Content Marketing & Google Analytics

Think of it this way: when you walk into a store, you are faced with a salesperson. They can answer your questions and provide detailed information; they know the product and they know the customer.

Your website should be your company’s salesperson — this is where your consumers will turn to receive information about your brand, products and services. An efficient, value-filled site can increase your revenue exponentially, but its effectiveness is only as strong as the content marketing behind it.

One of the many advantages of content marketing is the ability to utilise your campaign data to improve your future marketing efforts. Data-driven marketing can tell you everything you need to know: where your customers are located; how long they stay on a page; what search keywords they use; what their interests are; and more.

In other words, content marketing condenses all the information from a traditional marketing model into a reportable process that establishes who your consumers are and what they want from your business’s website. And this allows you to more directly target your market and produce better results, with the assurance that your advertising finances are being spent in the right places.

It goes without saying that marketing data is essential in understanding your consumers, their needs, and how they interact with your company (and other companies like yours). At nucleo, we invest a significant number of resources in monitoring, understanding and improving the content marketing efforts of our clients, ensuring their business gets the most from its website.

Our main method of tracking your customers and traffic stats is with Google Analytics, which is a powerful way to measure online performance and advertising ROI, and to develop your campaigns.

Google Analytics data offers insight to the mind of your consumers, thus providing you with larger, more targeted campaigns, catered to your specific brand and clientele. Google Analytics lets companies of all shapes and sizes measure the effectiveness of their website by showing us, among many other things, the Four C’s:

Customers:

who has visited your website? (your audience’s location, demographic, which browser they used, which device they used, which language they speak, and so forth)

Content:

what do your customers do on your website? (what do they look at, how long do they stay, which pages receive the most visits)

Connections:

how are your customers getting to your site? (referrers, traffic sources, external assets, organic searches)

Conversions:

have your customers completed what you want them to? (improve web usability, optimise your marketing campaign — can you see results towards your company’s goals?)

But obviously, to see results towards your company’s goals, you first need to set goals! In other words, know what is important to your business, and determine how your website — your little virtual salesperson — can help to achieve them.

So, for example, your goal might be to increase your website’s page views, thus increasing advertising exposure and seeing greater revenue from your site. Through software like Google Analytics, we could investigate where your page views are coming from, what your top landing pages are, which pages perform poorly, and so forth, to ensure ideal placement of ads. Moreover, using target audience identification, we can learn the location, age, gender and interests of your site visitors, and thus create ads catered specifically to your targeted consumer segments.

Google Analytics encompasses a lot of different reporting tools, and can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be. With it, we can create goals, segment your audience, create custom dashboards, view behaviour flows, track your email campaigns, receive real-time alerts when something good, bad or unexpected happens to your website traffic, analyse site searches, import AdWords to gain insight into what visitors do after they’ve clicked your ad, and so much more.

This information is invaluable to your business’s digital marketing. When you know which pages receive the most visitors, you can create more content to match. When you can see which time of the day receives the greatest traffic spike, you can schedule your posts to suit.

You cannot simply drop a website into the middle of cyberspace and expect it to work for your business — that would be like hiring a salesperson and abandoning them on their first day on the job. Maintaining an effective business website requires ongoing tracking, analysing and improving.