Content marketing isn’t rocket science, and using its analytics for your benefit is at the top of the line to break down your marketing strategy. We can think of content marketing analytics as the trails left behind by people and machines. Content marketing analytics holds home to a wide variety of metrics from view pages, downloads, perceptions, and the decisions users make.
As a part of your strategy, you can use these analytics to work out which areas you have to focus on. With the aid of this data, you can assess the impact of your content and transform your strategy to be more polished.
Why Rely On Content Marketing Analytics?
“Nearly ⅔ of leading marketers say that decisions made with data are superior to those based on gut instinct.” — Google.
The term ‘data-driven content marketing’ has been gaining popularity in recent years for all the right reasons. With competition soaring to the skies, simply relying on your gut feeling won’t cut it. Although trusting your instincts is good, they are not good enough. A more practical approach would be using data to power your marketing strategy.
A good content marketer makes decisions based on data and analytics. Data presents you with all the hard facts needed to transform your content marketing strategy.
Related Reads:
- How to Use Content Marketing Analytics for Your Brand? – A Step-by-Step Guide
- Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Plan
Here are 9 Ways to Use Data to Transform Your Strategy Using Content Marketing Analytics:
- Analyze Bounce Rates
- Bridge Content Gaps
- Research on Ranks
- Learn Your Users’ Platform Habits
- Analyze Audience Data
- Employ a Visual Conversion Fuel
- Asses Power of Marketing Campaign
- Look at Heat Maps
- Comprehend Organic Search Metrics
1. Analyze Bounce Rates
High bounce rates mean that you have a good number of people visiting your page. The only question you have to ask yourself is where these visitors are going. With the average bounce rate for e-commerce sites being 47%, anything higher than that must be decreased to create desirable conversions.
With the help of Google Analytics, you can easily figure out which pages fetch high bounce rates. Click the ‘Bounce Rate’ metric, and your pages are sorted from the highest to the lowest. Now, let’s see how to use this data to help with transforming your content strategy.
First, filter out the pages that have relatively low bounce rates by creating a segment to “All Users” at the beginning of the report. Select “Behaviour” and choose which pages you want to focus on. By saving these setting changes, you can see bounce rates in two segments: All Users and New Sessions.
You can read a breakdown of the sites your user visited after bouncing from your initial page. With this valuable content marketing analytics, you can figure out what these pages have that made users bounce to them, then try to seek inspiration from them.
2. Bridge Content Gaps
Every great decision on content marketing can be made on the basis of data. With analytics, you can decipher what content your audience wants, and what is missing on your page. Every user’s journey through your page shows how they landed on your site and how far they have gone through. By knowing where you lost your audience’s attention, you can make out which parts of your content strategy are working their magic, and where you have to add your creative touch.
These content marketing analytics tools also give you the data on which search terms are landing your users on your website. Check these keywords with the analytics of your page with your focus points being time spent on site, exit rate, and bounce rates. With keyword research, you can transform your strategy based on the knowledge of what your visitors are looking for and create more content on that subject.
3. Research on Ranks
Awareness of what terms make your page rank at the top provides a layout of what your content should be centered on. With this, you can elevate your content marketing strategy by keeping these terms in mind. Google Search Console is one of the top content marketing analytics tools to yield data on the keywords your website ranks for. Google Ads keyword planner discovers related keywords that you have missed from your content and are not ranking for. All this research on ranks can significantly increase clicks and impressions on your website.
4. Learn Your Users’ Platform Habits
For those who are unsure how this can help to transform your content strategy, here is our answer. According to a recent study by Statcounter, nearly 60% of the world surfs the internet through their mobile phones. With the information on what devices your blog’s visitors are frequenting, you can optimize their experience.
Google Analytics again comes to the rescue by giving you insight on your users’ platform habits, so you do not lose them owing to a bad experience with your website. With detailed specifications on conversion metrics, behavior, and device categories, you can compare and improve the friendliness of your website.
5. Analyze Audience Data
Revising your content marketing strategy based on your audience is the most sensible thing to do as a content marketer. Along with looking into the bounce rates of your page, looking at the audience segment bounce rate through the audience segments in Google Analytics will be a useful guideline for you to better study your audience. Not understanding your audience is like shooting arrows without aiming at a target.
While studying your audience, you must focus on demographics, like buying patterns, pain points, preferences in content, emotional triggers, and the main social media sites they go to.
All these content marketing analytics can be easily available through tools, like Google Search Console, including forms to collect data on your webpage, running surveys, and studying your audience activity on other sites.
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6. Employ a Visual Conversion Funnel
To increase conversions, you must know what’s stopping them from happening. A conversion funnel provides a visual representation of how your users land on your site, their behavior while on your page, and what pushes them for conversion. This representation shows the main area you should focus on, which is where you lose your audience.
Google Analytics lets you customize your own conversion funnel, but for fresh content marketers, there are also pre-built funnels. With this content marketing analytic tool, the specific step where your visitors fall off is visible. By gathering the biggest fall-off places, you can get rid of the roadblocks in your strategy and increase conversions.
7. Asses Power of Marketing Campaign
Every marketing campaign is essentially a strive to attract fresh customers. To measure the effectiveness of every campaign, Google Analytics’ Key Performance Indicator (KPI) lets you create your own dashboards to measure the increase in revenue. Although you can design your own dashboard, there are a few metrics everyone must keep track of.
Traffic source is one of the widgets that you must add to your dashboard. This can show which sources are highly impacting your performance. By setting your specific goals, you can know where you stand in terms of conversions. Sessions, bounce rates, and page views are the next metrics you must look into. This can help you narrow down what is working, so you can transform your strategy for the better.
8. Look at Heat Maps
Visual representations are absolutely necessary if we want to understand and improve our work. Heat maps are the best visual representatives of your visitors’ behavior on your website. From where your user hovers their cursor, to where they look, to how far they scroll through your content, every move can be tracked and studied with heat maps.
With these data, you can position the main message at the places where your visitors interact most. A classic example would be if most of your audience is scrolling only halfway through the webpage, it means the content has to be shortened because your audience has lost interest and won’t go any further. Revamp your content strategy by improving user flow and experience, and remove any blocks you can see on your heat map.
9. Comprehend Organic Search Metrics
Any content marketer should know that there are endless ways to market your content. With these many content types, you must be careful when choosing the right ones for your audience segment. Looking into the performance of the different types of content on your blog, you can decide what works best for your audience. Your content strategy must include an extra focus on these types of content.
Google Analytics can tell you if search engines like your content through a number of sessions. A high number of sessions, high session duration, and low bounce rate are what you are looking for. Looking at your competitors’ sites and seeking inspiration from their formatting can make a good content marketing strategy.
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FAQs
What is a content strategy?
In simple terms, a content strategy is a map to guide your path through your marketing efforts. It should come in line with your business goals and include all the bits and pieces from designing content to publishing, evaluating its performance, and fetching desirable conversions.
What is audience segmentation?
Audience segmentation is a major part of a content marketing strategy to identify subgroups within your audience. To give a more tailored message to your audience, knowing demographics like age, gender, location, interests, and much more is necessary.
In a Nutshell
Behind every good decision of a content marketer, there is data that reveals the hard facts. All quality improvement of your strategy must be powered by the analysis you made on your content. With a data-driven approach, you can have a clear vision of your final destination. Leverage the power of content marketing analytics to your benefit, and you can definitely see wonders working.
