?
- Which types of content are most effective for converting visitors? Which types of content are most effective to build traffic?
- What are some content topics that I’m missing out on?
- What are some quick wins that I can implement?
If you have more data, you can make better decisions about your content marketing strategy and what to do next.
Google Analytics Terminology
Google Analytics can be confusing if you don’t know the lingo. This article will ensure you understand the basics before moving forward.
What is a User within Google Analytics?
An individual that browses your website on Google Analytics is called a user. It does not matter if they visit your website once or multiple times.
GA uses a cookie to identify a unique user. This means that a user is stored in a browser. If someone visits your website using different browsers (on the same machine or different devices), GA will report more than one user.
The User ID feature allows you to identify one person across multiple devices/browsers. A User ID is a way to combine sessions from a known person on your website. If you are able to identify someone (for example, by using an ID from your CRM system), you can send that ID to GA, which enables a unique set of cross-device reports. Note that this will only work accurately when you are able to identify a visitor (for example, when someone is logged into your website) and will not work for all visitors.
What are Pageviews?
A Pageview is when a User views a page on your website. Google Analytics orders your pages based on the most amounts of views. This helps you to identify which content of yours is viewed more than others.
Unique Pageviews?
While Pageviews may be a helpful metric, it does not accurately reflect how many times a user visits a page. If a user visits the same page multiple times within the same session, each instance is counted as a Pageview, regardless of the reason for revisiting the page.
The Unique Pageviews metric only counts each page once within a single session, even if it was viewed multiple times.
What is Bounce Rate?
In simple terms, the Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave without viewing any other pages. A high Bounce Rate is not necessarily a bad thing, as it could just mean that people found exactly what they were looking for on that page and then left. However, if you have a low Bounce Rate, it could be an indication that your website’s content is not relevant to what people are looking for.
Make sure to take the Bounce Rate into account depending on the page it is for. For example, a landing page should have a lower Bounce Rate because people need to convert and move onto the next page. Whereas, something like a Homepage or Store Locator might have a higher Bounce Rate.
What are UTM Tags
You need to start tracking all your Inbound Marketing activity by using UTM tags.
Additional details that are appended to the end of a link that is being shared are called query parameters. Including query parameters in links that are shared will result in those details being included in Acquisition Reports.
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Urchin Tracking Module is a company that was bought by Google. Google Analytics is a result of the buyout. UTM are the things you can see after a URL in your browser. The extra details are always at the end of a URL you’re sharing and include things like utm_campaign, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, and utm_id.
Campaign Name
The “utm_campaign” dimension is one of three main parts of a UTM tag. The other two dimensions are “utm_source” and “utm_medium.” The “utm_campaign” dimension helps you identify a specific product promotion or strategic marketing campaign. For example, if a store is running a sale for spring, they may use the tag “utm_campaign=spring_sale” to let people know what the sale is for.
Medium
The final parameter you need is “utm_medium”. Medium can tell you how the message was communicated to the visitor. For example, “utm_medium=cpc” for a cost-per-click campaign, or “utm_medium=affiliate” for an affiliate link.
Ways to Use Content Marketing Analytics
There are nine ways to use content marketing analytics to make your campaigns more effective, whether you are just starting out or have been doing this for a while.
- Use Bounce Rate to See Which Pages Have the Highest Engagement and Identify Common Themes
Contentsquare states that the average bounce rate for e-commerce sites is 47 percent. If your pages have a higher percentage than that, you may think of those as “high” bounce rates. The good news is that you can use high bounce rates to your advantage. You can see where the traffic is going to the page in question and use that data to improve your website.
To find the pages with the highest bounce rate, go to Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown in Google Analytics and click on the “Bounce Rate” metric. A down arrow will appear to show that the metric is sorted from highest to lowest.
Click “Add Segment” to the right of “All Users” at the top of the report to filter out the top pages with a very low number of sessions.
To exclude certain behavior from your segment, click the red “+New Segment” button, then select “Behavior” from the left side options. Here, you can decide what pages to exclude by adding a quantity next to “Sessions.”
After you click save, you will be able to see the bounce rate by two different segments which are all users and the new sessions segment that you just created.
Click on the first webpage on the list and the primary dimension will change to “Page path level 2” in the chart above.
The following is a list of the pages the user visited after leaving the initial page. By analyzing this data, you can understand how users navigate your site and what may be missing from the initial page that caused them to leave. This information can help you improve the content on your site.
- Use Content Marketing Analytics to Identify Content Gaps and Create New Content
Analytics can not only tell you which pages on your website are being visited the most, but it can also tell you what sort of content your visitors are interested in but are not able to find. By understanding this, you can make changes to your website that will improve the user experience.
Content marketing analytics tools can help you understand how users find your website and what they do on your site before they leave.
66 percent of businesses said they want to increase content creation spending, which makes sense.
Ubersuggest’s free keyword tool allows you to see which search terms generate the most traffic and identify the top pages that rank for those terms.
To identify content gaps, you can check how often people visit the page and how long they stay on the site. A high bounce rate or exit rate, or a low time spent on the site, could mean that the page is missing key information.
What will this tell you?
Text that follows: If your pages have high traffic but also high bounce or exit rates, this means that the needs of your visitors are not being met. However, by conducting keyword research, you can determine what it is that visitors are looking for and add content accordingly. This will help to improve the quality of your website and keep visitors coming back.
- Research What Terms Your Top Pages Rank for and Create Content for Related Terms
What terms do your top pages rank for? Use this information to create content on related search terms.
Google Search Console is a great way to see which keywords your website’s pages rank for. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it.
You can use Google Search Console to submit and check the sitemap for your website. To do this, follow these steps: -Log into your Google Search Console account -Click the website you want to submit a sitemap for -Click ‘Sitemaps’ from the left-hand menu -Click ‘Add/Test Sitemap’ in the top-right corner -Enter the sitemap URL and click ‘Submit Sitemap’ Log into your Google Search Console account. Click the website you want to submit a sitemap for. Click ‘Sitemaps’ from the left-hand menu. Click ‘Add/Test Sitemap’ in the top-right corner. Enter the sitemap URL and click ‘Submit Sitemap’.
Enter the URL of the page you want to track, select your preferred country and click “Add”. Log in to Google Search Console, click on “Performance” in the left navigation bar, and then click “+ New”. From the drop-down menu, select “Page”. Enter the URL of the page you want to track, select your preferred country, and click “Add”.
Enter the URL of the page on your website that you want to check. Scroll down to see a list of the most popular queries for that page, including the number of impressions and clicks.
You can research your entire website, rather than a specific URL, which could be useful for small websites or blogs.
Ubersuggest and Google Ads keyword planner are both tools that allow you to find related keywords to the ones you are already ranking for.
This can help improve your content by reducing content gaps (as discussed in the previous section), increasing impressions, and clicks on your current URLs. With organic search driving 53.3% of content consumption, now is a good time to focus on targeted keywords.
- Compare Engagement Across Platforms to Determine Mobile-Friendliness and Implement Changes
If you’re not aware of how or on what devices your website’s visitors are accessing your site, you could be missing out on optimizing their experience. This could lead to losing traffic and damaging your brand strategy.
Worldwide internet traffic is broken down by device as follows:
- 56.05%mobile
- 41.52% desktop
- 2.43% tablet
Although the specifics differ depending on the location and website, it’s a fact that most users access the internet on their mobile devices regularly.
Google Analytics can tell you about your visitors’ platform habits. This information can be useful for content marketing.
To view your website’s mobile traffic data in Google Analytics, log in to your account and go to the ‘Audience > Mobile > Overview’ section in the left navigation.
The following text provides data on how devices vary in metrics such as acquisition, behavior, and conversion.
This step is about focusing on how conversion rates compare across different devices. For example, if the desktop conversion rate is 2.73% but the mobile conversion rate is only 0.89%, this suggests that there may be something wrong with the mobile-friendliness of your website. To investigate this, you can use tools offered by Google or Bing.
Even if your website is mobile-friendly, these tools can help you improve it.
Conclusion
Your content strategy should always be changing and adapting. You can use analytics to see which direction you need to shift.
Analytics can feel like a lot at first, but they can give you data that you would miss if you only looked at the surface results of your campaigns. These insights can help you change your strategy to make your campaigns more successful.
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