Brand awareness is one of the most difficult metrics to track. Attributing a user’s purchase to a blog or piece of content they came across days or even months ago is nearly impossible.
For this reason, content marketers face an enormously difficult task of providing clients with accurate results that reflect their efforts.
But can cold hard data measure the impact of a creative campaign? Are SEOs and content marketers forever doomed to their independent silos? In this article, the experts at ContentMender will demonstrate simple ways to track your creative campaigns using content marketing analytics.
How to Measure Content Marketing Analytics
Content marketing analytics measures the performance of any piece of content in several key areas, including user engagement, retention rate, organic traffic, and much more.
It’s key to understand that many content marketing analytics will be specific to individual pieces of content or your blog, as opposed to sitewide efforts. Therefore, we will use different metrics than what many traditional SEO campaigns might incorporate.
Key Content Marketing Metrics
- Channel Attribution: This metric tells us how many people visit our website through each channel, such as social media, advertising, or organic search. Remember, organic search will also incorporate traffic from branded keywords or people looking to contact you–not because they read your content.
- Sessions & Total Users: This metric–found in GA4–tells us how many people visited a specific landing page and how many times they have.
- Data-Driven Attribution: Google Analytics recently removed several attribution paths from its analytics and ads platform. However, with the new data-driven attribution, you can see what channels contribute to conversions based on Google’s machine learning program. This includes ads and organic channels–even YouTube.
- Device Attribution: GA4 lets us track how many people visited a page by mobile or desktop device. This metric is valuable in determining what kind of content we want to create based on the device our audiences are using.
- Average Engagement Time: Engagement time measures how long people stay on a webpage. In theory, a higher engagement time means people consume your content for longer, but it can be pretty nuanced.
- Views per User: This valuable metric tells us how many people visit other pages after a landing page. Note: This metric also tracks refreshes, so it can be slightly disingenuous. However, tracking users with “Path exploration” in GA4–which we will discuss–can really show you where people are going after engaging with your content.
- Conversions: Setting up custom conversions, such as when someone makes a purchase or visits a Thank You page after engaging with a blog, can provide specific numbers that can be attributed to your content.
- Revenue: Assigning value to conversions allows you to track the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing campaign.
Popular Content Marketing Analytics Tools
So how do we collect all of this data, and where does it live? Fortunately, many of these metrics can be found in several free content marketing analytics tools, including Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. However, there are several additional content marketing tools that will help track analytics.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
GA4 is a free analytics tool that recently replaced Universal Analytics by Google. GA4 lives on the backend of your website and tracks each unique IP that visits your site, including what pages they visit and actions they take once they land on your site.
If you click on Reports, then Engagement, and Landing Pages on the left side, you’ll be able to see the number of views, events, and sessions of each landing page, including blog posts.
The Path Exploration tool lets you get more granular and track where individual users on your website traveled once they landed on a page.
In the example above, you can see that two people who have visited one of our blogs over the past week came to our Contact page. Now, if we create a conversion event to track every time someone fills out a form, we can see the conversion rate of individual blogs.
To get started, collect the URL from the Thank-You page on your website and create an Event in GA4 under the Admin window with the following conditions:
- First Condition: “event_name” equals “page_view”
- Second Condition: “page_location” equals “www.example.com/thankyoupage”
Then activate the event in the Conversions tab under the Admin view to start tracking.
Google’s Guide to Set Up Conversion Events
Google Search Console
Search Console is a unique platform that helps manage several tasks for website admins, including indexation settings and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
Marketers can leverage the ‘Search result’ report under Performance to monitor which pages are driving the most clicks and impressions. This is great for tracking the off-page SEO of any piece of content to better optimize your content for search engines.
Bonus: Gain deeper insights by clicking on each page and seeing what search queries drive the most clicks/impressions to any page.
Keyword Trackers
Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs are great for tracking individual keyword positions and estimating the total traffic your website receives from individual keywords/landing pages.
For example, under SEMrush’s Organic Research report, you can filter Pages by estimated traffic percentage to get a glimpse of what pages are driving the highest traffic to your website.
Then, when you click on the page, you can see which keywords are driving the highest traffic and where they rank in results–SEMrush even tracks SERP features, such as People Commonly Ask boxes.
Note: Traffic estimates will vary greatly from Google Analytics as these platforms don’t have access to the same trackers you do and can only estimate percentages based on keyword volume and click-through rates.
Customer Relationship Management Software
Many CRMs like HubSpot and Infusion Soft feature robust analytics platforms that allow you to create custom conversion funnels and track leads in real time as they land on your website. Marketers can benefit from these platforms by properly attributing sales through the software to channels that contributed to that purchase, such as your blog, and then assigning revenue numbers to those purchases.
Tips to Start Monitoring Your Content Marketing Campaign
Now that you have a rough idea of what metrics and tools to analyze your content marketing campaign, it’s time to put them to work.
Integrate Goals Into Your Content Calendar
First, if you want to fine-tune your content marketing analytics, you’ll need to assign goals and KPIs that reflect those goals. For example, if you are looking to track the ROI of a writing campaign, you’ll need to be able to assign revenue and proper attribution to your blogs using tools like GA4 or a CRM.
Setting goals also creates benchmarks for performance so that you can pivot strategies, if necessary, midway through campaigns to help reach your goals.
Research Your Audience
Content needs to speak to your audience and address pain points. Leverage these tools to gain greater insights into your audience, whether it’s monitoring the behavior of people who land on your blog or researching the exact queries they search to find a webpage.
Tools like GA4, Google Ads, and Meta provide enhanced audience analysis tools that can help segment your audience by various demographic and psychographic features. Many CRMs and email management tools also provide these features.
Conduct a Content Audit
Learn more about your audience by seeing what content resonates most with them already by performing a technical content evaluation. These audits provide in-depth insights into the performance of your content and your website as a whole.
Conducting an audit can also help you uncover technical errors that are holding your website back or semantic ones that are curtailing click-through rates. Several content analysis tools we have detailed in the past will benefit your website.
Match Keywords to Posts
Target a specific keyword with each post so you can track the performance of that post in relation to its ranking, total impressions, and click-through rate. This will help you attribute traffic to your website down to the webpage level and see what strategies work and which do not.
Monitor User Behaviour on Your Website
Traffic is a good metric for campaign success, but what about once people land on your website? Monitoring user behavior via how many people bounce from your site (bounce rate), click to other pages (sessions per user), and complete a purchase (conversion) will give you far greater insight into how effective your content is at persuading users toward a desired action.
Read our guide on How to Leverage Content Marketing for Lead Generation.
Research Appropriate Lead Attribution
Finally, there are many ways to track leads and assign attribution using these tools. However, most of us understand that conversions are rarely a single path from click to purchase. In reality, some purchases will be made after people read your content, research your products, and click on an ad.
So if you are relying exclusively on first-click or last-click attribution, you may only get half the data you need. Luckily, GA4’s new data-driven attribution resolves most of these issues. However, blending data from different attribution will give you a more precise picture of how much revenue or conversions your content delivers.
Recap
- Metrics like brand awareness and authority can be difficult to track but are a major part of any digital marketing campaign.
- Even conversions are rarely a single path from click to sale, which makes attribution models tendentious. However, new data-driven models promise greater clarity in that regard.
- Marketers can improve their content marketing analytics by tracking the right metrics and investing in the right tools.
- Setting goals and tracking performance via appropriate KPIs can give you a clearer understanding of your campaign’s progress.
- Content marketing campaigns can benefit from conducting the right research and monitoring the behavior of users as they engage with your content.
