A Step-by-Step Guide for Content Marketing Analysis

It’s that time of the month again. Pull out those spreadsheets, get your calculator ready, open up your desk’s legal pad and get to writing. It’s monthly analysis time!

We’re not just at the end of the month, but at the end of the quarter, so naturally, all marketers go into reflective mode. We get ready to review data, compare results, lay out ideas for the next period. And I thought it’s the perfect time to share my content analysis workflow with you. It’s the step by step process I take when evaluating content marketing efforts.

I’ll use this blog’s stats to illustrate the flow here, but it’s the same process you’d use for a corporate blog. So let’s get crackin’!

How do you analyze your content? Here's a workflow that tells you how effectively you're getting people to know, like, and trust you.Click To Tweet

Why analyze, anyway?

You think this is a dumb question? I’d say, however, that it’s the most important one. Knowing why you analyze your content marketing efforts will give you a direction, an end goal. It will help you define your KPIs, your benchmarks, and any measurement gaps you might have. As any Douglas Adams fan knows, the question is more important. The answer, we already know is 42.

So the first step is listing the goals you want to achieve with content marketing. Is it awareness? Then what matters is how many people in your target market met you for the first time through your content. Is it lead generation? Go ahead and count those subscribe events.

Questions can traditionally be grouped into one of three domains: awareness, engagement, and lead generation. But while writing this post, I remembered a favorite quote.

All things being equal, people do business with, and refer business to people they know, like and trust. – Bob Burg

Content marketing is the most sustainable way you can get others to know, like, and trust you – and we can also split those three groups of metrics that way.

Know: A matter of awareness

My blog is the prime channel through which people can get to know me – or get to know me better. It’s probably the same with you, no matter if you’re a freelancer, a brand, or a small agency.

So first off, I’d look at metrics focused on awareness-building.

Overall Traffic

To get the big picture, look at the overall traffic your content has generated. Is it more or less than the previous period? That big picture info can easily be found in Google Analytics under the Audience > Overview report.

All good news here, yeah! More consistent writing and building up some library of content have proven beneficial for the blog’s traffic.

What are the top pieces that have garnered this traffic? Let’s also look what content got the most attention. The answer lies under Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

Looking at the first five landing pages of my blog, I see a good mix. There’s the homepage, but notice that it’s the landing page for just 10% of visitors. Always be aware that content is largely context-less – people land on a specific article and don’t know your full story.

Are your top pieces new or old? Here, you can see a veteran holding the top position – my guide on Google Data Studio is seeing decent traffic. We can dig into a second dimension in this report and see that’s due to organic search traffic. Then the rest of the top 5 are new players, including my recent piece on buyer personas and my goal-setting process.

What are the sources that bring in the most visitors? Let’s see what channels bring consistent traffic. Look at the general channel groups, but also the specific sites that lead people to you – respectively, under Acquisition > Overview report and Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium report.

Here’s the general split – for me social sites are bringing in decent numbers, but the great news here is the uptake of Organic Search traffic. While the social group depends heavily on new content promotion actions, search brings a consistent flow of targeted visitors.

Targeted Quality Traffic

Looking only at the total numbers feels good, but in the end, you need to focus on more than vanity metrics. If you have already defined your buyer personas, you can create segments that show you how much of that core audience you are attracting.

Otherwise, you risk deviating from your focus. Travel stories will inevitably bring more eyeballs to my site, but is that the audience of young marketing professionals I’m chasing? Probably not.

If I narrow down my key target group, I will see that those users are about 1/4 of my total readership. Not too shabby for a blog that’s been up for less than a year, but there’s more to do.

I can then use this segment and go through the same reports mentioned in the previous step to compare results. It might turn out that although Twitter brings a small percentage of the total audience, it’s perfect for attracting core users. Then there’s strong evidence I might want to increase my efforts there.

The quality of the traffic can also be measured by the audience’s engagement. So let’s dive into that topic.

Like: A matter of engagement

We saw there already are people who know us – but do they like us? That’s best seen through their engagement with your content. Here we’ll look into a bunch of metrics, but the most important thing is to not look at them in isolation.

Let me illustrate: is more time spent on page a positive thing? You’d first say yes. But imagine if the poor user is spending more time there because she can’t find something she’s looking for? Now give me a second answer.

The truth is, no matter if you said yes or no, you’d be wrong – it’s a matter of pairing this engagement metric with a goal at the end. So if people spend more time on the page and convert better, it is a good thing. But we’ll get into conversions in a sec – let’s first go through those engagement metrics.

Engagement by page

What content drives the highest engagement? Let’s take a second look at your posts, we’ll use the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report.

Those same articles pop up – but now you see a slightly different picture. The buyer personas post may have brought fewer people, but readers there are more engaged – the time on page is higher and the bounce rate is lower. Maybe we need to push it forward and create more extended content with templates like that? At this point, you’d look at your site’s most engaging content and try to figure out what those pieces have in common.

Engagement by traffic channel

An equivalent analysis should be done with your content sources. Let’s take a second look at the Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium report.

If we had stopped at traffic, StumbleUpon seems like a marvelous idea – it’s in top 5 referrers! But look at the session duration. 3 seconds?! That’s not good traffic.

The ultimate engagement metric

We’re taking a look at the time on page, session duration, and bounce rate, but all of those, as already said, have contextual meaning. That’s why you should turn to the most awesome engagement metric – page scrolling!

You don’t get page scrolls straight in your Google Analytics, but with some tiny Google Tag Manager magic, you’ll have all the data. So once you have that set up, create a Goal for full page scrolling. Depending on what amount of info there is in your post after the content’s end, you might set this up for anything over 75%:

Now you can look under Conversions > Goals > Goal URLs to see the pages with the most full scrolls. Or you can also look at the landing pages report we already mentioned and select the same goal in the last column. Since blog readers usually go through one post only, this report will still work when doing a content analysis.

Net Promoter Score

We’re talking about people liking our content, but I actually don’t deem social shares part of the engagement phase. To assess content liking I prefer to use Net Promoter Score (NPS). Setting it up is easy with tools like Hotjar and since it’s a ubiquitous way of measuring audience satisfaction, you can use benchmarks (at least at first – as soon as you have enough data, ditch the benchmarks and focus on improving your own score).

NPS measurement will take us out of the familiar Google Analytics environment. Another caveat here is that if you have little traffic, too few people will answer your NPS survey to give you a reliable score. That’s why my NPS has consistently been 100 for a few weeks in a row, which is flattering but pretty inaccurate:

Still, if you look at a longer period of time and combine more of those scores, you will see a trend there. Keep in mind, though, that as more people come to the site and vote in the NPS, your score may gradually decrease, although the quality hasn’t. Don’t be bothered by pure metrics – aim to understand what lies behind them.

Side note: you can also use Hotjar’s Polls function for a bunch of cool content-related questions.

Trust: A matter of leads

In the traditional Holy Trinity of marketing metrics, this is the place where we’d review conversions. But content serves a different purpose, so I believe the last step we need to review at this point is lead generation. Of course, if you’re creating content with the key purpose of selling, go ahead and look at different stats.

To me, leads are the epitome of trust. After all, if you don’t trust someone, you’d never share with them your most precious secret – your email address.

Overall conversion rate

First off, let’s review conversion rate. Actually, first off, you should set up an event for when users submit, say, a newsletter subscription form. Then set up a goal – the same way we did for the full scroll. Now it’s time to dig into the stats.

The only reason I’d look at the overall conversion rate is to assess how content is performing overall. And the only benchmark I’d use is the conversion rate for a previous period. I really don’t like benchmarks. Even industry reports wouldn’t cut it – as Avinash Kaushik said, “All data in aggregate is crap.” So what if someone else had worse/better conversion rate than you? How is this actionable?

So going into Conversions > Goals > Overview, select the goal you want to review and check out what’s happening:

Be mindful of both the conversion rate change, as well as the total amount of goal completions. With smaller blogs, it’s easy to pat yourself on the back for a 30% increase in conversion rate while the overall number of conversions has either increased by 10 or even decreased.

Conversion rate by page

So what content drives those conversions? That’s where we go back to the Goal URLs report and can look into it.

You can also use the Landing Pages report – for me, there’s just a couple of conversions difference and there I can see the conversion rate, as well. That’s handy if you have a post that brings much more traffic than others.

Learning the flow

So if you’re ready to analyze your content now, let’s recap the questions you need to go through in more detail. Feel free to copy and paste those into a file and start answering them one by one. Or if you want a reminder on where all that data is located, you can add your email and I’ll send you a link to a template you can copy.

1. Awareness
   1. What’s the amount of traffic you got compared to the previous period?
      1. What content pieces drive the most traffic?
      2. What channels drive the most traffic?
   2. What’s the amount of core audience traffic you got?
      1. What content brings in the most core readers?
      2. What channels drive the most core readers?
2. Engagement
   1. What’s your engagement by page?
      1. What pages have the best time on page and drive the highest session durations?
      2. Which of those have low bounce rates and higher average pages/session?
      3. Which ones have the highest percentage of full scrolls?
   2. What’s your engagement by traffic source?
      1. Are there any sources of significant traffic that drive “junk” sessions – with low session durations?
      2. Which channels have low bounce rates and higher average pages/session?
   3. How has your NPS score changed?
3. Leads
   1. What’s your overall conversion rate?
      1. How has the conversion rate change over the period compared to the last one?
      2. Did the total number of conversions change in the same direction?
   2. What content drives the most conversions?
      1. Are there any specific pieces of content that drive the most conversions?
      2. Which pieces have high conversion rates?

It’s a lot to answer, but when you know how to find the info, you will go through the whole process in less than an hour. Looking at the results and finding what the best and worst performers have in common will help you define what content resonates with your audience, what channels bring quality traffic and ultimately – what you need to do as next steps. And a last reminder – you will save a lot of time if you analyze your content on a weekly basis as well – here’s my Google Data Studio template you can use for that.

Happy analyzing!