Google Analytics (GA) has become the benchmark when it comes to measurement of success in the world of online marketing. One of the first things a company or brand wishing to work with a blogger or influencer requests is information on their Analytics. This is due to the fact that GA has become a powerful tool in determining the success of a content campaigns and knowing which data points drive that success are key to becoming leaders in content marketing.
These are the data points that can lead to high performing content campaigns:
Demographics
Using Google Analytics to look at your demographics is extremely useful in developing your content and targeting your specific audience. Google Analytics will help you learn specific information about who is actively using your site. By accessing the data about your demographics, you will find out things like age distribution, gender distribution and interest categories to help target your marketing efforts.
Engaging Behaviour
Google Analytics can help you look at which content is most relevant to your audience which means you will be able to create more similar content that will continue to attract and engage. By examining the data brought up on the behaviour of your site content you will be able to take a comparative look at the traffic on each page and determine what content is performing best.
You might find that there is specific material that is driving a large amount of traffic to your site and if so, you will want to feature similar topics and incorporate them into more of your online campaigns.
Traffic channels
Web traffic numbers are among the most important but it is also worth noting that traffic comes from several different sources or channels and in order to drive campaign success you must understand which of those channels is most effective.
Examining this data in Google Analytics will allow you to look at acquisition, behaviour, and conversion data for your default channel groupings. You can drill that information down further by looking at specific data, such as which social channels are bringing in the most traffic.
User Experience and Satisfaction
Content marketing success relies heavily on the user experience. Google Analytics allows you to gain an understanding of the user experience by comparing the performance by platform. By looking at data related to an audience of mobile users you can obtain reports on how much of your site’s traffic is driven by mobile devices such as phones and tablets. This information is crucial to developing a campaign that will result in user satisfaction. If a majority of your traffic is coming from mobile you will want to ensure that your site is optimized for mobile to create a better user experience.
Content groups
If your site, particularly a blog site, has a great deal of content it can be difficult to analyze content engagement. In this case it is most useful to create content groups where data can be analyzed based on different content categories, tags or other parameters you wish to set up using tracking codes, extraction or rule definition in Google Analytics. Once you have set up your pre-determined criteria you can pull specific reports for more accurate content performance data.
Conversion goals
Data on conversion goals allows you to examine the calls to action you have put in place for your visitors. Have you encouraged them to fill out a contact form, download gated content, subscribe to a newsletter or blog or make a purchase? Setting up conversion goals in Google Analytics will look at this engagement criteria and allow you to see what content is driving these behaviours. Once you have set up your conversion goals you can then go through reporting to see how visitors are using your site and completing those goals or allow to determine what problem areas, if any, exist.
Whether you are a large corporation or a small business, understanding the power of Google Analytics is crucial to driving the success of your campaign. If you would like to implement Google Analytics as a tool, are new to the platform and feeling overwhelmed or have specific goals you wish to achieve using data from Google Analytics feel free to contact the team at Social Know How for more information. We can help you achieve your success by numbers.
