Using Analytics To Optimize Content Marketing Campaigns

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Before we begin, what is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

– Content Marketing Institute

Which means…

Rather than a brand talking at you via traditional ads, they’re engaging you in a story.

Drive leads

Create engagement

Influence decisions

70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads.

67% more leads achieved by companies who have an active blog.

66%of the buyer’s journey is complete before that buyer reaches out to a sales person.

Content marketing is driving real results for brands

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This presentation is a brief introduction and example of how a brand* could segment its audience to evaluate if a one-year content marketing campaign is achieving its goals.

*The brand being analyzed is a sample B2B company. All data used in this presentation was randomly generated with reasonable parameters set for traffic and social metrics.

To optimize your content marketing, you must devote significant resources to analytics

Increase Conversions

Improve The Content Marketing ROI

Increase Engagement And Reach On LinkedInAs a B2B brand, we’re

trying to increase the number of leads for our sales team.

Conversions are measured as individuals who provide an email address to download a whitepaper or to stay in touch.

Content marketing is a business investment, so you must prove your ROI.

We must understand both the value of a conversion as well as the costs associated with our content marketing program to measure ROI.

Enabling the organic spread of messages to professionals via LinkedIn is essential to the long-term success of the brand.

Understanding the brand’s goals focuses the analytics on the context required to improve the marketing

Our basic traffic metrics tell an interesting story, but only scratch the surface of what’s really happening

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Traffic Metrics

Unique Visitors Visits Pageviews

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Unique visitors and pageviews are increasing while visits remain stable

• Pages viewed per visit are increasing…once we capture their attention, they stay and read more.

• Our audience is stumbling onto the site…growth in unique visitors is leading to a decline in the repeat visits.

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Social Following

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

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The brand’s social following is growing on LinkedIn and Twitter but staying relatively stable on Facebook

As a B2B brand, we’ve decided to target growth on LinkedIn, which we’ve achieved over the year.

Facebook’s efforts to reduce organic reach has impacted growth on the social channel. We’ve consciously decided to avoid sponsoring posts on Facebook, which is challenging our ability to grow our Facebook audience with the recent algorithm changes.

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LinkedIn Followers and Unique Visitors

LinkedIn Followers LinkedIn Unique Visitors

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As followers have increased on LinkedIn, so has the ability to drive traffic from LinkedIn to the content site

Our followers are engaging directly with the content we share on the social network.

• This demonstrates that our topics and headlines are capturing the attention of our followers as they scroll through their newsfeeds.

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Active Duration By Traffic Source

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Search Organic

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Active duration is one of the key metrics to measure for engagement

Just like traditional media companies, active duration is highest from our organic traffic and relatively consistent between social and search traffic.

• Our target audience from LinkedIn is showing that they are willing to spend their most precious asset, time, with our content.

• Although LinkedIn traffic is skewing positively on active duration, this engagement metric has declined in the past couple of months. This requires further investigation…

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LinkedIn Avg. Duration & Visits

LinkedIn Visits LinkedIn Avg. Duration

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Average duration for LinkedIn visitors has taken a nose dive since October while visits are also decreasing

Despite increasing our social following on LinkedIn, our visits are declining, which is hurting our average duration per visitor. This is in contrast to the growing number of unique visitors from the site.

• This demonstrates why it’s imperative to investigate engagement metrics versus other traffic data. Our unique visitors are visiting less often and thus spending less time with our content.

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Traffic Metrics Vs. Conversions

Visits Pageviews Conversions

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Conversions are increasing with our pageviews

The audience visits are staying relatively stable over time, but pages viewed almost double.

• Our audience is visiting less frequently (visits is staying stable while unique visitors is growing), but each visit is leading to several more pages viewed.

• The visitors are finding our content engaging enough to view several articles during each visit to the site.

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Engagement & Return On Investment

ROI Pageviews/Visit Avg. Duration

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The return on investment on content has grown by 14% during the year as our engagement has increased

Audience engagement with the content is having a significant impact on our ROI.

• Engagement is leading to increased conversion rates while costs for production and distribution of content are maintaining consistent levels.

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Conversion Rates By Traffic Source

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Search Organic

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Conversion rates are growing across all traffic sources except organic

Organic traffic is leading to lower conversion rates than other sources because the organic traffic has already converted.

• Most repeat visitors who enter the content site directly have already provided their contact information. We converted them when they downloaded a whitepaper or signed up for the mailing list during a previous visit to the site.

The audience from each distribution channel is interested in different topics

Audiences from each referral source are engaging more frequently with different topics.

• Now, the brand should target its content at each audience. Rather than randomly sharing content from our site, we should focus on specific topics on each social channel.

• Be careful…you may already have a selection bias. Investigate whether or not you’re already sharing more content on a specific topic on each channel.

27%

15%

30%

28%

Facebook Traffic

29%

33%

21%

17%

Twitter Traffic

50%

14%

10%

26%

LinkedIn Traffic

63%10%

9%

18%

Search Traffic

Increase Conversions

Improve The Content Marketing ROI

Increase Engagement And Reach On LinkedInAverage duration and

pageviews/visit have both increased over the year to yield a 72% increase in the conversion rate (conversions/visits).

The ROI has increased with the conversion rate despite a 53% increase in the cost of content distribution.

Engagement rates have decreased across our LinkedIn audience despite greater reach and an increasing number of followers.

The brand should focus on optimizing its content to continue to grow its LinkedIn audience while maintaining high engagement across the channel.

The content is achieving some of the goals, but the marketer should continue to optimize for engagement

We measured a lot, but it’s equally important to understand why we measured each data point

Metric Why it’s importantUnique visitors Unique visitors is the best approximation of the number of individuals who saw your

content over a given period.

Visits Unique visitors may visit your site multiple times per month. Visits tell you if your content is good enough to encourage your audience to stop by several times.

Pageviews If your content is really engaging, your visitors may read several articles during a visit. A high pageview/visit ratio demonstrates engagement with content.

FollowersSocial sites allow brands to measure their ability to convert readers into a community. This has become less valuable on Facebook as algorithm changes make it more difficult to reach an organic audience with content.

Active DurationActive duration tells you if your content is engaging enough to keep your audience interested. Rather than stumbling on your content and quickly leaving, a site with high active duration is capturing the attention of an audience for a longer period of time. This is the best measure of engagement.

Conversion Rates

In content marketing, converting an audience into customers or sales leads is the holy grail. Some brands may measure brand lift rather than conversion rates, but for a B2B brand, like the one in the case study, the goal is almost always converting an audience into a sales lead.

Traffic Source Conversion Rates

Measuring conversion rates by traffic source helps a marketer focus attention on specific channels. There are dozens of social sites, but some are more important than others to each brand. Measuring conversion rates across sources helps a marketer test what is working with one audience versus another.

Source Topic Engagement

Article topics focus the marketer’s attention on what an audience is interested in based on their entry point to the site. Once you know the topics of interest in each channel, you can focus your organic and paid distribution tactics.