It’s no secret that content engagement is a crucial part of every retailer’s web marketing strategy, but how do you know when users are actually being engaged? It seems intuitive enough that you would need a powerful way to track both static (blog posts, articles, etc) and dynamic (videos, podcasts, animation) types of content. For many floral retailers – and online marketers in general – Google Analytics is the go-to solution for tracking and managing any web content you put out into the universe.
While Google Analytics (GA) seems straightforward enough, you may be finding yourself wondering where to start. Let’s take a quick look at four tips for successful content monitoring and tracking in Google Analytics.
Three Tips for Better Content Tracking in Google Analytics
- Focus on the right metrics – If you’re stuck thinking that Google Analytics isn’t giving you accurate data, it’s likely that you may be focused on the wrong kinds of metrics. Successful content tracking means keeping an eye on metrics that match up with your content engagement goals. In general, you want to focus on three big measurement statistics: time spent, bounce rates and social media data. These metrics will give you real insight into how much time users are spending with your content, and whether or not they’re sharing content over social networks.
- Get a handle on short-term/long-term views – This is where the rubber meets the road. Essentially, you’ll need to keep a close eye on how potential customers are viewing and interacting with your content over short and longer periods of time. Start by filtering your metrics by a six months, and watch how user engagement is either growing or scaling back. From there you can shrink the view down to 3 months then down to the month, week and even day view if you want. This gives you a 30-foot to 30-inch view of what you may or may not need to adjust in your content strategy.
- Don’t forget your social media data – Social media data not only reveals that people are interacting with your web content, but also that they are sharing it with their friends. This lets you view just how many people are tweeting or sharing your content on Facebook.
Track everything all the time
Content marketing involves growing awareness for your retail brand. If you’re not tracking all of your content, you’re simply left to make educated guesses that often miss the mark. While this doesn’t necessarily happen overnight, Google Analytics gives you more control over your whole marketing process, which translates into more valuable experiences for your retail customers.
Thank you for this powerful article! I am very new to marketing online and how to use Google Tools to my advantage. Google Analytics is a tool that I have never heard before, but I am certainly going to use it as much as I can. In fact, this article is going to be a basic reference for me in the future on how to use it’s features.
How do we know that we are looking at the right metrics?
Great article on content tracking. Learnt a lot I didn’t know about before!
The hard part is having the patience I think. It is easy to expect quick success and results when you enthusiastically start up a website or blog, but the reality is that it is often a long time before you start seeing much movement. It is best to see websites as long term investments, the effort you put in today might take 6 months to bear fruit.
This has always been a confusing subject for me. Thanks so much for the tips and clarification!
Focusing on the right metrics has always been the source of my confusion… thanks for clearing it up. I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while but never knew how to REALLY use it! The social media data seems like a good place to encourage new visitors, which is something I need. I just need to remember: Patience, patience, patience…
I have a blog and recently had to re-do my media kit. The first time around someone did it for me so I was a little clueless to be honest. I struggled with focusing on the right metrics, there is just SO MUCH data on Google Analytics you can easily get lost or confused. Thanks so much for this post!
Knowing where to look and identifying what you see is so important in the analytics world. That’s why with a little effort deciphering what is the “right” metric can save a lot of work later own when campaigns go awry.
The point of statistical data is to help predict future results, with a little work and patience you would be sure to pull off your desired goals.
Thanks for this, it is really insightful and useful to learn more about Google Analytics, because it is a very underused tool that is very useful in SEO and tracking the views and traffic on your websites!
Google Analytics can be really intimidating at first. It presents to you a wealth of information — some of which, you may not have even known was possible. I’m not lying when I say that I’ve learned something new everyday with data that we’ve gathered using Google Analytics. I’ve used it for years with some of our minor sites. But for our main sites, I’m uncomfortable sharing that much data with Google, and so we’ve opted for more private alternatives. They aren’t quite as robust, but they seem to be a bit more user-friendly and they meet our needs.
Google Analytics is often the most over-looked tool when looking at how to improve a website. The metrics can help you understand how your site functions, and for that reason, it is an exciting venture! This is highly insightful on how to interpret it all! Thanks!
Social media data, I believe, is one of the most important metrics. It tells you how popular people actually believe your website is (are they willing to share it with their friends?)
I focus on social media, but Analytics often doesn’t give too hot of an overview.
I just want to say from a user which finds it very difficult to surf the information wave of Analytics your insights are very useful. The content can be overwhelming sometimes and it’s important to take a step back and focus on the key metrics which are important.
Google Analytics is an amazing tool, it provides a wealth of information. I fully agree with this blog it is highly under used, but I believe it is because there is so much data and it is hard to determine where to start. I think it really depends on the business/company and nature of the website. For my the analytics I draw the most from is the Visitor Flow so you can see how people go through your website and where they typically leave the website. Secondly is the traffic source, specifically the referral and search traffic because this tells you what people search for to find your website and what websites are linking to your website. (It is often interesting to see sites that you have never been on or heard of linking to your website).
Great blog and interesting topic. Thanks
I found that this information was very articulate and helpful. Content Tracking is a critical part of owning a business. Using these tips could directly increase marketing greatly.
I found that this information was very articulate and helpful. Content Tracking is a critical part of owning a business. Using these tips could directly increase marketing greatly. Personally I found that this made marketing easy and accessible .
Great blog post! I like how you mentioned the importance of social media data. I agree to that. Social media is a monster of a tool for us website developers and we need to make sure we are using it to our fullest advantage. 🙂
Tracking your traffic is probably one of the most important factors in running a website, or business, that many people do not talk about. Without tracking your results, you have no idea what you have been doing is working, or not. Social media is especially important in tracking, so you can see which post are going viral, and which ones are not.
Aaahhh. I see, said the blind man! Thanks for sharing this in simple, easy to understand examples. Google Analytics has crammed so much into its interface that its hard find what you’re looking for, much less understand exactly what it is you are seeing.
You always give great marketing advice! I like the part about social media sharing. It’s so important to build a fan base on social networks and keep track of how and what content your followers and fans are sharing! Word of mouth has now turned to sharing of the web!
I have been doing this on my blog everytime I visited Google Analytics. First thing I would look at is the number of visitors for the day. Then, I would check the time spent and bounce rates. That is how far I would go. I didn’t know about tip #2, which should have allow me to keep a closer look at how potential customers interact with my contents.
Thank you for the clear and concise outline of how to use Google Analytics. I agree with what has been said; the amount of data provided can be overwhelming.
What is important, as you’ve pointed out, is how the user is interacting with the site. And looking back at that data historically can really help us to know more precisely what kind of content is most successful, and to produce more of that type of content.
Keeping tabs on bounce rate is especially important as we’re hearing more and more about how Google is using this as criteria for ranking websites in the SERPs.
And of course, from the business perspective, the longer the users stay on the site the more likely they will become customers!
It’s also important to have a thorough technical understanding of how the tracking and analytics function. Otherwise, you could be running into situations such as the metrics on a page accidentally being split up because the incoming URL’s to that page may be using different URL parameters depending on their referral source. The site owner may not be aware that they need to search for all instances of that page and aggregate them first, for example. Or you may have traffic inadvertently getting bucketed into organic that is actually coming from non-Google paid search campaigns because it wasn’t tagged properly.