[Build Backlinks Online] Measuring and Increasing the ROI of Your Content Resources

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Measuring and Increasing the ROI
of Your Content Resources'


Posted by Mike Pantoliano

Let me cut right to the chase. Do you want to know the value of your content
marketing efforts? Want this report?



Read on and I'll tell ya!

Calculating the real ROI

With so much emphasis often put on the traffic generation potential of a good
content marketing strategy, I want to focus this post on measuring and
increasing the return on the (sometimes sneakily large) investment. Some common
goals you'll hear surrounding a content marketing strategy include generating
traffic for generic terms, increasing social shares, and developing the brand's
authority (measured by increases in branded traffic, or some other indicator).
In the right circumstances, all of these are nice metrics for the relevant
stakeholders in the organization, but they're all just proxies for measuring the
growth of a business. They're measurements of the means, not the end.

The impetus for a lot of what I'll be talking about in this post comes from
Josh Braaten's post on the Google Analytics Blog a few months ago titled "How to
Prove the Value of Content Marketing with Multi-Channel Funnels". Josh talks
practically about how to measure the business impact of traffic that first
experiences your site via a page that isn't directly selling a product or
service to a consumer. Think: the "How to get into fly-fishing" article written
by the outdoors retailer that sells fly-fishing poles, or even the "How to
measure the effectiveness of content marketing" article written by the guy
working for a company that's doing a two day kick-ass web marketing conference
in Boston on May 20th & 21st :). Indeed, these content pages aren't selling a
product or service, but they are selling the brand, the "purchase" made by the
consumer is everlasting trust; and it has a really low conversion rate.

The necessary analysis for this gets difficult because it is so rare for a user
to make the jump from discovery/informational stage to transactional stage in
one sitting. Hence the need for multi-channel analysis: we need to take a
conversion, look back at all of the interactions that have taken place leading
up to that conversion, and assign some amount of credit to those channels that
often show up toward the beginning of the conversion path. Social networks and
the content that usually ranks for generic keywords are most often found in
these early interactions. They are inherently 'openers' or 'exposers'.

So, now that we've covered the theory, let's look at measuring that ROI.

Expanding upon Josh Braaten's multi-contentfunnels

Everyone interested in what I've covered above should absolutely read Josh's
post. In it, Josh walks you through how to create a report within Google
Analytics' Multi-Channel Funnels that classifies users by the page type for
which they first interacted (based upon landing page).



Custom channel creation is a lot like creating an advanced segment in GA



The top conversions path report - seen here displaying a pretty convoluted
conversion path for one particular conversion.

I'm going to offer a slightly different direction, but they both accomplish the
goal of getting value out of our visit data. Instead of comparing content
sections against each other, let's instead compare it against our other channels
like direct, referral, organic, and paid.

Let's do a step-by-step walkthrough

Head on down to the multi-channel funnels reports.



Make a copy of the basic channel grouping template.



Include traffic based on landing page URL. Hopefully you've got your resource
center, blog, or content home on a neatly identifiable path in the URL. If you
don't, you may have to go the route of declaring page-level custom variables.



Drag it to the top. The order at which you put these channels is important
because GA will go down the line until a match is found, then stop. If we leave
our Resource Center channel at the bottom, the channels above will take a ton of
visitors first because our rules aren't mutually exclusive.



Though not completely related to this topic, I'd also suggest separating your
organic channel into branded, unbranded, and (not provided).



Because of that importance of ordering, if you put (not provided) first and
branded second, the final organic group will necessarily consist of unbranded
traffic.



You can create this segment with a neatly crafted regex of your brand name and
other branded terms.

Finally, let GA calculate things out, and voila!



What can we learn from the above?

Well, it should be pretty clear that under the traditional model of last click
analysis, our resource center is under-valued. This much is obvious by the
disparity in last click conversions and conversion value compared with assisted
conversions and conversion value. Not only that, but the "Assisted/Last Click or
Direct Conversions" ratio (6.62 in the screenshot) tells us that this content is
acting in an assist role more than any other channel we have (the higher the
number, the more likely it's an 'opener', not a 'closer' - those trend toward
zero).

When we look at assisted conversion numbers, we CANNOT say that our resource
center content is now directly responsible for $26k in revenue; that would not
be quite fair using this model. But our content did have its hand in a lot more
conversions than we may have originally assumed.

Now, as for this channel's relative contribution to the bottom line compared
with other channels, well, yes, it's still a lot smaller. But consider that this
particular website's resource center is actually quite small, especially
compared with the size of the rest of the site. Knowing how many pages are in a
resource center makes it pretty easy to apply simple math to determine what each
new page is roughly worth. Or you could choose to do deeper analysis into
specific pages or sections within. Again, I point to Josh Braaten's post for
more on that.

But at the end of the day if you know that each new page added to the resource
center has an assist in $X worth of conversions per year, justifying expansion
becomes a lot easier.

A bonus tip for content marketers

So that was measuring the ROI of a content marketing strategy. But I've
actually got a tip for increasing ROI that I'd like to share.

Our content strategies are targeted at the generic keywords that more often
than not are queries that align with the user's information-seeking intent. If
we had our way, the path would go like this:

Kitten mittens purchasing decision

A user searches "my cat's too noisy" and lands on your site's blog post "10
ways to deal with a noisy cat."

The user reads and is very happy with your content. In that content, you
suggest "kitten mittens," a product that you sell.

The seed is planted in the user's mind, and upon deciding that they're ready to
buy, the user either searches for your brand name, that post again, or the
"kitten mittens" product, all of which lead back to your site.



Nightmare scenario time: what if they searched for "kitten mittens" and you
don't rank for that term? Well, your content has done all the hard work, but
your high-ranking competitor swoops in and gets the purchase. This must be
corrected. But how?

Remarketing

It doesn't matter what remarketing tool you use (this would be super easy with
GA's remarketing tool - here I wrote a post on it!), put the user above in a
"noisy cat owner" list, and target them with "kitten mitten" ads around the web.



Thanks for reading, I hoped you learned something!

Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter, @MikeCP. Don't forget
that Distilled is running our search marketing conference, SearchLove, in Boston
on May 20th and 21st!
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