Perform Content Marketing Analysis By Using Google Analytics
Content marketing is a valuable method of attracting a defined audience. By consistently publishing relevant and valuable content on your site, you can boost your marketing efforts to reach your target audience. Content marketing analysis is necessary to ensure you have a successful content marketing campaign. Read on to find out how you can analyze your content marketing using Google Analytics.
Building a successful content marketing campaign requires that you post new, relevant content to your site on a regular basis. Here’s how you can use Google Analytics to monitor and analyze your content marketing campaign.
First, you should set your date parameters. In Google Analytics, you can set your date parameters by clicking in the top right corner of the page. The next step would be to review data from all pages of your site. To do this, scroll down the left hand side navigation bar to the tab that says, “Behavior Flow.” This will show a subset of tabs. Select “Site Content,” then select “All Pages.”
Now, you can view this section in different ways by changing the “Primary Dimensions” setting. It all depends on how you name your blog posts. If, for instance, you include the date in the header of your blog posts, then it would show up with that in the “Page” view. If you do not use a date-based naming convention, and you are using a title-based naming convention for your blog posts, then you would benefit from using the “Page Title” view.
Content Analysis Methodology
When you are conducting analysis for your site, you should be focused on what you want viewers to do when they visit your site. In Google Analytics, you have the ability to set “Goals” for your data analysis. After you have defined your goals, Google shows a page value determined by the goals you have set.
You can change the amount of Pages that are displayed on the Pages report by selecting the “Show Rows” window at the bottom right. Once you have found your desired amount of pages to be displayed, you can export this data out into either Google Spreadsheets or Microsoft Excel. By doing so, you will be able to manually enter additional data that Google Analytics may not have available (i.e. topic, location, author, etc.).
Once you have entered all of the desired information into your spreadsheet, you now have your “raw” data set. You can generate additional data sets based off of whatever additional characteristics you entered, such as looking at how various topics performed. These can then be translated into graphs to visualize the data. Conditional formatting in Excel is a great tool to use to illustrate trends and quickly decipher data.
When comparing multiple pages against a certain set of data (i.e. Most shared on Twitter: Topic 1 vs Topic 2), you could determine the statistical significance of each page to see if the observed data is valid. There are various statistical significance Excel sheets available online.
Trends are continuously changing, so it is wise to monitor and assess the performance of your content. Update the areas that are doing well by presenting the information in a new way. For example, instead of doing a blog post, do an infographic. If some areas are doing poorly, then you should determine whether or not it is even necessary to continue creating that sort of content. Keep an eye on the performance of your content, and you will make better decisions moving forward.
