Table of Contents
Intro to content Performance
Content is the king – We all know that. But if you can’t evaluate its effectiveness, how do you know your content’s value? For every new piece of content, you should be able to answer the question, “What is the business goal for this piece of content?”
Having identified your business goals, you can then dive deeper into content marketing metrics that matter.
Metrics like page views and page time are significant, but they do not reveal the whole story.
For this reason, in this article, we will explain how to track the progress towards your goals more easily with Google Data Studio. Additionally, we will provide you with a ready-to-use solution in order to gather key blog insights and optimize the time you spend on metrics: Data Studio Content Performance Report.
Some of the most frequent questions you should answer about your content pieces:
1. How much traffic does your website get?
2. What is the engagement on the content pages?
3. Which pages receive the most traffic and convert the best?
4. How do users find your website?
5. Where are your visitors located?
Check out our data studio gallery and upgrade your digital reporting in minutes.
We have structured our content performance report in three sections:
Content Overview
No matter what your company stands for, the need to drive qualified traffic to your site will always be the primary goal. But traffic by itself is not a clear indicator of your content’s performance if you do not keep a record of the sessions over time.
The content overview report will give you traffic-related metrics like sessions, pageviews, sessions by source as well as website sessions overtime at a glance. If you’re properly executing your content strategy, you should see an increase in traffic over time any pay attention in that metric.
Page time and bounce rate are also very crucial metrics for your content performance since they are indicators of how interesting your audience find the information you provide. The longer people stay, the more content they are consuming. If an article has a low bounce rate, the content is typically very relevant to your customer.
Page Analysis
Once a web searcher has made it to your page, the goal is for them to find relevant and valuable topics and interact with them in a meaningful way. Page engagement sends a signal that your visitors find content that worth investing their time. Metrics like Pageviews and Average time on page are two good starting points.
However, what is more effective is to know how people navigate through different sections and understand which content grabs your visitors’ attention, which one keeps it, and which content gets them closer to your business goals.
Here is where Content grouping comes in Google Data Studio and gives you useful insights about
· What content is converting the most customers
· What content group should you focus on improving
Compare easily the performance between your product categories themselves, rather than comparing performance between different distinct pages and get meaningful insights.
Readers-related insights
Every website needs both new and returning visitors. There are marketing initiatives encourage new visits and others that encourage return visits. This is why it is important to know your companies’ goals and the type of website you want to have in order to find the right balance for your content.
If you are blogging, new visitors will be more beneficial to you but if your website is more of an eCommerce-based website, then returning visitors may be the big bet. It is important to know how they all come together to make every piece of content accountable for generating real business results.
Understanding also your audience composition in terms of gender and preferences, let you understand the types of content you need to develop, the channels you should invest in and the kinds of audiences you need to target for marketing and remarketing campaigns.
Whatever your goal is – from lead generation to customer retention-make sure that your content is discoverable and grab the attention of your visitors within seconds!