How Do You Use Google Analytics?
What are analytics?
Analytics are measurements that allow you to examine how well your pages are attracting visitors, how well you are engaging those visitors, and whether or not your marketing efforts are successfully encouraging people to convert on your website. Analytics make the difference between generating content blindly, based on vague gut feelings, and creating a content strategy that is based on numbers.
Given that 76 percent of B2C brands and 88 percent of B2B brands use content marketing, the competition is high. You need to use Google Analytics to make sure that you are properly engaging your readers and achieving your desired success.
What is Google Analytics and how do you use it?
Every piece of content you create should have a set goal in mind and should align with audiences at specific stages within the sales funnel. For example, content at the top of the sales funnel should drive repeat readers as you establish your brand as a trustworthy resource, whereas content towards the end of the sales funnel will have a primary goal of conversion.
As you create content, you should be regularly monitoring your progress when you use Google Analytics to see if your material is meeting your set goals and how well it is impacting your overall sales process. When you use Google Analytics, you can provide insight on whether your content is underperforming in any of these areas:
- If you are targeting the wrong people, such as if your content is reaching an audience that is unlikely to make a purchase from you.
- If your content is not what the targeted audience wants to explore, which may result in low engagement.
- If your content is engaging and has strong traffic but it is not doing enough to encourage people to move on to the next stage of the funnel (link to FAQ on using content to move through sales funnel).
Monitoring customer behavior related to the goals you have established is the best means of determining the true success of your content efforts. This can offer you data-backed guidance on the adjustments you should make to drive greater future success.
What can you do with Google Analytics?
There are a few chief analytics metrics that will help you gauge the impact of your individual pieces of content as well as your content strategy as a whole and use Google Analytics to the fullest. To begin, look at:
- Your traffic rates
- Your engagement rates, including how long people spend on your pages and how engaged they are with the content - such as whether they share the article on social media or leave a comment
- How many of your readers progress to each stage of the sales funnel and the pages that are driving the most conversions at each stage
- How well your content correlates with brand revenue
- How you are performing in each of these areas month-over-month and year-over-year
Analytics is powerful tool for your content production because it tells you how successful your efforts are and where you need to make adjustments. Rather than wasting your time producing content and creating a strategy based upon hunches, you will be able to create a numbers-driven system that will help you maximize your success.
