How to measure the influence of an article on a web visitor
Last December, I gave a presentation at the AMA Symposium for Higher Education about brand storytelling for search engine optimization (SEO) and the importance of long-form articles as part of a school’s content strategy. After the presentation I received several questions about how to measure the effectiveness of specific articles.
Attendees wondered how I was able to measure the impact of an article (or group of articles) on whether a website visitor submits an inquiry form and becomes a lead. Everyone was excited to know that it is possible to look beyond a single website visit to see if a piece of content on the website (such as an article or blog post) can be attributed to having an influence, even if the user does not submit the inquiry form on the same visit in which they view the article.
Colleges and universities have started spending a lot of time and energy on producing content with the intention of bringing new prospective students to the website and getting them to convert. “Content strategy” is a buzzword, but is a popular idea with good reason. Simply put, it works.
In this article, I will show you how you can use a feature of Google Analytics that will allow you to see the impact of your content across several visits.
Advanced Segments are a Content Strategist’s best friend
I have written before about my love of advanced segments in Google Analytics. They are perfect for applying context to data in so many ways, as well as uncovering things not easily understood otherwise. Advanced segments can help measure content impact, because they allow us to not only look at what happens during a website user’s single session on the website, but also during all of the user’s visits across a 90-day period. This becomes much more useful when trying to determine if one action (such as a page view) contributes to another action (such as another page view or goal completion). Using advanced segments is also much easier than you may realize.
To look at the data by users who fit a specified criteria (rather than only session) simply change the advanced segments filter option from Sessions to Users.
After changing the filter option to Users, you can then specify the page you want to analyze. Here you can add the page that you hope will contribute to another action–such as completing an inquiry form.
After creating this segment and applying it to the goal conversions report, you can then see if someone visited the page that contains my-amazing-content in the URL and also completed a goal within a 90-day window. Again, this includes instances in which those actions occurred during different visits to the website.
One (perhaps obvious) caveat here is that this does not necessarily indicate that the visit to my-amazing-content happened BEFORE the goal completion. It merely states that both the visit and the goal completion happened. If you want to untangle it a bit further, you are still in luck. You can instead create an advanced segment with the Sequences option. With this you can still look at users across multiple sessions. However, it gives you the chance to be more precise and specify that the page view happened before the goal completion. This can provide an even more accurate view of content leading to goals.
Going further with Assisted Conversions
When you want to investigate the SEO contribution of users entering the website through a new keyword-rich page on goal completions across multiple visits, you can specify an organic medium in your advanced segment. You can also use the Assisted Conversion report (under the Multi-Channel Funnels option) to understand how users interact with your site after they enter through specific pages.
The first thing to point out is that in the Assisted Conversions report, there is a default 30-day lookback window. However, you can increase the lookback window up to 90-days. This is something that I will often do.
After you have the lookback window you want to use, you can then set the primary dimension for the report to Landing Page URL.
After selecting the Landing Page URL as the primary dimension for the Assisted Conversions report, you can now see whether someone entered the website on a specific page and either converted on that visit (Last Click or Direct Conversion), or converted on a later session (Assisted Conversions).
By looking at the data through this lens, we are able to understand the role of our content in our goal completions. We want our content to work hard for us and we can’t expect every new visitor who visits our articles to immediately convert (as much as we might wish it were the case). Taking a broader look at the data in this way will enable us to understand nuances between our top-of-the-funnel content that assists in later conversions and bottom-of-the-funnel content that produces immediate conversions.
Having these tools at your disposal will make your analysis much more complete and you will be able to make better decisions about the kinds of content to create in the future. There is room at the content table for top-of-the-funnel content to exist with bottom-of-the-funnel content in a symbiotic way. If used together and correctly, both will help you reach your objective of more goal conversions.
Meet the Faculty: Joshua Dodson
Higher Ed Experts is a professional online school for digital professionals working in universities and colleges.
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Joshua Dodson is a Google Analytics qualified web expert who has worked with numerous colleges and universities to improve their web presence and better understand their user trends. Before joining Bentley University as Director of Digital Marketing, Dodson worked as the Director of SEO at SNHU and the Web Strategy and SEO Administrator for Eastern Kentucky University. He has taught hundreds of higher education marketing professionals how to use analytics and SEO through the courses he teaches for Higher Ed Experts.
Joshua teaches Higher Ed Expert’s 4-week online course on Web Analytics for Higher Education as well as 2 other advanced courses and a course on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for higher ed.
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