How to Track Conversions, KPIs, ROI and Engagement of Blog Content

For over a decade in the panorama of Italian web marketing you hear about Corporate Blog and corporate blog, in general the need, by companies and professionals, to have a space within the site to create content, which depending on the company's business can be a blog within a website ecommerce or a "showcase site".

Beyond a advantage for (or the) company Brand, often vague as well as difficult to monitor in terms of return on investment, Those who propose the need for content writing often fail to mention:

  • gli macro and micro conversion objectives of this activity that can have a real impact on company turnover;
  • the way of plot an activity that as such is extremely time-consuming and costly.

This article therefore seeks to:

  • deepen like the blog and more generally the writing content that is useful in the context of the web marketing strategy company and more specifically within funnel for sale;
  • understand what the conversion goals of a corporate blog;
  • understand how and what to track in order to understand the eventual return on the activity.

Let's start with the first aspect, that is what is the function of the blog and more generally of the editing of content in the context of the funnel of sale.

The role of the blog within a Web Marketing strategy

Within the sales funnel, i.e. the process that takes our potential customer from an initial phase of awareness of our product or service, to the final phase of conversion, the drafting of content can represent a way to intercept the user at the top of the funnel.

Entering more specifically and taking up the distinction between conscious and latent demandthe company blog we need to intercept the initial phase of the conscious question, that is, the information phase in which the user is consciously asking a problem by making queries, that is, questions using keywords on Google.

At this stage, however, the user's searches are still of informative type are in fact defined informative queries, e.g. "how to cure back pain".

In this phase a company blog can be useful to intercept those who search for this type of information queries creating content that goes to acquire organic traffic from keywords that as such are often harbingers of:

  • a high volume of research;
  • low levels of competition as of Long Tail;
  • usually inexpensive (in case you want to use the research network of Google ADS) as they are not traditionally associated with "money keywords";

At this point, since the user is still in an informational phase i.e. does not yet intend to buy our product service or choose our Brand, there are two possible approaches:

  • Direct the visitor to the sales page of the product or service, perhaps a call to action or point directly to the sale;
  • convert the visitor into a cold lead;

Regarding the first aspect, the advice is to track the click on the Call To Action, for example with Google Tag Manager. In case you don't want to proceed with an "attempted sale", but in a more mediated way, you can try to convert the reader of the content into a cold lead.

Convert Content Reader to Cold Lead

This approach consists ofmake contact (one lead generation), which in this context is referred to as a cold lead, via an optin, che can be in the form of PopUp or static form and realized with tools like Optin Monster.

Once the contact has been acquired, it is possible to insert it in a automated procedure of email marketingaimed at gradually bringing him to conversion;

From a tracking perspective, lead acquisition can be tracked with a simple landing page target in Google Analytics.

Calculate the return on investment of a Cold Leador a "subscribed to the newsletter" is not so simpleIt's mentioned in my book Lead Generation, to explain it in a few words I report a fragment of an interview of mine on SeoZoom:

If in the last 6 months I generated 1000 leads that yielded a total profit of 20,000 euros, the average value of my lead will be 20 euros.

From https://www.seozoom.it/interview-emanuele-chiericato/

However, it could be that I don't need to increase leads, nor do I need to sell, but just want to create content with a Brand Awareness purpose, or that I'm trying to understand, beyond the standard conversions (leads, sales) how my content is perceived.

In this case I have to analyze the fruition of the content with the Metrics related to content engagement.

Track content engagement

A second type of trackable goal can then be engagement, or how much and how the content is used by the user.

With the feature called Google Analytics (and the help of Google Tag Manager) I can track three useful metrics to define engagement on content, namely:

Let's start with the first one.

Adjusted Bounce Rate

The modified rebound rate or Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) is a metric useful to overcome the limits of the traditional bounce rate or to the fact that in the absence of further interaction on the page, the user's dwell time is automatically set to 0.

As we know from the definition of Bounce RateGoogle Analytics tracks the bounce when the user enters the page and exits without doing any further tracked interaction.

However:

  • not necessarily that the user subscribe to the newsletter after reading the contents: Judging the "success" of a piece of content by this conversion goal alone might be reductive, since:
  • It is not necessarily the case that leaving the content without navigating to other pages is a negative sign and does not mean that you have not found what you were looking for.

But if you think about it can be very limiting in that:

  • the user may very well have exited the content satisfied that they found what they were looking for;
  • we have no way of knowing how long he was there before he left.

The modified bounce rate allows us to precisely trigger the rebound when a certain event takes place, for example after a Time Frame of your choicefor example of 30 seconds (or more, if the content is longer or you have other reasons to do so).

Like this:

  • we have a smarter view of engagement over content;
  • we can also reduce the Bounce Rate in general.

From this point of view, setting an "adapted" or "modified" Bounce Rate and monitoring certain events such as page scroll or dwell time can allow us to have a more detailed overview of the user's function of the content.

Average Time On Page

Average time on page is a Google Analytics metric (not to be confused with Average Session Duration), which tells us how long readers of your content stay on your page on average (excludes bounces).

Plotting the Scroll Depth of the Page

With Google Tag Manager I can then go to monitor the percentage of scrolls of the content: this can allow me to understand, perhaps with the joint use of some tools such as HotJar o Yandex Metrica, at what point users abandon the content and then where to set a conversion goal such as an email request.

Some hints

  • Modified high bounce rate, low scroll and average dwell time could tell us: Houston, we have a problem. Perhaps the content does not reflect the research intent?
  • you can create segments to isolate organic traffic or other sources and assess their relative engagement;
  • you can create segments for mobile and desktop and assess their relative content engagement;

Conclusion

To paraphrase the title of a well-known series of books... a corporate blog is easy if you know how to track it.

The starting point is understand the role of the company blog in the context of the sales funnelContent writing serves to intercept organic visitors from information queries.

Since the latter are plausibly not yet ready to buy our product or service or to choose our brand, the most useful strategy will be to acquire their contact details, such as their email, through a optin and a Lead Magnet informational and then insert them into a automated workflow of email marketing.

Other macro and micro conversion goals and related metrics we can track are the modified bounce rate, content scroll rate, and average time on page.

What do you think? Have you implemented one or more of these metrics to evaluate engagement and ROI on your content? Let's talk about it in the comments.

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