Analytics for Content Marketing the Right Way: Part 2 of 3

This is a continuation of a previous article. Please read Analytics for Content Marketing the Right Way: Part 1 of 3

Step 1: Inventory & Catalog

An inventory and catalog exercise takes a lot of the guesswork out of configuration changes that need to be made during later steps. For this first step, key components of the content marketing efforts are inventoried and cataloged, which include sources, assets, and interactions.

Traffic Sources — Traffic sources — (source) or (source/medium) in Google Analytics — where content marketing efforts will be broadcast or from where assets are expected to attract traffic. This can range from a Facebook ad campaign to organic search traffic.

Examples

• Presences on social media platforms
• Presence on social bookmarking platforms
• Referrers in your niche [content partners, associations, etc.]
• Organic search engine visitors
• Newsletter subscribers
• Blog visitors

Assets — Assets are the content assets that are included as part of content marketing efforts. This may include existing evergreen content assets or informational content for a prospective customer who has just identified a need and is seeking to learn more.

Examples

• Blog content
• Article content
• Whitepaper content
• Infographic content
• All user-generated content (UGC) (forum content, Q & A content, blog comments)

Interactions — Interactions are actions that a visitor can take in content or on the website that are significant for conversion and may include a commercial conversion action, such as a lead form fill or an e-commerce transaction. Interactions also include other actions that indicate that a customer may be moving further down the conversion funnel, such as a newsletter signup or social share in exchange for exclusive content.

Examples

• Sharing interactions (shares, retweets, repins)
• Engagement interactions (click-throughs from social platform, blog comments, clicks on social media plugins in content assets)
• Conversion interactions (lead form, e-commerce transactions, email captures for exclusive content, signups for webinar, newsletter signup)

The inventory and catalog can be very simply put together using a spreadsheet, with lists in three different tabs for sources, assets, and interactions.

Step 2: Assign Value

The next step to take with the inventory and catalog spreadsheet is to assign value to the interactions that you have identified based on content. For some of these interactions, especially the commercial interactions, they may already be tracked as goals in Google Analytics. For these interactions, you can go into goal settings in the admin area of Google Analytics to fetch the goal values. For the other interactions that are not tracked as goals in Google Analytics, assign a value, or place a value of zero if they are not directly or indirectly relevant to business objectives.

Please visit us next week to read the final part to this series.