For years, when content marketers would ask me what I love about my job I used to say somewhat reluctantly: “analyzing data.” I would almost wince as I waited for the inevitable look of horror to come over their faces before saying, “ I can’t help it. I’m kind of a Google Analytics geek.”
You see, a misconception exists in marketing that marketers are essentially divided into one of two camps—the “data” team or the “creative” team. One team believes great marketing is “science” and the other team believes great marketing is an “art.” A veritable cold war exists between these two mythological factions. In fact, many content marketers are openly hostile to analytics, as if they fear that being analytical will somehow reduce or destroy their ability to do bleeding-edge creative work. It took me a while to understand that this hostility was actually due to the fact that most marketers don’t really know what Google Analytics is or how powerful a content marketing tool it can be.
So I decided to write this blog post to “come out” so to speak—to let content marketers everywhere know that not only are analytics essential to developing phenomenal content strategy, but that it’s absolutely “okay” to be a content marketer and admit you like to crunch numbers and dream of data. In fact, I would argue that every “creative” person on a marketing team—from content to design—can and should benefit from becoming fluent in Google Analytics. Here are three reasons why I believe your content team is doomed to fail if they don’t become familiar with Google Analytics and use it regularly.
1) Discover What Isn’t Working (And What Is)
Content marketers consistently undervalue Google Analytics from a content development perspective. They see it purely as a static reporting mechanism. A way to “see” what’s “happening” and merely report results on marketing activities. They see it, in other words, as a window into the immutable “past.” They don’t see it as a dynamic tool—a tool that can effectively help marketers to dynamically reshape their marketing future. Think about it. So many content marketers just keep ideating in a vacuum and just keep spinning out content without ever taking the time to (1) understand if their activities are actually having an impact or helping to achieve business objectives and (2) if there is anything they can do about it. In short, most of the time the average content marketer doesn’t even know if their asset (post, page, ebook) was a success or failure. They don’t even care. They just continue to spit out content, publish it, and move on to the next random content project. In this way, they just keep running in place, eating up budget and resources with very little to show for it.
These marketers are unaware that Google Analytics gives them the ability to see which content marketing activities are failing and which ones are succeeding. Knowing what isn’t working is as important as knowing what is working. As human beings, we learn from failure and the faster we fail, the faster we learn and grow. Think about it—simply not making the same content mistake again will save your company time and money and will bring you ever closer to developing a content asset or strategy that will succeed. At the bare minimum then, every content marketer should be leveraging Google Analytics and equivalent analytics tools weekly (or even daily) to learn before it’s too late if they are on the right or wrong track. Doing content in a vacuum doesn’t help content marketers make an impact or reach marketing goals. In fact, doing content in a vacuum is the single greatest reason most content marketers fail. Like this, analytics enable marketers to finally “see” so they can actually start marketing.
2) Communicate Mission Critical Information
Sure it’s good to use Google Analytics to prepare reports to marketing leadership on the “status” of your content marketing activities, but it’s even more important to “share” or communicate the insights you’ve gained from analytics to every member of your content team or broader inbound marketing team. Why? Well, obviously you can’t fix what’s broken if you don’t know it’s broken. Every member of these teams absolutely needs to know what is happening with the content that has been developed. Analytics can isolate a visitor’s journey on your site or blog and identifying exactly what page they entered/exited on and what aspects of the page they interacted with. Even a marketing team’s graphic designer needs to understand, for example, the reason a post is doing poorly is because that page is loading too slowly due to a large graphic that wasn’t properly optimized. Likewise, your team’s social media manager needs to know why her social media campaigns aren’t referring any traffic to the website. Your copywriter needs to know why most visitors to the blog abandon posts after reading only 20% of each post. Your SEM manager needs to know which Google Ads campaign is performing the best and how to optimize those campaigns for maximum impact on content.
All of this information is mission-critical to the success of your content marketing and digital marketing efforts, but this information cannot help if it is not shared and communicated to key stakeholders. Regularly sharing data from Google Analytics is a game-changing activity and should be an essential component of any content marketing team’s reporting regimen. I recommend and put into practice years ago a Google Analytics training session for every member of my team and also offer to provide training to other members of the digital team.
3) Enable Continuous Content Optimization
Unsophisticated content marketers labor under the delusion that each piece of content—each asset—is a sacred immutable object that once created is supposed to remain unchanged for the remainder of time. But a sophisticated content marketer knows that every piece of content is ever-changing, always in flux, and is in a continuous process of revision. For revision is essential not only for perfecting every asset but also updating it—keeping it accurate, current, and relevant to its target audience. How does Google Analytics help with content optimization? It enables marketers to know at critical phases in a content asset’s life span if that asset is “working”—on the day of publication, 6 months after publication, or even years after publication. We can safely say that a blog post, web page, or ebook is “working” when it not only drives traffic to your site but also compels your visitor to stay awhile and come back.
Google Analytics not only tells you what assets/pages are driving traffic but also how long those visitors “consumed” the content and if they came back. If the asset is driving a lot of traffic but is getting a low session time or a high bounce rate, this data tells you the asset isn’t a “failure” but is actually an opportunity for improvement and thus ripe for optimization. Once a content marketer is armed with insights such as these, they can immediately analyze the asset to pinpoint why the piece is attracting visitors but not keeping their attention or causing them to bounce. This analysis, insight, and revision will eventually result in a stronger asset that will drive more traffic and higher conversions. Moreover, you’ll be able to leverage this data to refine your content marketing strategy and plan.
As a marketer leverages analytics to continuously isolate opportunities for improvement, they are able to slowly fine-tune every asset for optimal impact. In this way, Google Analytics and other analytics tools are essential then for pinpointing key areas of opportunity in your content marketing arsenal so you can transform your content marketing into a high-performance machine.
Stop Worrying and Open Your Eyes
So if you’re a content marketer, stop worrying that becoming an analytics geek is going to dilute your “creative genius.” Stop playing into the false dichotomy that suggests you can’t be creative if you’re analytical and you can’t be analytical if you’re creative. There is nothing more natural in the world than wanting to know how your content was received and what happened to it once it left your content marketing “nest.” One of the greatest joys—thrills—I get as a content marketer is opening up analytics and discovering a blog post I thought had failed was actually spectacularly successful.
Start worrying about all the opportunities you’re missing to discover what isn’t working (and what is), communicate mission-critical data to your team, and optimize content for high performance. In short, it’s time to come out and test the waters of analytics. What are you waiting for? The water’s warm :)