You want to generate leads and make sales but you gloss over your Google Analytics reports as just another section with all these graphs and numbers you can not even begin to understand. But that is a big mistake to make. It is like driving but not knowing where are you heading to or whether you have lost your way. There is no purpose in creating engaging content if you do not even know what your target audience considers engaging.
For one thing, it has been determined that 20% of your content drives the majority of traffic to your website. Google Analytics reports allow you to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy by establishing what kind of content brings you the most value and attracts more audience than any other type of content. Many researchers were done by essay writing service company as, we know, is a high competitor niche. So, it's essential to develop unique and profitable content strategy on this market.
One Key Performance Indicator that you want to check here is located in the “ Behavior“ section of Google Analytics.
·Behavior
All Pages gives you insight into what kind of content/ pages your website visitors are attracted to.
It consists of these parts:
Pageviews - shows how many people visited a particular page on your site indicating what kind of content is the most popular with visitors. But this does not mean that your job ends here. Once you have identified the most popular content you should make it even more appealing to your audience by updating it, including more interesting content.
Bounce Rate -shows the percentage of visitors who only visited one page on your site before they bounced elsewhere. This can indicate that your content could be more engaging to readers, but also that your website could be simpler as your visitors have problems navigating it
Average Time Spent on Page - this metric is pretty straightforward as it shows the average time a visitor spends on your page, indicating which content gets the most attention
Entrances - showing how many visitors used a particular page as an “ entry point“ to your website
Unique pageviews - using IP address this metric shows how many individual visitors clicked onto a particular page of your website which is particularly useful for measuring your website traffic
Exit rates - showing the percentage of visitors who exited your site from a particular page. This one is important in determining whether your content should be more engaging to readers. If your content needs a boost, you might want to consider hiring a professional writer who would make it shine.
·Social Media Traffic Referral
Social Media Traffic Referral metrics basically show which social media distribution channels bring you the most external visitors and should, therefore, become the target of your social media marketing campaign. Is it Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Reddit, Quora, Instagram...that brings you the most readers?When you determine which social media site brings you the most traffic you will want to start sharing more content on that particular site, using your email marketing campaign to promote it, submitting links etc. If you want your overall referral traffic to increase you should consider reaching out to popular blogs and guest blogging in order to increase the awareness of your own content.
·Demographics and Location
You want to know what is your target audience in terms of their location, age and gender so that you can make the content of your website more attractive and appealing to them. For example, if“ age“ subsection of “ demographics“ tab shows that that the majority of your visitors are older than 25, you should place more emphasis on the content geared towards young professionals. If “ gender“ subsection shows that the majority of your visitors are women, you will what to include more feminine content or even change the appearance of your site in terms of colors etc. And what about “ location“ tab? That one is equally important in determining which locations should be targeted in your social media or AdWords campaign.
·Landing Page
This subsection of Google Analytics Reports shows which of your blog articles are the most popular, which social media channels brought you the most frequent visitors and what is the average time visitors spend on a particular page. If your most promoted pages and blog posts are at the top, it indicates that your social media campaign has been effective and that you should focus on them in the future. If they are not at the top, it means that you should change your strategy and focus it on what brings you more visits.
·Goals
In order to create an effective content marketing campaign, you will want to define your goals in Google Analytics “ goals“ section. Is your goal to increase your conversion rate? To increase the time a visitor spends on a particular page or a number of visits? Track their visits to the signup page? Just use one of Google’s simple templates and set up the goals you want to track.
·Keywords
It goes without saying how important keywords are for your SEO campaign. This section will enable you to determine which keywords brought the most visitors to your website, how many pages they viewed and what is the average time they spent on page. Once you identify your most popular keywords, you can start focusing your SEO campaign on them.
·Measure Downloads
While you can extract this information by asking your visitors to fill out a contact form, why bother them when you can use Google Analytics to check the most downloaded content on your website by using event tracking.
It is true that Google Analytics Reports can be difficult to navigate and intimidating with their scary numbers and graphs. But what is the most important here is knowing which key performance indicators to focus on in order to create an effective content marketing strategy. There is no point in creating what you consider to be the most engaging content if you do not have any information indicating if your content is hitting the target with your target audience.