Your content marketing clients are eagerly awaiting your reports each month: are the new posts ranking well on Google? Is organic traffic up month-over-month? Did revenue increase?
But demonstrating ROI is rarely this black and white in content marketing. How do you know that the organic traffic is actually coming from the inbound content you wrote, or that your content marketing strategy is receiving fair attribution for the revenue it drove?
Here are 5 ways to demonstrate the value of your content marketing efforts that go one step further than traditional reports.
Landing Page Report in Google Analytics
This report will help you measure the individual performance of your blog posts. Content marketing can’t technically take credit for organic traffic to a bio page for your company’s founder, for instance – this will show you whether or not your actual blog posts and pages with useful content are driving traffic and leads.
In Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. Then filter your traffic by using the Organic Traffic segment.
You can now see exactly which pages are performing well in organic search, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
Corresponding Increases in Direct Traffic
Did you know that up to 60% of traffic labeled as “direct” in Google Analytics is actually organic traffic? Session timeouts, visitors arriving via non-https links, and other common web phenomena can cause Google Analytics to lose a visitor’s scent.
If you have been creating a high volume of valuable content on your website for a period of time, you should compare “direct traffic” from that time frame to “direct” traffic from beforehand. You can most likely take credit for the increase in traffic.
Conversion Attribution Modeling
For this report, you will navigate in Google Analytics to the Model Comparison Tool. You can find the tool at Conversion > Multi-Channel Funnels > Model Comparison Tool.
Google Analytics uses “last click attribution” for its standard reporting, but you will also want to view first-click attribution in this tool.
Here’s why. If somebody initially finds one of your blog posts, then visits the website again a month later through an advertisement or social media post, those latter channels will receive credit for the conversion. We can probably agree that in reality, the blog post should receive most of the credit! This is a big factor in law firm SEO strategy, where so many clients follow a journey like this:
- Step 1: Google: “what is the statute of limitations on car accident cases in CA”
- Step 2: Get served a retargeting ad five days later
- Step 3: Google the attorney’s name and click through to the website from the Google My Business listing
You can see why attribution is a big deal!
Another trick: change the lookback window (circled above) to 60 or 90 days. That way, even if a visitor initially found your website through your content marketing two months ago before converting through an advertisement a week ago, content marketing can still receive credit for any conversion actions that visitors may have taken.
Search Console Data
Google Search Console is a treasure trove of data for content marketers. Here are three specific things to look for when demonstrating content marketing ROI
Search Query Reports
In the performance reports, you can see the literal search terms visitors are using to find your website. If a high volume of those queries are informational in nature, you’ll know that your content marketing efforts are working.
Corresponding Increases in Branded Traffic
Furthermore, you can demonstrate that an increase in branded searches corresponds with your content marketing work. For instance, if you started publishing content every few days on Jan. 1, 2021, you will want to compare branded searches in Google Search Console from March 1-31, 2021 to branded searches March 1-31, 2020. I intentionally used a two month delay here because it always takes some time for content to start to get organic traffic.
Google Discover Report
The third Search Console report you’ll want to look for is the “Discover” report (only available in Search Console if your content is currently showing on Google Discover):
Google Discover is the content that Google algorithmically suggests to people, based on their interests, on the homepage of Google Chrome on mobile devices.
If your content is being featured on Google Discover, that means a few things:
- Google views your content as highly valuable and authoritative (E-A-T is a factor here)
- Web users don’t even have to search for keywords to be served your content organically
- You will receive a high volume of brand awareness, even if you don’t get clicks in Google Discover
Retargeting Audience Performance
If you are investing in content marketing, you should absolutely be building retargeting audiences in Google Analytics. You can segment your blog post traffic into its own retargeting list or you can group visitors by subject matter. You can then serve these visitors with appropriate retargeting content based on their stage in your marketing funnel.
Content marketing will be able to take a significant amount of credit for this if the following is true:
- Your retargeting lists are being populated by a high volume of organic visitors
- Those audiences convert as leads or customers in your retargeting campaigns
How Are Your High Level Keyword Rankings?
Your blog posts should all have internal links (with relevant anchor text) to the most valuable commercial pages on your website. Example: a blog post about the “best nail polish colors for a wedding” should have an internal link pointing to your main “gel nail polish” product page. Over time, that product page should start to rank higher for its targeted keywords because of those internal links.
High ranking commercial pages in a competitive niche always have a critical mass of good content internally linking to them. Even if those blog posts are not ranking well individually, they are helping create authority for your website in Google’s eyes.
