Google Analytics
provides
remarkable free analytics tools to help marketers get more insights into their
audience and improve their marketing efforts.
With so many tools to choose from, however, it
can be overwhelming to learn and use them to inform your campaigns.
Fortunately, we’re here to discuss Google
Analytics and help you get the most from these available tools for content
marketing.
How Does Google Analytics Help Content Marketing?
Data is used to guide marketing strategy. Google
has a huge collection of data related to your audience and your business, so
you can use this mountain of data for actionable insights about how your
efforts perform and how you can correct or improve.
It also helps you answer questions about your
content marketing strategy, such as:
●Is my content marketing effective?
●What opportunities am I missing with
my content marketing?
●Where am I losing customers, and how
do I fix it?
●What are some of my trends?
●Are my efforts more or less
effective?
●What content types perform
the best?
●What are the gaps I missed?
The more in-depth data you can compile and the
more questions you can answer, the better your insights you can gain to inform
your strategy..
By using a methodical approach of reporting and
metrics, you can determine if something is or isn’t working and why. You have
the ability to analyze your traffic and audience to determine how customers
interact with your business.
You can also decide if your content marketing is
worth your investment, or find areas that are performing well, but can still be
improved.
Here’s how:
Define Your Goals
As we’ve discussed, Google Analytics has plenty
of resources to measure your performance, but you should customize them to get
valuable insights.
Defining goals is the best way to customize this
process.
Four different goals that can be used to monitor
your marketing strategy are:
●Destination: a specific location.
●Duration: session time.
●Pages/Screens per session: a user viewing a specific number of pages or screens.
●Event: a predefined action is triggered.
Google Analytics will help you set up your goals
and walk you through the process.
Use On-Site Search
Websites can grow rather quickly, especially
with a blog. With so much growing content, it can be difficult for customers to
get what they’re looking for unless they get there from Google directly.
Fortunately, you can help your customers find
your website and stay there with a search bar. This will not only get them to
the page they’re looking for, but it also gives you insights and data through
the Google Analytics on-site search terms report.
With an on-site search terms report, you’ll
discover the keywords that are most searched on your website and compare them
with those you’ve targeted. You may find that your content should be updated
with a new keyword and you may even want to create new content to gain better
engagement and more traffic.
You may notice a lot of traffic to a specific
page within the search, which can be used to:
●Target pages with marketing
campaigns.
●Link the page with high traffic to
low-performing pages.
●Redesign the site to improve the visibility of your popular pages.
To perform this search in Google Analytics, log
on to your account and go to the “Behavior” reports. From there, choose “Site
Search” and “Search Terms.”
This takes you to the dashboard of your on-site
search terms.
Optimize for Mobile
Mobile devices are used more by consumers than
ever before, so it’s important that your site works well for mobile visitors.
You should also verify that the changes you make work.
Log on to Google Analytics and find the
“Audience” tab on the left side, then find the “Mobile” tab. Expand it to
choose “Overview” to determine how well your site performs on mobile devices.
If you’ve defined a goal related to mobile
traffic or conversions, it can be included in this report. On the right side,
select the goal completion to display with mobile performance. With this
information, you’ll be able to look at the conversion rate and goal completion
over a time frame.
If you find that your mobile site version
performs poorly in comparison to your desktop site version, you know that you
need to do more to optimize your mobile site.
With Google’s recent mobile-first indexing
policy, it’s vital that your site has high performance on mobile devices to
keep your content marketing efforts effective.
Optimize Site Speed
Most sites load too slowly, meaning that they
fall below the three-second benchmark
for load
times. In many cases, these sites take over nine seconds.
As the page load time increases from:
●One second to three second, the
bounce rate increases by 32 percent.
●One second to five seconds, the
bounce rate increases by 90 percent.
●One second to six seconds, the
bounce rate increases by 106 percent.
●One second to ten seconds, the
bounce rate increases by 123 percent.
This information matters for two reasons:
●Speed affects your bounce rate.
●Google factors page speeds into ranking factors.
So, having slow load times will have a
detrimental impact on your search engine ranking and traffic. Before you’re
able fix this problem, however, you need to diagnose it. It may be a site-wide
problem, or it could just be a particular page, so you can identify the
particular pages and make improvements.
In Google Analytics, you can find this
information under “Site Speed” and “Page Timing.” This report shows you the
pages on your site and their respective load times, so you can analyze the
particular pages.
You can also find a “Speed Suggestions” report,
which will provide recommendations for how to improve the speed of different
pages.
Know Your Customers
Gaining an in-depth understanding of your
customers is paramount to your content marketing efforts. In fact, many
marketers have already prioritized personalized experiences.
By tapping directly into your customers’ needs,
you can increase your sales and profits.
Google Analytics Affinity Category reports can
help with this. Log on to Google Analytics and find the “Audience” section on
the left side. Here you will find “Affinity Categories.” Here you will see
which affinity groups have high traffic and low bounce rates or high
conversions on your site.
For instance, you may find that you perform well
with unexpected segments of your audience. This information will help you
develop your future marketing campaigns.
Another helpful report for understanding your
customers is the “Audience” report. You’ll find this under the “Audience”
section, but you’ll choose “Overview.”
While the overview doesn’t give you in-depth
information regarding your customers, it will help you target broad interests
like devices and locations.
Final Thoughts
We hope that these tips help you gather
information to inform your content marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that these
are only a few of the tools available with Google Analytics. Google holds an
incredible amount of data about your website that can be useful.
On top of that, it’s completely free. It’s
important to make use of what Google Analytics has to offer, so you can learn
what is and isn’t working and elevate your content marketing campaign.