You Ask, I Answer: Channel and Content Performance Metrics?

In today's episode, Tyler asks, How do you prefer to track your channel metrics or content performance metrics? Uh native analytics, social media tools, combination, interested in hearing your thoughts. I prefer to look uh more at outcomes first to determine what's working best as opposed to looking at uh uh sort of data on what I've done. What I've done is good and it's important information to have, but I care more about the outcomes first because if I if the outcomes are all bad, then analyzing the data of what I've done is kind of irrelevant because it clearly didn't do anything. So look at the outcomes first.

And to do that, I use Google Analytics data, but I use Google Analytics data by extracting it from the application and processing it uh using some machine learning tools. And the reason for that is that the type of analysis I want to do is not built into Google Analytics. It it's not in there, probably won't be there for some time, but I need to know not just how did a channel perform, but how did that channel also impact the effectiveness of other channels? Um there's a built-in functionality called assisted conversions, but it it's it's not as good as being able to do the sequencing, like this one helped this one more than it helped this one more. So let me show you a couple of examples.

Let's bring up this first one here. This is the digital customer journey map. Uh this is cus again, custom software had to write in order to be able to to analyze this data. And what I wanted to see was uh the size of the bubble indicates the importance of that channel for impact and conversions. And then the uh the position from left to right is the beginning, middle, or end of the customer journey.

So in this case, from for my blog, I can see that uh 66% of the my conversions are driven through organic search, right? It's just a very, very large amount of search uh of my conversions come through. Then I see uh things like uh organic from Yahoo, medium, marketing over coffee, uh LinkedIn, DuckDuckGo, which is kind of a surprise, uh, is in there. Twitter is in there towards the bottom as more of a something that's uh is a call to action for someone to take an action rather than uh up top, which is more awareness stuff. So from top to bottom on the left-hand side, it's uh from it goes from awareness down to conversion, same for you know left to right, and then the size of the bubble indicates yeah, this channel is really converting strongly.

Um Bing is in there, my newsletter is in there. So by looking at this assessment, I can go, okay, I definitely need to continue my search game, yeah, my organic search game. It's it's a strong game. Definitely need to beef up and add more punching power to my newsletter. What can I do to improve my newsletter?

My YouTube channel is in there, but I clearly need to do a bit more with YouTube because it's on there and it's in the middle of it, actually towards the end of the funnel, and then there's a whole bunch of stuff up top. Like, okay, what can I do to improve LinkedIn? What can I do to improve medium? Other than just copying and pasting things, uh, what can I do to improve uh some of these other sources? So that's the first thing.

Uh, when you look at channel metrics, you want to look at how impactful is the channel, and then where is it sequenced? Where is it in the customer journey? Because if your messaging is wrong on a channel, it's not going to resonate. So, in this case, like in in this chart here, uh, Twitter is towards the end of the customer journey. At the very, very end of the customer attorney.

If my uh tweets are all, hey, get to know me. If you never heard of me before, it's wrong. It's wrong because Twitter's closing the deal in a lot of cases. So my messaging on Twitter should be hey, download this ebook. Buy my book, AI for marketersbook.com.

Uh and that's how I should be using that channel. So customer journey mapping is really important for that reason. The second thing I do is a report that I I jokingly call MVP, the most valuable pages. And again, using the same type of machine learning technology, in Google Analytics, Google Analytics tracks the path somebody takes through your website on the way to a conversion. If you know that this blog post always gets people to this landing page, which always gets people to fill out this form, then you know that that blog post needs more promotion.

That's how this assessment works. And so uh if we look at this chart here, we see the blog itself, 34% of uh conversions come from the blog homepage, which is some a summary of existing posts. Uh newsletter, no surprise there. Uh home page, surprisingly 15%, uh, which is weird because I don't do that much on the homepage. It makes me think maybe I need to rethink that strategy.

My public speaking page, great. I want to see that page if it's not on there, I'm not doing a my job. Um, how to set your public speaking via as a blog post, best practices for public speaking pages, my contact form. So what's not on here is that's a little alarming to me is there's not more blog content on here, right? So even though I'm my con my my conversions are coming from organic search, it's coming to very specific pages, it's not coming to the to my blog.

So I need to increase the amount of uh search work that I do on my blog uh in order to keep attracting new traffic. So uh something to think about there in terms of how I approach this content. Now, all of this is unique to my website only. So please don't go thinking that Twitter is you know the the closer channel, and everyone should be tweeting, you know, uh closing uh uh content there. It's it is the one of the benefits of this type of analysis is that it is unique to your website, it tells you what is working for you and you only, and it even changes over time.

If I were to rerun this in another 90 days, uh I run it with a rolling 90-day window. If I were to run it in another 90 days, it might look completely different. I might have a blog post that just knocks it out of the park. Great, I'm gonna do more of that. Um I might also maybe I'll make a change to the home page and it it drops, right?

Uh whoops, don't do that. That was a poor choice. So these two maps together are what I use to track channel metrics and content performance metrics for the content that is that I have control over. Now, this does not take into account what I'm posting on a social media channel, uh, and there's again we can do a different type of assessment for that, but for the results, particularly on the channel one on the digital customer journey, I need to know what is the impact of a channel in nudging forward conversions, period. Right?

That's that's the point of these maps. So it's a good question, Tyler. Um if you're interested in getting these maps for your website, just pop on over to trustinsights.ai. We uh we we do them for customers. Um or you can just email you know sales at trustinsights.ai and and talk to to me and the team about that if you're interested in getting uh these for your own website.

But that's how I approach this these channel metrics, because without it, you're dealing with a much more simplistic analysis in Google Analytics, which is okay. It's not it's not gonna like sync your marketing, but you're not gonna know what to do. It's not as clear cut, it's not as prescriptive, uh, it is much more descriptive. Uh like this is just what happened, as opposed to this is what you need to do to make things work better. As always, please leave comments in the comments box below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon.

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