Measure your Content Marketing RoI with Google Analytics | socialexcerpts.com

Whenever any firm formulates any strategy, it always employs various methodologies to measure the return achieved, followed by the implementation of the strategy. This action is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of business decision and improvements for future strategy. It also applies to content marketing where the metrics are employed to judge whether the content has met the customer requirements. Out of all the techniques used for RoI measurement in content marketing, Google Analytics is a widely accepted tool. There are broadly four metrics through which the tool assesses the effectiveness of any content marketing strategy.

1.  Measuring the traffic and time spent on a page

The number of visitors of a page, defined by the page traffic indicates the interest created by the content at prima-facie level. It may be the headline or any keyword of the content that creates the interest. But the actual effectiveness is measured only by the time spent by the visitor. Sometimes the effective SEO design and online promotions become the influencing factors for higher traffic, not the content of the page. Hence, traffic per page alone will give misleading results. However, when the traffic per page is measured in association with the average time spent on the page, it may signify the relevance of the content for the visitors.

2. Measuring the conversion ratio

The conversion ratio metrics are used to measure the number of visitors, who have completed a specified action at the visited site. The definition of action varies from one site to another. For example, for any online shopping site, the action refers to completion of a purchase by the user, for job sites it refers to the completion of a registration process. The measurement of the occurrence of such events is the key to measure the ROI for any site content.

3. Tracking the number of downloads

Some content designers develop their content with a two-fold aim of online reading and download facilities, to make the site more user-friendly and to attract more visitors. In some cases, the download is accomplished with a single click, whereas in some other cases the user has to do a free registration at the site to get the link for download. In the former case, the page showing “download completed successfully” can be tracked for measuring the number of downloads. In the other case, registration completion is the index to track and measure the RoI.

4. Assessing the traffic generated through referrals

Referral traffic indicates the visits to a site that has been originated from links at some other sites like social networks, content submission sites and other promotional sites. As a distribution strategy of content, normally website owners and blog writers share their content at various promotional sites, highlighting the main idea of the content. The visitor, if finds interest by the pop-ins at other sites, redirects to the backlinked site, provided in the content. When the user clicks the link and enters to the intended website, metrics could be employed to track the activity and compute the referral traffic.