VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 1 Content Marketing - Analyzing Your Efforts: This is a transcript of a presentation originally given live at the Growth Powered by Risdall Fall 2014 Seminar. I m Beth, a digital marketing manager at Risdall, and I ll be discussing how to analyze your content marketing efforts. I d like to review three concepts of content marketing that need to be top of mind during the entire content marketing strategy. Specifically, these concepts are going to impact the lens we use to view analytics through. Understanding the Buyers Journey: The buyer is being taken through a three- step journey on the way to a conversion (a conversion in this case being a purchase or something that affects your bottom line): Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. After becoming a customer, they may be in the retention or advocacy phase, which can be thought of as a rejuvenation of the conversion funnel, where our goal is to make them become aware of more products or services, or drive deeper adoption of our offerings.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 2 Assign the right goals for the right content: Ideally the content strategy is to design content specific for personas in one of these phases of the Buyer s Journey. So if the goal of the content is simply to nurture someone in the awareness phase, we ll want to analyze our efforts based on metrics that tell us if the audience has become aware of our business. Those metrics are going to be for example, impressions of an ad or sessions to the website. That metric is not the same metric as someone who has consumed a piece of content meant for a buyer in the decision phase. That metric is going to be a count of forms submitted to the sales team or transactions completed on an ecommerce site. Understanding your reach over time: It s also important to keep in mind that not every piece of content is going to have the same shelf life. Here I have examples of sessions to the Risdall blog pages on our website.! Blog 1 received about 100 visits in its first two days of life. Then trailed off quite a bit, but received some sporadic hits for a few months longer. I expect to see this kind of life for a post that was distributed almost exclusively through social media.! Blog 2 received almost 1,000 visits on its first day of life, and then nothing after that. This is typical of a post that was distributed almost exclusively through an email blast. Folks open the email, read the content, and don t share or return.! Blog 3 clearly had modest beginnings, but gained momentum overtime. This is an example of a post that was optimized well for organic search, and over time, picked up more popularity with search engine results. As web users type in a particular string of keywords, this post is offered as a relevant search result.! So when we take a step back and analyze the blog as a whole, we see a steady flow of visits. This is because all of our content, distributed through different types of amplification tools, are working together like gears. Beth Varela Risdall Marketing Group bvarela@risdall.com
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 3 Acquisition: We ll be exploring three specific areas of Google Analytics with the goal of analyzing the efforts of content designed for the awareness, consideration, or decision phases of the buyers journey. I can find most of the metrics I need to analyze a piece of awareness content in the Acquisition area of Google Analytics. From within Google analytics (the reporting tab), I ll click on Acquisition from the left hand menu options, and then on Channels. This shows me all the different channels from which traffic has been brought to my website (organic search, referral when someone arrives to my website from a hyperlink on another website, direct that means the visitor knew my website URL and typed it in directly, or bookmarked it, paid search, social media, and so on. Another popular channel that isn t represented in this particular screen shot is email). That s all fine, but the point of our discussion today to attribute these metrics to a specific piece of content.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 4 Secondary Dimensions: To do that, we ll add a secondary dimension. A Secondary Dimension is just a fancy word for another column. Here we ve added another column to the table, and chosen landing page, so that we can view the landing page URL that has received traffic through these distribution channels. In this example, I m seeing that our blog The 300 Word Myth received 880 sessions through organic search and 95% of them were new visitors. If that piece of content were meant to bring awareness to more web users, I d say it s done its job. These are the metrics that are going to be important to me. We also get a sneak peek at some metrics that might be more important in understanding the behavior of a visitor once they ve crossed into the consideration phase of the Buyer s Journey. A Bounce just means that the visitor only viewed one page the visited the website, and bounced right back off. The higher the bounce rate, the lower the pages per sessions metric and we can see how long they spent on this landing page consuming the content. So that gives us insight to the visitor s behavior, but we have certainly already justified its original goal of bringing awareness of our business to new visitors. Because adding a secondary dimension is going to be so important for the rest of our discussion, I ll take a minute to show you how to add a secondary dimension in case this is a feature you re unfamiliar with.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 5 Video: I first click on the secondary dimension button, which opens up a menu of options. I start typing in l- a- n- d so that Analytics will draw the landing page option to the top of the menu for me. By clicking on landing page my secondary dimension is added. Now I ll navigate to the advanced search hyperlink because I d like to include landing pages containing the word blog in it. When I apply that filter, only landing pages with the word blog are displayed in my secondary dimension. When I m ready to get rid of it, I just click the X s near the filter or the column to remove them. Let s review the Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, that we ve uncovered so far for content that we distributed for the purpose of awareness: We ve attributed visits and percentage of new visits to our content. We ve also received a sneak peak at some consideration metrics like pages per session and time on site, so we can start to understand the visitor s behavior once they arrive on our site. Beth Varela Risdall Marketing Group bvarela@risdall.com
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 6 Behavior: I ve found that I m able to uncover metrics I need to analyze the consideration phase in the Behavior section of Google Analytics. Site Content: We ll first navigate to Behavior, which is in the left menu under Acquisition, and we ll look at Site Content. This places the page as the primary dimension. I can make this look quite similar to what we just saw in Acquisition by adding a secondary dimension and choosing Default Channel Grouping. I can use the same filter features we saw earlier to only view the landing page of a specific piece of content. In this example, it s my 300 Word Myth blog again, so this should all look familiar. We are given a new metric in this are, which I ve always thought might be better served in Acquisition, but for whatever reason it s here in Behavior. Notice Entrances on the far right. This is telling us whether this URL has been the visitor s entrance point into the website, from which they might either bounce or visit more pages. This could be important to you depending on the goals of your content.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 7 Events Tracking: Far and away my favorite area of Behavior, as it relates to content marketing, is Event Tracking. This is found in the left menu along with the other Behavior options. Firstly, what are events? An event can be a click perhaps you have a hyperlink on your website for the visitor to click to then be taken to the itunes store so they can download your app. You ll certainly want to track the number of clicks off your page to the itunes store using Event Tracking. An event can be a form fill perhaps you offer a contact sales form on your site where visitors can submit their email or phone number to be connected with your sales team. We ll want to track a successful completion of that form with event tracking. We can track the number of downloads for your free trial or white page download. We can also track video plays which of course is a metric you can get from YouTube, BrightCove, or whatever your video hosting service is but we can also bring that metric into Google Analytics with Event Tracking.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 8 Attributing Content to Events: Let s add the secondary dimension, Page, so that we can see if a piece of content is responsible for the completion of one of our tracked events. This is important because if the point of your content is to get the user to download the free trial, because they re in the consideration phase, this is your most important KPI. Of course, by looking at the table we can see that in this example the event was completed 26 times. 24 unique times, so someone did it twice or three times maybe, but then what s this at the end? Event values? This is a download; it s worth $0 right? Why would we ever want to tell Analytics to fill in a value? Lets say you offer a free white page download. Folks fill in their information to receive the download and that information goes on to your sales team. You have a quick conversation with your sales team and they tell you: Each lead that comes into my SalesForce deck with the lead source White Page XYZ I m converting at about a 10% rate, and my average sale is about $500. Well, that s enough information for
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 9 us to draw out a quick formula. An average sale of $500 times a 10% conversion rate (represented in the picture as a decimal) tells us that each download event is worth $50. We ve just found a way to explain to our CEO the value of creating white page content to be downloaded on our website. Remember, Google Analytics isn t accounting software. You still want to check actual sales numbers from the accounting staff or the sales team, but this is a solid way to attribute monetary value to your marketing efforts. KPIs: Lets review the KPIs we ve uncovered so far. Again, we ve nailed awareness content with sessions and new visits. We ve found consideration KPIs like time on site, pages per site, and my favorite events. We ve even touched on our next topic: Decision. This is where we count goals, conversions, and measure the bottom line.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 10 Conversions - What is a Conversion?: First, it s important to understand what Google Analytics will count as a conversion. If you have an ecommerce site, where visitors are able to pull out their credit card and actually make a payment on your website, it s easy. Those conversions are transactions, and with ecommerce tracking, Google Analytics will add the revenue for you. If you don t have ecommerce in place, this is something Risdall does for our clients with the help of your development staff. Don t be intimidated. We can help. For non- ecommerce related conversions, Google Analytics uses Goals. A goal can be set- up as a destination page. For example if the only way a user can get to the /thankyou page is by receiving the hyperlink to their receipt from their sales representative after making a purchase over the phone or online, then that thank you page is your indicator of a goal or conversion. The next two metrics are a little more rarely used, but certainly possible. We can tell Google that if someone spends a certain amount of time on the website, then count it as a goal/conversion. Or if someone views a certain number of pages, same thing, count it as a conversion. If the goal of your content is to have someone visit all five pages in your 5 Steps to Whatever campaign, then, perhaps, you want Google to count that as a conversion once they ve completed it. Now my favorite: Events. After a visitor submits a contact sales form or downloaded the white page, we can tell Google: Hey, that s the end of their online process. It s up to sales to convert them now, so go ahead and count that as a
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 11 completed goal with a $50 conversion value. We ll keep on top of that average sale conversion rate metric from the team. If we ve set all this up as goals in Google Analytics, and in one day we have one online transaction, one download, and one visit to the special thank you page, we have three conversions. Attributing Goals to Content: Well fine, but the point of this video is to attribute goals or conversions to content. This page should look familiar. We have Landing Page set as our primary dimension, we can see the Acquisition and Behavior metrics, but now on the far right we also have our Goal metrics. What are we actually looking at?! We re in Acquisition, Channels (our first screen from earlier in this video). Our primary dimension is set to landing page, and conversions is set to All Goals.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 12! Here is the primary dimension, landing page. It s colored gray, not blue, so we can tell that it s selected.! The little pull- down menu next to Conversions is set to All Goals. This means that if I were only interested in analyzing one particular goal, I could select that goal from the menu here, but for today I m interested in all goals, so that s what I ve selected. Multi Channel Funnels: Multi- Channel Funnels are fantastic ways to measure content marketing efforts and I d like to show you two areas today. The first being Assisted Conversions, and the second being Top Conversion pathways, which is right underneath Assisted Conversions in the menu options. Assisted Conversions are just like assisted goals in hockey. We don t only want to focus on the player that shot the puck into the net. We also want to understand who was responsible for the assist. For that player, the assist is even sweeter than the goal. More often than not, that s going to mean your content marketing is greater than your awareness and consideration pieces.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 13 Attributing Content to Assisted Conversions: At this point you can say it along with me, let s add a secondary dimension. I ll choose Landing Page and filter on the blog again. Here I can see that Social Media and Direct Channels are responsible for bringing traffic to my blog content, AND that the blog was responsible for $200, in some cases $100, worth of revenue in the form of an assist. This is exactly that case where, in our heads, we have indeed assigned the wrong goal to a piece of content. Where we re saying, Gosh, I spent all day writing that article and it didn t make me any money. Well, the point of the article was to help the reader consider your products and services. It passed the puck to the product description content inside of the shopping cart, and that product description content is responsible for the goal.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 14 Top Conversion Paths: Top Conversion Paths illustrates for us the path that a person took to reach their conversion. We re able to see just how many visits to our page, through how many different channels, users take. Marketers have been arguing for a long time that all of their amplification channels need to work together on a unified campaign to get the message to sink into the heads of the public. Well, here it is. My top example shows a visitor that was introduced to our site through a hyperlink on a different web site (referral). They remembered our URL, or perhaps they bookmarked it, so they returned directly a second time. They came back to our blog pages twice through a social network, and finally, finally, they converted by returning directly to our site.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 15 KPIs: Lets review all the KPIs we ve uncovered for analyzing the effort of our content marketing. When our content is for the purpose of Awareness, we find sessions and new visits in Acquisition. When our content is for the purpose of Consideration, we find Events in Behaviors. When our content is for the purpose of Decision- making, we find conversions (transactions and goals) in the conversion section of Analytics. Finally, invaluable to us are the multi channel funnels, which reveal who passed the puck, and who was responsible for which step in the Buyer s Journey.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Content Marketing Analyzing Your Efforts 16 Key takeaways: Assign the right goal to your content Understand the Buyer s Journey and know where to find the appropriate KPIs. Add a secondary dimension to attribute metrics to specific content on your site. Closing: I hope this presentation was helpful. If you have any questions, please get in contact with us by leaving a comment on our video, or by visiting http://www.risdall.com/contact- information/.