Nine out of 10 companies are creating content, but how are you measuring the results? If you’re like most marketers, you’re reporting on numbers that many search experts consider ‘vanity metrics,’ such as organic traffic figures and ranking position. Below the surface, questions remain about how exactly content is benefiting the brand.
For example, eMarketer recently covered a study that asked marketers which metrics they wish they could measure in their content strategies. Over 41 percent said they want to know how much more likely people are to buy their products or services because of the content they’re creating.
Not automatically accessible in Google Analytics, it makes sense that marketers have a hard time getting their hands on this kind of actionable data. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there – it just has to be teased out with careful segmentation in analytics reports.
Step 1: Create a segment for people who read your content
This will allow you to see how many visitors came into your site and viewed your content at some point while browsing your site. You can segment out a news section, blog section or video content to refine your data.
Step 2: Apply the “Visitors who read content” segment and look at Goal completions
If you don’t have Goals set up, start here. If you do, you should be able to compare how many of your blog readers are converting versus the rate at which overall traffic does.
In this example, people who come to the site and view a news article are converting at a much higher rate than people who arrive through organic search without reading the content or those who come via paid ads.
Track conversions back to sales
Depending on the Goals you’ve set up in analytics and how those track back to your bottom line, a conversion might be an actual purchase (and cash in the register) or a hot sales lead (with a bigger deal down the line). Either way, you will be able to deliver more concrete answers on ROI after seeing how many website visitors are entering the sales funnel, if not becoming customers, after reading your content.
If you want to know more about how to calculate the ROI from your content, check out this blog post from our lead strategist Jeff Baker.
