Web Analysis in Practice: How to Measure Your Content Marketing Performance with Google Analytics

For numerous companies, measuring success in content marketing is uncharted territory. While AdWords ads and SEO measures are regularly examined for their performance, content marketing often gets left behind. There are several reasons for this. In addition to lacking personnel resources, many companies do not know how to specifically analyze and evaluate their published content.

Why Successful Content Marketing Requires Success Measurement

Content marketing is demanding, but when done right, it is one of the most successful strategies in online marketing. Unlike AdWords ads and social ads that are geared towards immediate traffic, content marketing ensures that users acquired through ads and announcements find the content they expect on the website. This sector of online marketing is therefore a crucial piece of the puzzle for building sustainable, high-quality leads and ultimately gaining customers.

Therefore, measuring content marketing performance is essential. It reveals whether your content marketing strategy, production, and promotion are on the right track and whether your measures are effective or where you need to optimize.

For success measurement in content marketing, two key metrics are primarily important: metrics for content marketing and metrics for conversion. The former indicates the reach of the content. The latter, on the other hand, describes how successful it is from a business perspective.

Blog articles, YouTube videos, eBooks, etc., are not published for their own sake but usually serve to achieve a specific goal. To analyze success, you need to define what the relevant goals are. Otherwise, you are analyzing in vain. Such content goals can include:

• Inform the target audience

• Encourage the audience to share the provided content on social media channels

• Increase reach

• Position yourself as an expert in your industry

• Keep visitors on the website longer

• Facilitate contact

• Product sales

• Acquire new customers

• Retain existing customers

The possible goals are diverse and strongly depend on your own business.

Content Marketing and Google Analytics – A Strong Team

Success measurement using a web analytics tool provides the perfect foundation to regularly review your content marketing activities for their performance.

To select the appropriate tool for success measurement, you must first determine which information is relevant to you and which metrics you need. You should ask yourself the following questions:

• How often should success measurement be conducted?

• How many pages do you want to analyze?

• Do you need the data in real-time?

• Do the data need to be prepared for others, and if so, in what form? (Excel, graphics, in text form, etc.)

• Should it be possible for you to receive the data via email?

Google Analytics offers the advantage of being able to customize it precisely to your needs. Additionally, Google provides further tools (Google Tag Manager, Search Console, etc.) that enable even more in-depth analyses (depending on the planned analysis, you may need to expand your tracking). Possibilities include:

• Button tracking setup: examining whether users click on certain buttons

• Scroll depth: examining how much percentage of the webpage users view

• Video tracking: examining whether users watch certain videos, and if so, how long

• Engagement: examining whether the browser tab is open in the foreground or background

• Download: examining whether users download certain elements (PDFs, graphics, etc.)

Fig. 1: Event tracking possibilities

How to Use Google Analytics for Success Monitoring

Google Analytics is a powerful tool in the area of success measurement and provides numerous insights into content performance. Below, we present examples of how you can use Google Analytics to evaluate content performance specifically.

Content Marketing: How Many Users Your Content Has Reached

To evaluate your content, you must define metrics that best achieve your set goals. In content marketing, relevant metrics may include:

• Number of page views (blog articles, service text, etc.) per day and total

• Average visit duration

• Number of downloads (eBook, whitepaper, infographic, etc.)

• Percentage of read/viewed/listened content

• Ratio of new and returning visitors per day and total

• Traffic source

• Number of accesses from mobile and stationary devices

Fig. 2: Relevant metrics for evaluating content marketing

Once you have defined the most informative metrics for yourself, it is time for evaluation. The following example shows how you can proceed.

In the first step, you should investigate how many users you have reached with your content. Content reach is one of the most important pieces of information in validating performance. It is important to note that reach is purely a quantitative measure. It does not indicate the quality of the users reached or whether you have reached the right target audience.

By measuring the number of page views, you can determine how well you have managed to spark interest from users (click on the article on your blog homepage, click on a tweet, Facebook post, etc.). Whether you have met user expectations can also be checked well with Google Analytics. Using the metrics "average time on page," "scroll depth" (needs additional setup), and "bounce rate," you can track how long visitors were interested in your published content. A short visit duration, barely scrolled content, and a high bounce rate are clear signs that users did not find what they were looking for or expected.

To assess whether you have reached your target audience or engaged users you previously didn't consider, step two involves taking a closer look at this in Google Analytics. Metrics like "gender," "age," "city," and "user type" provide more detailed insights.

While the metrics "gender" and "age" can define the target audience themselves, the metrics "country" / "region" and "city" play an important role in location-based business. By using "user type," you can discover the extent to which you have reached new users with your content and maintained the interest of users you already know.

Your content must be published or marketed on third-party sites to be noticed by your target audience. To check if you have reached your target audience in this area, you should view from which sources the traffic originates in Google Analytics. With this information, you can evaluate the channels used and potentially optimize your content distribution in the future. You will see which channels are already working well and which you should push further.

If you target mobile users, it definitely makes sense to analyze whether you reach them on mobile devices. You should certainly take advantage of the opportunity to analyze access figures by devices to evaluate content performance and discover (unknown) optimization potential. Given the increasing importance of mobile-optimized websites for both search engines and users, you should definitely take a closer look at these numbers.

Content Conversion: How Many Leads You Have Achieved

Making users aware of your content is one thing; getting them to take follow-up actions is quite another. After analyzing reach, the second step is to investigate whether your content contributes to actually achieving the pre-defined goals.

Again, you need to determine the most relevant metrics for you. Here, you can choose between monetary (customer acquisition, customer retention, revenue, etc.) and non-monetary (brand, interaction with website content, etc.) oriented metrics and consider them either together or separately, as needed.

In Google Analytics, you can examine various metrics, such as:

• Number of items sold

• Level of contact initiation

• Reading of other articles (e.g., in article series)

• Newsletter sign-up

• Use of (call-to-action) buttons

• Number of downloads for further e-books, whitepapers

The aforementioned selection is just a small sample of possibilities. With Google Analytics, you can determine and evaluate numerous other metrics. Which specific metrics are of particular interest to you naturally depends on your website and your business.

What We Can Do for You

Do you already create high-quality content and need professional support with success measurement? Do you want to use Google Analytics for performance evaluation but are not sure how to implement it on your site? Then contact us. Our web analytics specialists will advise you on defining relevant metrics, carry out the success measurement for you if desired, and also take care of the complete implementation if needed.