Lead generation is/ should be a priority in your content marketing efforts. Yet, it's likely that your company isn't measuring content marketing ROI. Either because:
A) You don't care
B) You know there's value in you don't know how, or what, to measure
C) It's just too hard to measure the value in marketing
There's this long-held belief amongst marketers that you can't measure the true value of content marketing. In fact, in the early days of my career, I'd held firm to this notion, steadfastly writing articles with the solid knowledge that it would pay off in the long run.
I wasn't alone.
Most content writers I've spoken to over the years were under the same impression. It's not entirely unfounded. It takes a while to build up backlinks, domain authority (which makes it easier to rank with search engines), enough keywords on your site, etc.
Over the years, your content starts ranking higher. You get traffic easier. Reach is greater. You don't have to fight as hard to bring attention to your content after you've built enough "street cred".
My perception changed dramatically when I began freelancing. First, because I was focusing a lot more on lead generation for my own content marketing services. Second, because I found myself needing to justify my rates, both to myself and to clients.
Strangely, I found that most companies aren't doing the same for their content marketing efforts. Many are still stuck on the idea that the value of content marketing is built over time. That measuring marketing ROI is damn near impossible.
It simply isn't true.
In this article, I'm going to cover how to directly link your business blog to lead generation and what metrics to look at beyond vanity metrics.
The content marketing value you CAN'T measure.
I want to cover this first, because there is a foundation for the claim that you can't measure the value of content marketing. It really, truly is a challenge, and no one can identify all the leads brought in from blogging.
Aimee Meester, the CEO of Madison Taylor Marketing, put it excellently the other day during our call:
"What's the ROI of your mother?"
A reference to a talk by Gary Vaynerchuk:
She went on to relate the value of your mom to content marketing. It boiled down to this:
You grow up, you have success, and you thank your mom. You can't point to one specific point in time in which your mom was the key to your success, but you know that she is. It's the culmination of all that she's done, said, and provided.
There are intangibles that are difficult to measure. As Aimee puts it, there've been clients that've gained huge contracts from articles or resources they've created, but they know this because the client informed them of this.
Without insights from clients, it can be challenging to know where leads come from.
Why is this?
There are actually quite a few reasons for this:
The lead may have called the company instead of signing up or filling out a form on the website
The client found your content a long time ago, but are reaching out to you months or even years later. They may have been following you for a long time, keeping you in the back of their business plans. (Google Analytics can only track first impressions as far as 3 months back)
There are multiple people in a marketing team or management team sharing content, adding companies to lists of potentials to work with, etc. It's challenging to know when the first person in the organization found you, especially if they're not the decision-maker.
The above events make it really difficult to track leads, and the larger the organization is, the harder it is to attribute leads. For my own business, I'm able to determine where my leads come from simply by asking or paying attention to how they reach out to me.
For instance, messages through LinkedIn often reference a post that's prompted them to reach out. A recent lead reached out due to a connection request I'd sent, and noticed that I was a freelancer.
Facebook messages I've received have referenced a post they'd seen in a Facebook group. Or, someone in my network informs me they're sending me a lead, and connects me to that person.
Larger organizations are able to ask how you'd discovered them on their contact forms or by asking during consultation calls.
Still, there are some leads you just can't trace.
The intangibles of content marketing
As mentioned above, you can't always track where a lead comes from. Especially if those leads don't follow your lead funnels. But besides leads, there are other benefits of content that you simply can't track, such as:
Brand awareness
The value of your thought leadership
Your authority
Word of mouth shares
It might not be fully fair to place all of content's value on the things you can measure. That being said, as a business, you can't put money and time into something without knowing that it's working to bring in leads.
How do you find the value of content marketing?
A lot of content marketing agencies track vanity metrics- traffic, social media shares, comments, likes, etc. We call them vanity metrics because they're pretty surface level.
They aren't a good measure of how many leads you're bringing in, yet if you aren't tracking actual lead generation goals in Google Analytics, traffic is a good measure of content performance.
As Ashley Amber Sava, Content Marketing Manager at Pushnami, puts it:
"Traffic is the most important metric for measuring content success. Boosting engagement, establishing brand authority and landing conversions simply isn't possible without traffic."
While this is true, I fully believe that you can get leads from your content without a huge amount of traffic. You just have to convert more of the traffic that you do get using content that reaches your target audience and solves their problems.
I wanted to find out how other top content marketers and marketers within companies track the value of their content.
Ashley Amber Sava gave me great insights stating:
"The ultimate goal is to increase the amount of returning visitors to your content. Identifying the ratio of repeat visitors is a critical metric for understanding whether or not your content is good enough to fulfill the needs of your audience."
Return visitors is a great way to ensure that you're actually producing content that people want to see. It says that you're on the right track, and that your potential customers are coming back to your site again and again because you're offering something truly valuable.
Another great way to measure content performance, according to Ashley Guttusso, Director of Marketing at Simple Focus, is to follow engagement and consumption of the content. This means:
"Following views in channel and pageviews on site... In Google Analytics, I use site content, all pages, and start filtering to see what’s getting traffic over time. When I’ve had HubSpot, I’ve tied different pieces of content to campaigns and then used reports to pull metrics like views and CTA clicks. I also look at referrals to see which sites are sending the most traffic."
From what I've seen, this is far more content tracking than most businesses are currently doing. But doing so allows Ashley to see which content performs best, and why, to trim the fat on content efforts, and repurpose the content that performs best.
Peter Caputa IV, the CEO of Databox, also weighed in on the subject, stating:
"We track performance by measuring the sessions and signups for our product. We look at every section of our website and every page... We are constantly improving pages by adding additional content or making design/ copy changes, building internal links to the pages that can rank higher or that are already converting well."
Tying content to signups is pretty similar to my recommendations in the section below, where I'll explain how to use Google Analytics to track content success.
When I pull back and look at everyone's suggestions, it's easy to see just how many methods there are for measuring content marketing ROI:
Pageviews
CTA clicks
Opt-ins to more content
List growth over time
Open rates for emails
Unsubscribes for emails
Video views on YouTube
Emails directly to me saying thanks for this content
Trial signups/conversions to paid
Traffic over time
Social media metrics
Returning traffic
Setting lead generation goals in Google Analytics to calculate content ROI
All of the above is absolutely true about content marketing value. By all means, think of your content marketing efforts as a single body that leads to future success.
Understand that it takes a build-up of content to make a difference.
Put most of your attention on traffic, social media engagement, and returning traffic.
All of those tracking methods are valuable. They provide you insights into what content gets the most views so you can continue making similar content; ensure that you're on the right path with your overall content strategy; help you optimize pages.
As our experts above pointed out- tracking sign-ups and opt-ins is another important metric to pay attention to.
I personally believe it's the most important metric if you want to prove that your content has tangible benefits.
To do that, simply redirect all of your sign-ups to a thank you page and set that thank you page URL as a goal in Google Analytics.
Okay, let's break that down a little.
In most cases, you're pulling leads from various places. This great. It's exactly what you want. But this typically doesn't include blog content.
To add blog content to the mix, follow these steps:
Step 1: Create a general thank you page
This doesn't have to be spectacular. Just a simple page that states they need to verify their email address and thank you for providing us that sensitive information. This is what mine looks like:
Make sure that this page is a dynamic page that can only be reached if someone fills out an opt-in or sign-up form. Do not link to the page anywhere else on your site.
Step 2: Set a goal in Google Analytics
Honestly, this is rather simple to do. Many marketers already know how to set up goals in analytics, as well as use other features and reports within GA. But there are still plenty that don't know how to set up goals, and aren't measuring their conversions from blog content or other types of content. The following is for the latter group.
When I added the goal to my analytics, I followed this chain:
Admin> Goals > New Goal
You may also be able to follow this chain:
Conversions > Goals > New Goal
The goal setup page will look like this:
Give the goal a name such as "thank you page" or "conversions". Click on the "destination" bubble, click continue.
Equals to is simply the URL of the final page of the funnel- the thank you page they land on after converting.
Enter the full URL here, not just the end of the slug. GA makes this a little confusing by adding that little description under the "equals to", stating to insert the end of the slug. Unfortunately, GA won't measure the conversions accurately without the full URL.
After you hit save, you'll be able to look into the conversions reports, and the source of the leads.
If you go into your goals, there's a little button that says "source/medium" at the bottom of the page. You can get a quick look at the referral there. We'll take a closer look at reporting in a bit.
Step 3: Lead magnet in content
So, lead magnet might be a little misleading. You don't need a true "lead magnet" such as a checklist or infographic or slide deck or ebook to pull leads from a blog.
A simple "Download this article as a PDF" sign up at the beginning of the article, or a pop up asking you to join a newsletter, works perfectly fine.
Readers are still interested enough in the content to provide their email address, fully knowing that it may lead to you reaching out to them later on.
Of course, if it's an article you think will do really well, or you have a relevant resource you want to provide as a content upgrade... then by all means, use it as a lead magnet.
Just make sure to make the sign up form redirect to your thank you page.
Why should it redirect to a thank you page? You might be wondering, since you could also connect your individual sign up forms, or contact forms, to conversion goals.
Frankly that's just extra effort. If you send all of your leads to the same end point, GA will automatically generate reports showing you where those leads came from.
How to see which pages are generating leads
If you just want to get a general view of which pages are converting, there are a few reports you want to pay attention to in Google Analytics;
Acquisitions channels
Acquisition sources
Landing pages
Acquisition channels
To get to acquisition channels, follow this quick path in GA:
Acquisitions> All Traffic> Channels
You'll see the various channels that drive leads to your content (social, direct, organic, referrral...). This is just scraping the surface of lead traffic, but it allows you to see which channels are most beneficial to your lead generation.
This is vital for optimizing your marketing channels, and trying to determine what to put your effort and budget into.
Acquisition Sources
You get to acquisition sources with the same path as the previous section, but select sources/mediums instead of channels.
Again this is pretty surface level, but it takes it one step further than channels, providing you a look into the actual social media channels and sites that are driving traffic and leads.
Landing pages
To get to this report, follow this chain:
Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages
This is where you'll be able to find the exact blog pages that your audience converts from. Thing is, it's just where their journey ended... where they finally took the plunge by giving up their email address.
It gives you great insights into what pages were strong enough to push them over the edge, but it doesn't tell you where their journey started.
What if they've been reading your blogs for months and finally found an article they wanted to download or a resource they really wanted.
What if they've read tons of your blogs, but go to your contact page to get a project going right away.
Believe it or not, there is actually a way to see some of that data as well.
Using Google Analytics Model Comparison Tool for a truer look at conversions from content
It's pretty challenging to get a legitimate count on where your ALL of your leads come from, especially with blog content. However, you can get pretty close- at least the lower end of your conversion numbers- by using the model comparison tool in Google Analytics.
In your landing page report (from the section above), you're looking at "last-click attribution" numbers. In other words, the last place your visitors were before converting into a lead (ie signing up for your newsletter).
Generally, readers aren't converting from a single blog post. Content marketing really is a long game. Sure, you can shorten the game by targeting your real audience.
I touch on how to do with in my article on converting readers into leads.
BUT, in most cases, readers need to become a bit more familiar with your brand before being comfortable handing your their precious email address.
For that reason, you need to focus more on:
First click attribution
Linear paths
First Click Attribution
First-click attribution tells you which content piece brought the user (visitor) to your sight. What content sparked their initial interest. It then shows you the path that user took until they converted.
As mentioned, your visitors need to become a little more familiar with your brand. That's why it's vital that you offer as much helpful content as possible, and link to that content within each relevant blog.
Doing so creates the reality that you have a lot to offer, and all of that content is helpful to them.
The more they read, the more likely they are to convert.
What's great about first-click attribution, is that a user can leave your site, and come back a month later to view more content and Google Analytics will still pick up on that.
GA tracks the IP addresses that interact with your site- thanks to cookies.
It's able to track those previous interactions up to three months in the past. So if a user interacts with your site before that, you won't be able to account for that. However, you can account for returning visitors within that three months, even if they haven't visited your site in a month or two.
Linear paths of your site users
Your users don't take a direct path to converting, and you shouldn't expect them to. Marketers know this, and it's often why they don't take too close a look at which articles make the most impact to conversions. They simply consider the body as a whole, pushing the user towards the end goal.
In many cases, that's enough. You can take a general look at conversions, increases in traffic, and higher rankings for keywords and generally understand that your content is working.
However, as a freelancer that works with a lot of tech companies, and one that works with B2B businesses, I want a more detailed look at my content.
I want to know which articles users are touching on their journal to converting. I want to optimize content and my content strategies to include more of the content that really works.
Linear paths allow you to see which articles your visitors read on their journey from first-click to last-click attribution and conversion.
GA Model Comparison Tool gives you a more complete look at your lead's journey
You don't need the model comparison tool to look at last-click attribution. That's readily available in your landing page report.
However, if you want a more complete look at their journey- where they first interacted with your site and which articles they read along the way- you need to see first-click attributions and their linear touchpoints. You can only find this with the model comparison tool.
"Tool" makes it sound like something you have to download, or a plugin you need to enter into GA, but it's actually just another reporting function that's easy to access and use.