Content marketing is a key component of a successful digital strategy. After all, if you write a lot of content as part of your content strategy, but no one finds it and reads it, what’s the point of writing it to begin with?
That’s where content marketing comes in.
Content marketing is your developed plan around how you get your content in front of the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons.
★ Want to learn more about content marketing and content planning? Have a look at these post:
- What it Takes to Build a Solid Content Marketing Strategy
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
Your content marketing plan can happen in a lot of different places, but some main ones are:
- As part of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy: Getting your content found in search results, at the right time, by the right people, through their search intent.
- As part of your social media strategy:Â Posting your content on your social media profiles, and using hashtags and other tactics to be found in social search results.
- As part of your advertising strategy: Building advertising campaigns to promote your content to help people discover you.
No matter how you get your content in front of people, the primary way you’re going to be able to measure the success of your content marketing is through your website analytics.
When you’re reviewing Google Analytics 4, there are a lot of different metrics that you can look at to see if your content marketing strategy is effective (and so you can improve it), but here are the easiest ones to review:
1. Traffic Sources
The traffic sources metric gives you an overarching view of how people initially find your content (Your Acquisition Metric). It’s broken down into:
- Organic Search: they discovered your content from an organic search in a search engine.
- Direct: they discovered your content directly by your domain and/or URL (any acquisition from your email marketing might also show up in this metric).
- Referral: they discovered your content by clicking a link on another website.
- Organic Social: they discovered your content from a social media platform (most social traffic, even if it’s not organic, will still show up in this metric).
Why is it important? This metric tells you how well your content marketing is performing at a high level, and it helps guide where you should make large-scale adjustments. For example, if your ‘organic search’ traffic channel is low, it means that not enough people are discovering your content through your SEO strategy, so you may want to focus on improving that.
➤ In Google Analytics 4, you can access this metric by going to: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition (and then adjust the date range to the period of time you want to review).
★ Want to learn more about SEO? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
- Understanding SEO Titles and Meta-Descriptions on Your Real Estate Website
2. Landing Pages
The traffic sources metric is a deeper dive into the pages that people first land on when they first discover your content.
In the past, most people would focus on the homepage as being the primary way that people will find your website, but if you have a strong SEO and content strategy in place, often, your strategic content pages can surpass your homepage as a landing page.
Why is it important? This metric will give you more specifics around how people are actually first discovering your content so you can decide what to focus on to make your content marketing strategy more efficient. For example, if you find that some of your blog posts are the primary way people first find you, you may want to expand on that topic and create a series of posts since it’s something interesting to your target audience.
➤ In Google Analytics 4, you can access this metric by going to: Reports > Engagement > Landing Page (and then adjust the date range to the period of time you want to review).
3. Most Popular Pages
The most popular pages metric tells you what content people view the most, primarily determined by views, over a period of time. It allows you to get an understanding of the content you’re producing that’s the most valuable to the people that visit your website.
Why is it important? This metric gives you more specifics around where most of your website traffic goes. For example, if you know the 3 most popular pages people go to on your website, you can adjust those pages to ensure they have strong CTAs and guide the user toward an eventual path of conversion.
➤ In Google Analytics 4, you can access this metric by going to: Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens (and then adjust the date range to the period of time you want to review).
Writing good, high-quality content is a lot of work, but it’s absolutely worth the time investment that it takes as long as you write content strategically. However, it’s equally important the right people find your content at the right time, and building an effective content marketing strategy is huge part of seeing success in that.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
