How Web Analytics can help you improve your content marketing

The internet has been a huge platform for brands to share their content with their target audience for years. Is your brand maximizing its potential?

Web analytics should be integrated into all aspects of your content marketing strategy.

Google Analytics and other web analysis platforms offer so many data it can be overwhelming to use. Some brands do very little analytics, such as tracking web traffic numbers or not using it at all. It is no surprise that 91% of brands use content marketing today, but only 9% are satisfied with the results.

9 percent? !

This doesn't mean you have to be in that category. You can use web analytics immediately to improve your content marketing strategy by using the focused, simple tactics we have covered in this article.

Take-outs

• Web analytics can optimize your most-performing and least-performing content for more traffic and better conversions.

• Web analytics can help you target your audience more effectively.

• You can align your content strategy with user intent by matching on-site searches queries to your SEO keywords.

• Google Analytics offers automatic reports that will help you integrate data into your daily routine.

How web analytics can improve your content marketing

Leverage your best performing content

There are two important points to be aware of: First, do your know what content is performing the best? It's time to discover if you don't know which content is performing best. Do you know if it is? Are you maximizing its potential for a better ROI?

Both cases can be helped by web analytics.

Let's begin by finding the best content. You can view behavior overview reports using Google Analytics to see page views, unique page visits, and the average time spent on a page. These metrics will tell you which blog articles, landing pages and other content is getting the most hits.

Here's a screencap showing what it looks like.

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Now it is time to optimize that data. You can start by identifying topic trends to create great content about the topics that are most relevant to your audience. These pages can be used to link to other popular pages that you wish to gain more traffic.

It is also important to know what your customers do after they interact with your content. Is your customer reading the content and then leaving? Are they responding to your call for action?

The Google Analytics behavior flow report will tell you how visitors move around your site. This report contains information about how visitors arrive at your website, what they do once they leave your landing page, as well as where their most frequent drop-off points.

This is how the report looks:

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This is vital information because pages that draw high traffic, but don't push customers to the next step (like subscribing) or starting a free trial are missed opportunities. It is usually because users don't know what to do next after reading the content. Google Analytics can help you pinpoint these instances and determine the best steps to close them.

Content that is not performing well can be improved

Although it might not be as enjoyable as looking at your most popular content content, it is equally important to look at the underperforming content.

You can make changes to these pages using the insights from web analytics. It is possible to identify areas where content is not needed or is irrelevant and then remove it from your website.

You can also use them to optimize popular content. Behavior overview and behavior flow reports are useful for identifying content that is in need of a boost. Next, you need to decide which content should be updated and which can be removed completely.

The good news is: HubSpot's recent research found that optimizing underperforming content has doubled the number of leads. The number of leads generated from old posts.

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These are some of the ways that you can optimize your old posts to increase their performance.

• Add visual content such as images and videos

• Make headlines more appealing by updating them

• Improve SEO best practices

• To drive organic traffic, re-optimize using long tail keywords

• To align with the user's intent, add or update calls-to-action

Target your content effectively

Google Analytics Audience reports contain a wealth of information about users. This can be used to target your content better. You can view demographic data, location and user loyalty.

Google also offers vast amounts of user data and audience group information, such as affinity (based upon interests) or in-market (based upon recent purchase intent), that can be used to target paid ads more effectively and gain insight into which audiences you should target with your content.

Content marketers spend so much of their time trying to understand their audience with tactics such as customer segmentation or user personas. These hypotheses can be tested using web analytics to make objective, informed decisions.

To drive conversions, adopt a data-driven strategy

While engaging your audience with content can be a great way to start, your ultimate goal should be to convert customers. With a range of tools, web analytics can help drive conversions.

Are you familiar with the behavior flow reports that we spoke of earlier? These reports can help you determine which pages and content drive the most traffic to your points of conversion like email subscription forms or free trial pages.

The report can be used to identify which conversion points are most effective and how you can increase their use in other areas. You can also take a look at the most successful content to help you create even more.

Your SEO keywords should match on-site searches

A search bar feature is one of the best ways to understand the intent of visitors to your website. You can track what users search for on your website using web analytics.

This is where the Google Analytics on-site keyword search report comes in handy. This is how it looks:

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This article will provide more information about how to use on-site searches for deeper insights.

You can use this information to determine what keywords people are looking for on your site.

You can also analyze your internal search trends to see what users are not finding using simple site navigation. This information is crucial because it allows you to adjust your navigation menu, page hierarchy and content categories to make it easier to find what your users are looking for.

Web analytics can be used to routinely analyze data

Data integration is key to making your content strategy data-driven. Google Analytics makes it easy to make this happen. Google Analytics allows you to set up monthly, weekly, hourly and daily reports so that your team is always up-to date on performance metrics.

Your web analytics tracking can be outsourced

You probably don't have the time or patience to go through data and create reports if you own a business. How can web analytics be integrated into your content strategy?

Outsource.

Web analytics reporting is a core service offered by content marketing agencies. Partnering with SEO strategists and professional content creators will help you create a data-driven content strategy that is both effective and cost-effective.

You can launch a content strategy that is backed up by analytics today with our Content Builder Service.