Remember that “excellent” content you’ve been harping on? The one that is sure as heck will drive in traffic to your site? You’ve been spending days on creating, polishing, nearly perfecting it. You just know it’s The One.

But what if it’s not as excellent as you think?

No matter how awesome, great, brilliant or superb that content is, it will not bring your desired output. Sucks, right? Surely, there must be a way to get the people in!

The good news is there is a way. Several ways, actually.

A great website does not stand on great content alone. While it will be always canon to create excellent content for your site, you should also focus on making these marketable. Think about how it will convert your passive audiences to proactive consumers.

The marketing part of “content marketing” is often left out during the production phase. Remember that it is just content if there are no viewers or readers. But how can we measure the actual effectiveness of a campaign?

What is the Purpose of Content Marketing?

The purpose of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior.

Effective content can drive awareness for a brand by associating itself to the brand whenever its name is brought up. Content marketing is primarily used to promote a website, brand, or product.

It can be said that many people are becoming aware of a brand if it’s ranking high on search engines. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets around the world, more and more people are relying on search engines to look for information they need.

If a website ranks high on search engines, they can be considered as primary sources the next time people look for a similar content. A search engine, especially Google, is a great driver of traffic to a site and every site owner would want to get new people visiting them through search. Recurring visits do not hurt either.

An increase in new visitors in the website is also an indicator that curiosity has driven these people to take a look at what your website has to offer. Shares, likes, and comments through social media are the online versions of traditional word-of-mouth.

To know if the content is engaging enough to be discussed in social media, scale the reach of the content through tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Topsy–all of which can help manage social media accounts.

Attention from social media, however, measures only the primary engagement. Since social media is used as a top-of-the funnel platform for brand awareness, marketers must be cautious on using likes and shares as a metric for success. You have to look at those signals in relation to the goals you have set for your campaign. Details of social engagement metrics can is best explained in this post on Moz.

How to Measure Content Marketing Through Google Analytics

Even though Google Analytics (GA) has been making things difficult for marketers (cough, “Not Provided”, cough) these past few years, it still provides a wealth of data that can actually be used. We just have to try reeaallly hard to get those. Luckily, Annie Cushing gives great insights about the data you get from GA. Data really is sexy.

Goal Setting

Measurement starts with the goals of the campaign. What does your site need? Leads? Traffic? From where? Search? Social? Email? From these goals, you have to identify the metric and key performance indicators (KPIs) of the campaign to track the progress.

Metrics can be set in Google Analytics, but they can’t stand alone in measuring your online campaigns. These are the PageViews, bounce rates, and average session durations of the world. However, marketers worth their salt also set KPIs for their content marketing to go with these metrics. You can also do that in Google Analytics in the often neglected tab called Advanced Segments. Here’s an introductory post about the subject, but you’ll have to promise that you’ll do your due diligence and learn more about it.

Advanced Segments show the traffic of your site that has a great chance of converting. Things like demographics, technology, behavior, first touch (date of first visit), and traffic sources when used in conjunction with each other will paint a pretty specific picture of the people visiting your site.

The information that is provided can–no, scratch that–will be the basis of your content marketing strategy. It will show the people who are visiting your site. Who are they? Where are they from? It will also tell you the device they are using and if they think your site is worth visiting. Knowing this will make your content marketing strategy more targeted.

Measuring The Conversion Funnel

The cycle of visits acquisition, engagement and conversion serves as a funnel that narrows down traffic towards the completion of campaign goals. Each of these phases of visits should be measured using pre-defined KPIs to easily track the effectiveness of your content strategy.

Acquisition

Depending on the traffic channel you want to target, the metrics and KPIs you set will have an impact in this initial touch of traffic to your site. Let’s say, for instance, your content marketing campaign aims to increase conversions in new visitors via organic search. You will have to set a search engine as a parameter of that organic traffic. In Google Analytics, set up a report that will monitor organic traffic coming from Google.

With this goal in mind, the metrics that you will closely monitor are new visits and % of new visits. You will then have to drill down the dimension to traffic source and filter it down to Google / organic.

Now that the traffic going to your site is already segmented, the next thing to look at is the page where the jewel of your content marketing strategy can be found and see how your visitors behave there. This content will (hopefully) lead to goal completion. It can be an article, video, infographic, download page, whitepaper–anything that will persuade your visitors to either buy, sign-up or download your product or service.

Engagement

This is the point of the cycle where negotiation happens. The content that you or your team spent weeks or months developing should provide visitors the information they need or answer questions about the products or service that your site offers.

We’ll have to backtrack a bit because I am obligated to say that before measuring anything or even developing a content marketing strategy, you have to know the audience your content will cater to. I’m not going to explain this or how to do that in this article, as more qualified individuals have already done that. Check out this excellent post by Michael King before you get started.

Going back, now that your visitors are already on the page and hopefully digesting the content that was created, it’s now time to go back to measuring. In standard reports, the default metrics are Bounce Rate, Pages / Session and Avg. Session Duration.

Again, depending on the goals you want to achieve for your marketing strategy, you can use different metrics to track visitor engagement to your landing page–which you can do in GA custom reports. The data to be measured is quantitative, and it is imperative that you know the threshold of those numbers in relation to the user behavior on that page.

For example, if your content requires a reading comprehension of, let’s say, advanced, the bounce rate or exit rate might be high. Don’t fret; if you did your research about the audience you are targeting, this is expected. The key metric you will be monitoring is the average session duration, because you would want the reader to actually read the content and get the information that they need to move on to the next step.

Conversion

This is the reason why we do what we do. Business owners and marketers look at site conversions and see if we can sleep soundly at night or not. The example we used previously was organic traffic from Google. To see if organic traffic is converting in your landing pages, just look at the goal flow and choose whatever metric you have set for the campaign goal.

The image below shows the goal path of your campaign. In this case, it’s landing page > cart> to purchase. By now, the traffic has been filtered from acquisition to site engagement. The last and perhaps most important question is, does your content convert?

The example below shows the drop-off from the landing page to the cart from organic Google traffic.

The numbers also show that organic search is not a good traffic converter, something to the tune of 0.009% from the landing page. Ouch.

So what happened?

There are a lot of things that can be at fault. Perhaps, the content is not awesome enough. It might not give the information that your target audience needs. The keywords might not be relevant to the content (if this is the case, check the bounce rate). Maybe the persona research isn’t on-point; some details may have been missed. Or maybe you are chasing the wrong traffic channel. In the table above, even though the conversion rate of direct traffic isn’t that high (1%), the actual number of conversions doubles that of organic search.

Leveraging Multichannel Marketing

Does this mean that content marketing does not work?

Of course it works; it just has to be done right. And doing it right means being holistic in your marketing campaign. A great thing about GA is that (in case you haven’t heard about it) it now shows multi-channel funnels. Here is a great guide for your multi-channel marketing campaigns.

Let’s say you still want to convert in organic search, just head on over to the Multi-Channel Funnels tab in GA and look for the grouping path conversions.

See that organic search works best as a starting point for conversions. Look at the conversion rate in the previous image–direct and referral traffic have converts better than organic search. With this in mind, you can now develop a more comprehensive and holistic content marketing strategy that (hopefully) leads to more conversions.

Just be sure to measure everything.