Google Analytics (GA) provides very powerful analytics tools right out of the box. However, most marketers are not familiar enough with what those tools can do, and are therefore not using them to their full advantage.

1. Google Analytics:
Setting Up Your Content Hub to
Measure Conversions
(Part 1)

2. DATA ACCURACYDEFINING GOALS SETTING UP CONVERSIONS
Today’s Agenda
01 02 03

3. Segments of Google Analytics

4. What are we focusing on in GA?

5. 4 Major Buckets
Who are the people that
read my content?
How are these people
getting to my site?
What actions did they take
that I want to record
AUDIENCE ACQUISITION
CONVERSIONS
What do they do when they
get there?
BEHAVIOR

6. Understanding and choosing
Google Analytics Conversion Goals

7. What is a conversion goal and
how do I choose one?

8. A content marketing goal is a
measurable action taken through your
content that matters to your business.

9. Examples of Content Marketing Goals
LEAD GENERATION
Filling out Blog Subscribe Form
Actions taken that can be tracked
back to creating a new lead.
Sales Demo Request Form
New Member Sign Up
TRANSACTIONAL
Purchase on e-commerce site
Actions taken that can result in a free or
measurable purchase/transaction
Request for physical collateral
Download / Read White Paper or e-Book
Coupon Redemption
BEHAVIORAL
Visit Product Detail / Pricing Page
Behavior taken by a visitor that has intrinsic
value to the company
Visit CSR Page / Site
Move from Content to Corporate
Store Locator search
About Page
Coupon / Discount Program Join
Reading x pieces of content
Watching key video
Sharing content

10. Content Journey mapping

11. Mapping your ideal content journey
allows you to create better goals.

12. Best practice lead journey – Top Down Approach
SUBSCRIPTIONS
PAGEVIEWS
OPPS
LEADS
MQLS
New visitors to Insights content from all channels
Goal is to move this channel to subscribe or sign-up to Insights directly
Newsletter Subscriber & Upsell Opportunity
Receives newsletter as normal, but also gets entered into stream to upsell to Insights
Scorable Lead
Contains enough data to be scored by Everstring
MQL
Scored by Everstring as A rated lead
Opps
Revenue Connected
2%
8%
15%
15%

13. CONTENT JOURNEY
GOAL TYPE
Measureable action that matters to your business
Different brands and content hubs have limitations and identifying a measureable metric that
you can track will help lead you to deeper goals.
DEFINE YOUR GOAL
Articulate your content journey
By creating a visual journey for ideal visitors, you can identify opportunities for creating goals,
and success states that will be reportable to your CMO.
Choosing a Goal type
Lead generation, transactional, and behavioral goals can all be used to prove your business
case or lead you to a process where you can choose deeper goals.
Quick recap about Goal setting

14. Understanding + Customizing Your Traffic Data

15. What’s wrong with my
Google Analytics data?

16. CONTENT GROUPING
CHANNEL ACCURACY
Knowing who sends you traffic
Referral traffic is a powerful indicator of not only the impact of your content, but the sites that
are key to growing your business.
REFERRAL TRAFFIC
Breaking your site into segments
Being able to view your content on a topical or other grouping level allows you to gain more
insight into your content and how to improve it.
Understanding the ways people get to you
Knowing your channel sources is key to your strategy. Bad information results in bad strategy.
Google is close, but it’s not exact without context

17. 1. Referral Traffic

18. CONTENT HUB
REFERRAL
Referral Channel Organization
BLOGSPOT
FEEDLY
CORPORATE
YAHOO
REDDIT

19. CONTENT HUB
REFERRAL
The Referral ‘Blind Spot ‘
BLOGSPOT
FEEDLY
CORPORATE
YAHOO
REDDIT

20. Defining your Traffic Sources
Accurately

21. OWNED
SOCIAL
• Correct use of utms
• Identifying email client urls
EMAIL
• Create a channel for owned domains and corporate sites
• Understand the value of internal referral
• Separating into Paid & Organic
• Identifying custom utms
Channels to focus on
OTHER
• Find better buckets for traffic in Other channel
• Keep this channel to a minimum

22. Setting up
Content Groupings

23. Examples of Content Grouping Architecture
BLOG POSTS
Topic 1
Topic 2
Topic 3
Topic 4
HIGH-VALUE CONTENT CONVERSION PAGES
Topic 5
CONTENT HUB
White Papers
Videos
Webinars
Sign Up Page
Coupon Downloads
Contact Us

24. CONTENT GROUPING
CHANNEL CLEANUP
A clean referral channel gives you powerful data
Removing the noise in your referral channel will show you the domains that drive valuable
traffic to your site and will help inform your strategy to capitalize on this.
REFERRAL TRAFFIC
Grouping content helps you to understand your content performance better
By grouping your sections, you’ll be able to use GA to look at the content without the additional
noise, as well as viewing it at a granular level.
Accurate channel data will help to inform your distribution strategy
Cleaning up and creating custom channels will help to build a customized model for your
content hub, and will also give you a more accurate picture overall.
Quick recap about channel cleanup

25. Creating + Measuring Goals

26. Setting up a Goal

27. Google Goal Types
Specific page or group of
pages
Set amount of time spent
on site
Coded element on the
page that receives action
DESTINATION DURATION
EVENT
Pages visited within a
specific session
PAGES/VISIT

28. Google Goal Types
Specific page or group of
pages
Set amount of time spent
on site
Coded element on the
page that receives action
DESTINATION DURATION
EVENT
Pages visited within a
specific session
PAGES/VISIT

29. Viewing Goal Results

30. GOAL FLOW
FUNNEL VISUALIZATION
High-level view of your goals.OVERVIEW
Visualizing the journeys to and from your goal locations
Viewing the conversion rates for complex or multi-step goals
High-impact Goal/Conversion Reports
MULTI-CHANNEL FUNNELS Seeing how multiple channels work together to create goals

31. Look to your own business KPI’s to find
actions that a user can take on your site
that you can measure today.
Start with achievable and measureable
goals and you’ll have a foundation to
build on with additional tools.
Google Analytics is good at identifying
traffic sources, but without some context
from you, it might be giving you
information that lead to a bad strategy.
Clean up your channels and you’ll be
able to measure with confidence.
Creating Content Groupings can help
you to understand your content better.
Building an understanding ways to
analyze goals will help you to see and
record behavior that will matter to
your CMO.
Knowing how to interpret this data will
help you to provide stronger insights
into how these goals occurred and
which channels to focus on.
Quick Recap
UNDERSTANDING TRAFFICDEFINING GOALS SETTING UP CONVERSIONS
01 02 03

32. The goal isn’t to
be good at content.
The goal is to be good at
business by using content.

33. Thank You!