10 Analytics Tips To Improve Content Marketing Strategy

Time on site, referring links, bounce rates, and page views are some of the data regarding your site visitors that can amaze even the best of content marketers out there. How can you determine which data is important for your content marketing strategy and how can you use that analytical data to your advantage? Content marketing strategies are crucial for online success. However, just like any other technique, it is imperative that you crunch the numbers to determine what works for you and what does not. The most effective way to find this is through use of analytics, such as Google Analytics. Read on to learn about the 10 ways in which you can enhance your content marketing strategy to get more leads, and ultimately, improve your bottom line..

1. Understand the High Page View-High Bounce Rate Relationship

We often come across pages that have high page views, but they also have high bounce rates. What can we make of this? Well, it shows that even though the content on the page is most probably useful, the visitor does not have a clear, established path to follow after they have gone through it. This calls for the right call to action (CTA). Are you giving your visitors an option to act after reading something on your website? Think about this.

2. Review Your Daily Report

Make sure you set up your Google Analytics to get a report in your email every day. You will be astonished to know the pages of your website that are shown in your top 10 list. They may include your team page, an old blog post, or even your pricing page. In general, regardless of which page shows up in your top 10 list, it implies that there is considerable interest for those particular pages, and this is a signal for you to take action to promote them further. For example, you could consider running social ads for those pages or scheduling social shares, whatever works best for you.

3. Think About Your Least Viewed Pages

A lot of people pay attention to the top pages. But are your bottom pages getting the attention they deserve to get? Do you want people to see them? What is the reason behind them not getting the number of views you expect? Where does the fault lie? Is it with the content or with the way it is optimized? All pages of a website must be in harmony with each other. If it’s cluttered, people will not find what they are looking for. Every now and then, review which pages are not being navigated to and see how you can make them easily accessible.

4. Translate Technical (or Difficult) Stuff into Plain English

Does your website explain technical things or things that are difficult to understand? You can figure this out by viewing the time spent on a particular page. People often navigate away from pages that have difficult-to-understand content. Sometimes it’s an excellent idea to turn them into plain English sentences by adding ‘which means…’ and explaining it in simpler words. You will notice an improvement in the time spent on pages.

5. Focus on Popular Blog Topics

How can you find out what topics you should focus on? View your top performing blogs to identify the topics that the visitors engage with the most, this will put you on the right track when it comes to writing more of similar content. In Google Analytics, you can view this data by navigating to ‘All Pages report’ under Behavior. Make sure that those pages that contain blogs are shown (use advanced filter).

6. Understand In-Page Analytics

It is crucial to understand how your visitors engage with content on your site. This will help you determine whether it is correctly optimized for conversions. You can see the clickable elements on the page with which the users interacted using the In-Page Analytics Report in Behavior section of Google Analytics.

7. Have Clear Objectives

It is necessary that you set up goals and have objectives even for non-revenue generating content. Spend time to track engagement and interaction for useful feedback regarding what works and what doesn’t in relation to your goals.

8. Can You Convert?

The ultimate aim of any content marketing strategy is to successfully engage visitors and get them to interact with your business. This interaction steadily builds trust, and transforms them into your loyal customers. If this isn’t happening, then you are missing the whole point of it. Traffic, regardless of how much you are getting, will do you no good if your website fails to convert people into leads. Check your conversion rates to determine where you’re falling short, and rectify it by improving on areas that need work – such as your landing pages, for instance.

9. Learn from Those Who Refer to You

Review the websites that have referred traffic to your website (excluding search engines and social media). Check out a few and see what they are writing about, whom they link to, and what their founders or writers share on social media. Using this intelligence, you can develop content with utmost confidence that it is up to the mark, particularly when compared to your referrers’ content.

10. Utilize UTM Parameters

UTM parameters enable you to attach extra information to the links that point to your site, allowing you to collect detailed data regarding the clicks that lead up to your website. In a content marketing strategy, UTM parameters are most commonly used during the promotional stages. You can use these to tag social media posts that have the content you posted on your company’s website. This will help you determine not only which social media channels are most useful for you, but also the time of day at which they are most effective. UTM parameters are also useful when you post content to third party websites where more than one link is used for each post.