So What? Analytics Ask Us Anything

Well, well, well, here we are again, another Thursday, another episode of So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. In today's episode, we're doing another uh ask me anything session, this time focused on analytics. And we kept it pretty broad because analytics is a big topic, it's a big skill set, there's specialties within analytics. And so we really wanted to see what kinds of questions uh our Slack community had, our uh other communities had, and just sort of see where people were at and how if and how we could be the most helpful in providing some practical advice or quick demos or those kinds of things.

So that's what we're focusing on today is general questions about analytics. And Chris, I know you've been compiling a long list of questions. Because I'm sure you, as someone who's known in the industry as an analytics expert, gets asked questions all the time. Yep. But these are uh many of these are from our Slack community.

Actually, I think almost all of them are. Um so let's go ahead and dig into uh these. Let's start with, and uh I've got a uh we'll do a little round rob and get some perspectives on a few of these questions. Hannah starts us off with if you could only pick three KPIs to measure blog performance, which ones would you choose? Hmm.

I would probably pick shared content. So how many times that piece of content is shared uh directly from your site around the internet, whatever it is. Um probably traffic to that page. No, that's not a good one. I take that back.

Um I don't know. We just lost John, he ghosted us. Um you know, I would so I would want to know kind I guess engagement. So that's people sharing it, that's people um how you know if they read the entire thing, so maybe scroll depth depending on how long it is. Um, but probably also um you know, something around my SEO in terms of you know, is it optimized in such a way that that's what people are finding me for?

Um, am I am I bringing people to my assets, my site for that content? That's that that's a good mix. How about you, John? Yeah, you know, wearing the biz dev hat. I think the biggest three stats are closed one, closed one, and close one.

So assisted conversion to conversion. Right, right. Conversions, assisted conversions, and uh meetings with sales. Those are three. I I love kid, you know, I like the shared thing.

I hadn't thought about that too much, but like that's a big deal. If you have content that you know gets passed around a lot, that's uh that's a great stat to have. I like that. I like it because it to me it says I wrote something that people enjoyed and wanted other people to also get something from it. What about you guys?

The the I like the and you talked about this in this week's newsletter. Um having those three very basic buckets, awareness, engagement, conversion, right? So did blog posts, any of them participate in conversions, right? That's obviously John's uh John's near and dear love, right? Um the engagement one I think is important.

Um specifically time on page. If you know how many words are in a blog post, say there's a blog post is 600 words, you know that people's average reading speed is about a hundred and fifty words per minute, give or take. Therefore, the time on page ideally should be about three and a half minutes. If your time on page for your blog content is like two seconds, it it ain't doing the job, right? People are going there and then just leaving.

And of course, at the top of the funnel really is um that the the new users, right? Are you getting new users to your blog content? Uh, if you are, by any means, great. If you're not, then again, your blog content's not doing enough to attract people by any digital channel, not just search, but you're not getting social media content. You're not getting emails to drive traffic, nothing's working to drive those users.

So from a blog, if we had to narrow it down to three, those would be the three that I would pick. That makes sense. And so do you think that so you're talking about time on page. How does bounce rate compare to time on page? Which is a better metric.

Time on a page is a better metric. Um, bounce rate is problematic. Uh, it is problematic for a variety of reasons. One, um, it is context insensitive. So it's okay for you to bounce off of a blog post.

You came, you read, you left. Great. I'm okay with that. Uh, if it's a you know, I would not be okay with that like on the landing page. Like that's that's a problem because if you left, you didn't develop the form.

That's okay. But two, and this is especially true. This is one of the reasons why you no longer see bounce rate in Google Analytics 4, which is is kind of an interesting thing. A bounce happens only when nothing happens and no event fires. But now with things like scroll depth, for example, if somebody scrolls and it triggers an event in Google Tag Manager that relays that to Google Analytics, it's no longer a bounce.

So the moment you do anything that triggers any kind of event that pings Google Analytics, Google Analytics says, Hey, no, it's you did something, and we're like, No, you didn't do something because you just scrolled once and you left, but it's no longer counted as a bounce. So tie on page to me, I think is is more reliable. Got it. I think that that's something that is gonna continue to be a learning curve for people. Because I know bounce rate has always been something that people have defaulted to of like, well, we had a very low bounce rate, so it's a good page, but it doesn't give you enough information.

Mm-hmm. Uh we have even seen cases where uh if somebody accidentally doubles up their analytics tracking code on their website, like they have it, they have the Google Analytics tag and they put also put it in tag manager, your bounce rate goes to zero because you now have two events happening uh at the same time. And so and that's uh not good. Um, let's move on, because we have a long list to get through today. Um Brian asks, how do you can you get easier ways to track and compare performance across digital channels?

For example, if a tweet gets lots of engagement, I would like to be able to see how that engagement translates into other results. So, how do we how what are your recommendations for tracking across channels? Attribution modeling. Some digital customer journey. Yeah.

Some some kind of attribution modeling. Even if you are using just a system like Google Analytics or another system like your CRM that has attribution modeling built in, assisted conversions will probably give you some of that information as long as it's tied to a goal. Um, but I think you know, we would obviously uh say our digital customer journey, our attribution model is probably more accurate than what you can get out of the box. But that's what I would default to is if I want to know across digital channels, I'm thinking of an attribution model. John, what about you?

Yeah, that's what you know, all the work you've done as far as going beyond what Google can do, you know, rather than just doing last touch or maybe based on four touches, grabbing all that data and doing some machine learning against it to find out what's relevant regardless of where it falls in the funnel. And then being able to report where in the funnel those things hit. I mean, that's just a massive improvement over that. You know, it's one thing to know that, well, these five programs show up all the time and they're our champions, but to be able to dial it down further and say, well, these are the ones that end up getting the meetings, and these are the ones that get people to sign up for the newsletter, and these are the ones that close deals, then you can more strategically place your budget as far as you know, what do you need more of this year? Where are you, you know, where's the shortfall and and where do you um have to allocate to get the best results across the board?

Yeah, attribution modeling definitely is is close to uh as good an answer as most folks are likely to get. Um if you want to get very sophisticated, like if you if you are pretty sure that you know your tweets really matter, then you're probably gonna want to do something that involves um a little bit of data warehousing and putting all of your data in in one place, like a Google BigQuery database, for example, and then being running a big regression analysis. We've done this for a bunch of clients where they've got like billboard impressions and phone calls and you know uh people walking into stores and doing that multiple regression to say here's the outcome we care about of all the data you have, which columns alone or in combination have the highest mathematical relationship to that outcome, and then trying to figure that because sometimes it is stuff like you know, the number of feet who walk in the door actually does really matter, particularly if you're you know uh a click and mortar business, you you not having that information uh would be really, really uh a big mistake. Okay. Stephanie asks, what is going to be an important social media analytics trend to watch in 2022?

You know, it might be considered an anti-trend, but I think I mean, I don't know. I feel I don't know that trend is the right word, but I think the thing to look for in social media is diversification. So people are gonna be moving away from relying on the quote unquote tried and true big four, you know, which is you know, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. I'm seeing more and more people boycott and move away from Facebook, which by then extension, they're moving away from Instagram because Facebook owns Instagram. Um, you know, LinkedIn ads are still really expensive, and you need to understand how the algorithms work on both LinkedIn and Twitter in order to make them work for you for your benefit.

So I think what we're gonna start to see is smaller, more niche social platforms becoming more relevant. You know, I wouldn't call TikTok a small platform, but I would call it almost kind of like a niche platform because it's still I feel like it's still a very specific audience for a very specific purpose, but more and more people are signing up and getting on board with it. So, how can you, as a marketer, think about where that works into your brands and your company's plan? Um, but I think there's gonna be a lot of other social networks that people are gonna turn to as they move away from you know the giant ones. So that's my trend prediction.

Big quotations. I I'm still betting heavily on influencers. I think that there's so much going on with you know, YouTube and Instagram and other channels like that, dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these content creators who are amassing their own audiences of millions of people. And I think that's going to be a great alternative for a lot of brands to, you know, instead of spending more on ads that are now less effective than ever before, to you know, get in front of the right audience that's qualified and is you know more on target for the brand. So I think spending's going to continue to shift on that front.

The big question for me is programmatic ads. You know, we're we're losing a lot of tracking, but yet I don't know if you believe a lot of what the programmatic people are saying. It's, you know, you can still do well with machine learning targeted ads where you just set them up and the system runs. But I that will have to prove itself over the next year. You know, is when you put the money in, do you actually get the quality conversions or not?

And I think the jury's still out on all that. Yep. Okay, it's interesting because neither one of those really were analytics trends for social media. Those are for more general social media trends. But I think they're both absolutely valid.

Um from an analytics perspective, we have a data blindness problem, right? So the amount of data you can get out of these platforms continues to get smaller and smaller and smaller. Um, LinkedIn, if unless basically it boils down to this with social media, unless you're paying, you're not getting data, right? You can't get LinkedIn data, you know, much more than what you're doing on your page. You still get good data out of Twitter, but Twitter is, you know, uh much more of a niche audience, actually, than TikTok is.

Twitter has 300 million users, TikTok has a billion and a half. Uh so if there's anything that's a niche, it would be Twitter. Facebook, you can't get organic Facebook data other than your own page anymore. And even that's you know, not great. TikTok, you can't get again stuff except what's what is in your app.

So if you're trying to do any kind of industry or competitive analysis, it is really, really hard to do that now. And then you have this whole raft of new networks, right? You have things like Clubhouse, uh, you have you know and Twitter spaces, uh, you have decentralized social like Des the Dezo project, you have private social like Discord and Slack and Mattermost. All of these services don't give you any data, like none. So one of the big challenges that we're gonna have to face in terms of analytics is you've got less data to work with than ever.

Um, so it means you have to rely on a a bunch of new data sources. You number one, you're gonna have to start surveying, you have to start running surveys to your audience. There's no way around it anymore. You have to be asking people questions because you're not going to get the information any other way. Um, two, uh, you have to have really good tracking governance because if you're not putting tracking codes on everything everywhere, you're blind, you're not going to see that data, especially as cookies continue to get throttled down.

That that URL-based tracking is all we've got left. And three, one of the things I think that is a strategic change for marketers who have got to figure it out. That's this is not true of enterprise, large enterprise companies, but it's definitely true of mid market and below. We've got to get away from the mindset of bigger is better. Better is better.

Like we have a Slack community with about 2,000 uh or so people in it, right? This is not a huge audience. This is not gonna, you know, light up any prizes uh you know for social media audience sites, but it's the right 2,000 people. And for us, as we you know, look at our social media strategy, we continue to focus on are we getting in front of the right people? Truth be told, if you're in an enterprise B2B company, say like you sell security uh software or hardware, you only need 50 people in your social network, as long as those 50 are the 50 CIOs of the Fortune 50, right?

That's really all you need as a social network. You don't need much more than that. But in in marketing, one of the things we're stuck on is that bigger is better. Okay, let's move on. Uh Stephanie asks, content marketers often default to using vanity metrics because they're easy to track and understand.

But if you want to prove to your boss that your content is making an impact on business results, what metrics do you recommend using instead? So let's first be clear on how we're defining vanity metrics. So, Chris, I know you recently wrote a post about you know, stop getting vanity metrics. What do you consider to be vanity metrics? Vanity metrics are numbers that don't have a correlation to your business result, which means you gotta do the math first.

So, like number of followers and yep. Well, so for example, with my with my personal website, number of Twitter followers is not a vanity metric because it does have a strong correlation to the number of people who sign up for a newsletter. So for me, that's not a vanity metric. Now, for Trust Insights, it is, it has no correlation uh to our newsletter signups. So even though it's the same metric, in one place it is a vanity metric and in one other place it is not.

So vanity metrics is really gonna depend business by business. And so using the term vanity metric is problem number one. That makes sense. And so the question that Stephanie is asking is what metrics should you care about in content marketing? And so I would say it really depends on what your goal is.

Why do you why are you writing content in the first place? For us for Trust Insights, we write and share content to help answer questions, but also secondarily to demonstrate our expertise in the questions being asked so that people can say, oh, Trust Insights knows what they're talking about. I can probably hire them to help me solve my problems as well. So it's it's twofold. It's to be helpful and to you know get people to hire us.

Um so that's our goal for creating content. Um so I would say that's where you really need to start is why are you creating the content in the first place? There's plenty of companies that don't have a blog uh that don't have content other than the content that's on the pages of their website. And so it really just depends on why you're doing it in the first place. And I'd say that's really the place to start.

And from there, you start to build the KPI map. So if your goal is revenue and you're using content, then you need to figure out where content fits in in terms of your customer journey. Is it an awareness tool? Is it an engagement tool? Is it a conversion tool?

And so if it's an awareness tool, you need to write it and then share it everywhere so that everybody knows about you, who you are, what you do, and write it from that introductory standpoint. If in if it's an engagement tool, maybe it's gated. Maybe it's original research. Maybe it's something of value that people would sign up for and give you their contact information for. And if it's conversion, well maybe putting it on your website's not the right place.

Maybe it belongs in an exclusive newsletter. Maybe it belongs somewhere else that only you know people who sign up for it can get it kind of a thing. So that that's where I would start with content marketing is why are you doing it in the first place? Yep. John, what about you?

What what you're the boss of marketing over coffee and you have a clear business result, right? Which is getting people to sponsor the show. What do you look at that helps you determine yep, we're gonna make our sponsorship numbers or no or not and and what do you change to get bigger better dollars out of sponsors? Yeah, you know it's really the thing with that is it's always been driven by quality of content. Like I really do next to nothing for the sponsors when you think about I mean the idea is that I know well it's a double edged sword.

There's more to it that I don't just say sponsors you suck give me money. I mean there's a lot more to that it's um you know we deliver qual we deliver the right audience to them and that's a really important thing because there are all these people that will advertise on podcasts and they're like yeah we'll give you $30 a thousand but you know our audience is worth 500 bucks a thousand because it's it is the right people you know if you want to talk to marketing people that are dealing with you know 10 or more cloud solutions you're not gonna find you know they're gonna be a needle in the haystack over on the Joe Rogan show but our whole audience is made up of those people. So yeah, for us, it's always been about quality content. You know, we want to make content that's educational and entertaining so the audience stays on board. And you know, unfortunately the topic is so niche that if someone listens to our show, we know they're the right kind of person for these sponsors because you know uh the rest of my family has no interest in listening to us go on about attribution models uh for a half an hour on Thursday.

So yeah, quality content has always been at the heart of it. And you know and we are a small business. You know, I think that's an important thing where, you know, sometimes vanity metrics are all you've got, you know, I mean if you have enough staff so you can start to build attribution models and do all the tracking that you want to do, then you can grow away from the vanity metrics. But you know, for now on, it's as long as the numbers are always going up and there's more engagement, more listeners, and there'll be more and we do see that the sponsors get more qualified leads. So those all move in the right direction.

But it's still yeah it's a lot of tea leaves and like the worst part is like when numbers dip, it's like, well what happened? Oh I have no clue. You know, we have no idea what the hell happened when the numbers move in one direction or the other. Maybe once in a while if they go up we know that oh we got cited here or there you know we got an amount link that was good. But yeah it's just interesting how much of it is flying blind.

You know you really it's any you know a vanity metric does beat nothing. I mean it's not great and it you know maybe you can't draw the connection to closed business directly but at least yeah at least twice as many people came around. I think but the big fear that has changed so much with digital marketing is that it's so easy to fake the vanity metrics. You know like if I really wanted to I I can go buy 5,000 Twitter followers for 12 bucks over on Fiverr, and I don't understand how that works, but somehow I can spend 12 bucks on Fiverr. And you know, you can make the the numbers move.

And so that's the big one of the big fears with vanity metrics is like, yeah, we're just getting bamboozled here. Um but you know, I don't know, I don't see any way around that. You just, you know, slowly over time as you um ramp up and get more savvy, you're able to put more resources to our zit and do just better analytics. Yep. Cool.

Dominic has one I think is very interesting. And first to Katie first, what is success look like when you're tracking influence and education versus explicit lead generation? This is a more of a B2B marketing question. You know, success, it's subjective. It really depends on you first have to define what success looks like to you.

So if we take influence and education first, uh as the question, then I would say, you know, you could say broad stroke success there looks like you know, um, engagement, it looks like retention, it looks like um people sharing, you know, your stuff because it was worthwhile. Um version, you know, is what it is. It's people going to your stuff and saying, I want to hire you, I want to buy this thing, and so it's more of a direct line of why they're coming to you, why they're coming to your assets. But I feel like education and influence is like a constant cycle of sharing and learning and growing. I personally for B2B specifically, I think influence is really an awareness and engagement tool versus a conversion tool.

John, what about you? Yeah, I think you know, you can see views and shares, and if you get SEO value out of it, you know, if it's a a worthwhile training resource, you should see some SEO action from it, some ongoing, you know, evergreen inbound traffic, which is the holy grail for that stuff. Um, but yeah, that falls squarely into the leap of faith stuff. You know, you're gonna put a bunch of stuff together and throw it out there and just pray that it flies. Um really the only thing that you can do to give yourself some kind of a fighting edge is, you know, if you're dealing with your customers or prospects and you know that this is the kind of material that they need, you can at least increase your odds and give yourself a better shot.

But um Yeah, I don't know. That I mean it's still uh, you know, again, use UTM links and all of your stuff. And yeah, even though it's educational, that doesn't mean that all of the normal goals don't apply and and tracking. So I don't, you know, see how you really have to treat training much differently from everything else that you're doing. I think we typically nail the head.

I think we typically think about influencers in the B2C space. And so, you know, uh fashion people and sports people saying, like, I use this sports drink or I wear this brand of clothing. That is more of that conversion versus an awareness. Whereas in B2B, the services and the things are not as tangible. And so it does, at least in my opinion, it does tend to be more of an awareness tool of like, hey, you know, this person endorses us, so therefore you could probably learn about what we do as and how we helped that person as well.

Exactly. The John hit the right the nail on the head, which is it's not an either-or. It's not influence or leads, right? Because one has to lead to the other. If it doesn't, then you've got a bigger problem.

But one of the favorite uh brand measurement tools slash influence measurement tools that I love is good old fashioned branded search, right? If people are not searching for your company uh or its products or services by name, you're not getting the job done, right? There's no there's no good brand uh stuff. So we want to see branded searches going up. And if you roll out an influencer campaign of some kind, or you roll out an educational campaign of some kind, and you don't see this number move upwards, it didn't work because people still don't remember who you are and or still don't feel compelled enough to just Google for you by name.

Now you also will probably want to do a little bit of correlation with direct traffic, because again, if you did a really good job branding, people don't need to search for you, they just type in your your domain name just and go straight there. So there's there's that aspect too. But brand organic search is one of those things I feel like everybody just misses, like they just forget that it exists and it's there and it's so valuable. If you work especially in public relations or brand advertising, and you're not using branded organic search data as a KPI, today's a great day to start. Today's a great don't wait until January 1st.

No, no new year, no new you. Start today. Yep. We have a live question here from Monty Consulting. It says, uh, growing our research capabilities, welcome thoughts on resources for reaching specific audiences with surveys.

Uh Katie, you want to tackle one first? Sure. I feel like that's the thing that eludes people a lot of like, how do I get that specific audience? And so, you know, you can run a Gen Pop survey through something like a Google surveys, or you can use a screener question like, you know, do you work in X industry? Yes, no.

And if no, then you know, thank you for their time. But if yes, you know, so there's ways to handle it with, you know, off the shelf tools. But a better way to reach those audiences is to become part of those communities. So, Chris, I know you like to uh you've been doing a lot of research into what you call the velvet rope communities, and it's really those niche communities like the Slack group that we've been growing for, you know, marketers who talk about analytics and data science. If you wanted to do a survey with those people, you would first need to become part of that community and then work with the owners of that community to say, is it appropriate for me to run a survey to these people?

This is what I want to do. And so it needs to be a collaboration with the community owners, but those communities exist. So I would say step number one is you know, figure out who that audience is that you're trying to reach. Step number two is become a part of that community. So you're not just showing up and asking something of the community, but actually participate and then work with the owners of the community to say, is this appropriate?

Is this the right community? You know, can I do this, you know, with the people who've like you've built trust with? So that's how I would approach it. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think the other thing is that it the question assumes you've already done your qualitative research.

And it sounds like if you aren't sure where the specific audience is, you haven't done enough qualitative research. So focus groups, one on one-on-one interviews and things like that, and asking people, hey, where do you spend your time? Like when you are when you want to talk shop, where do you do it? I don't care where you you spend your leisure time necessarily. Um, but if you're trying to figure out, like, hey, I'm trying I'm hiring a new analytics consulting firm.

Who do you ask? Where do you go? And talking to people and say, and that can give you a sense of exactly what you were saying, Katie. Those those specific communities. Some of them you may you may have to pony up a whole lot of money.

Like, you may, you know, if it's a certain specific audience, you may need to be spending a lot of money on a golf course membership because guess what? That's where the audience spends their time docking shop. That's you know one of the things. Um I have heard of folks um who have literally just booked flights, first class flights, just to see who they sit next to. Um, you know, uh, or you know, fractional chartered private jets just to be able to talk to some of the highest powered CEOs, because it's the only time you can get time on their calendars.

Otherwise, they're not interested. They, you know, they're they're unavailable. When you want to talk to the CEO of like T-Mobile or something, yeah, you're probably gonna have to pony up for you know at least first class seating to sit next to the person, but then you get that uninterrupted time with them. After that, the question is whether you even need a survey. So if you're doing the top 50 CIOs, do you need a survey for all 50 of them?

No, you can probably call 10 of them and get enough information to be able to make some decent decisions, get to know them. I can't wait until I'm a high-powered CEO who people can only get time with me and if on my private jet. Like, that's a goal. That's a new goal that I'm gonna write down and manifest it somewhere. The other thing is that there are other there may be communities where you are in a non-traditional community.

And guess what? Again, you have to be able to integrate into that community. Um, a number of years back, there was a fantastic article in, I think it was uh Fortune magazine saying, like, you know, is World of Warcraft the new golf course? Because for some of the you know, the tech CEOs of the time is where they spent their leisure time. I will tell you in advance, no, it's not.

But there absolutely are things like um, say ranked uh tournaments in Apex Legends or Fortnite or you know, some of these other games where yeah, you have people who are that's where they spend their leisure time. Now, whether they want to talk shop there, that's a different question. But certainly if you want to know where they hang out, that's that's a great one. So uh it's a great question. Let's uh dig back into the question pile.

This is a fun one. Kathy asks, what is Google Analytics tracking that we're not taking advantage of that is ripe with actionable data. I love that question. I feel like you just covered some of it, which is branded search. Um, how are people finding you?

So I feel like there's that. I know that that's more Search Console than Google Analytics, but I see them sort of as like part of the same ecosystem. Um, you can do pretty good attribution modeling in directly in Google Analytics. So you can find you can figure out like what channels are working best for you based on the goals that you have set up. So I would say that's probably one of the things that's overlooked the most.

The most common use case I've seen in terms of you know our clients and in my experiences, people are looking at in terms of was the goal completed? Yes, no. Did I drive more traffic? Yes, no. And I feel like that sort of diminishes all of the other things that Google Analytics collects.

John, how about you? Yeah, I just said you know, you don't have enough goals set up, you're using UTM codes wrong, and your channels are messed up. You need to clean those up. Like those are the big three. Um, you know, people think they're looking at the right kind of data, and when they're making decisions based on this stuff, no, it's actually, you know, um amazingly, Google ads look like they're really killing it no matter what happens.

Well, that's probably not the case. Um so go back and clean it up and talk to somebody who knows what they're doing. Yep. One of my favorites uh I guess in Google Analytics, specific to Google Analytics 4 is that that attribution slash funnel view. It's if you go into advertising and you go into conversion paths, and let's pick a conversion event here.

Let's do I'll just leave them all on, that's fine. And we're gonna change from uh last click to a time decay model. This to me is so incredibly valuable to be able to look at what's what's happening within your funnel at the beginning of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and at the end of the funnel for the goals that you care about, and to know if there's a difference in the channels so that you can say like just looking at this. This is something we talked about actually on previous episode of uh of our podcast, Katie. Our top and middle of the funnel is empty, right?

We have some very serious issues to deal with, uh, which we're working on remediating, and we see the bottom of the funnel is really, really full. Um, and so this immediately tells us we need to do a lot more stuff at the top of the funnel to keep things rolling. But in terms of it just an attribution modeling, this is a really as long as your UTM tracking is good. Um, this is a really powerful hidden gem, I think, in Google Analytics 4 that almost nobody uses, and it tells you a lot and it tells you things you could take action on. Okay.

Let's uh finish out with one last one here. Uh we have actually like 10 more, but we'll just we'll finish up with the last one so we don't go on forever. Um Allison asks, what is your go to number for gauging content marketing performance? The one that all teams should pay attention to, even if it's the only thing they look at. So now we've gone from three KPIs down to one.

What is the one number that you think people should look at for content marketing performance? The pressure is on. Um I mean, that's a that's a tough question to answer because it really depends on why you're doing it in the first place. And so that's really the quest, you have to answer that question first because there is no one size fits all answer. Because why we do content marketing is different from why you know our friend Jenny Dietrich does content marketing, is different from why our friends at V Square does content marketing is different from why you know some of our clients do content marketing.

So that's a really it's almost like a trick question. Um, so it's like, why are you doing the content marketing in the first place? Then you can figure out what that one metric is because it's going to feed up into that goal. So that's my not you know, super clear answer, but you gotta know why you're doing it in the first place, and then you can figure out that one number. Now, if I you know was like pinned to the ground and couldn't move, and someone said, You have to tell me what the metric is, I would probably say, you know, an engagement number, something around how many times is this piece of content being shared.

John, how about you? Come on, then closed one. Coco is for closers. Step away from the coffee. Okay, then the from a content perspective, one of the hidden secrets too of Google Analytics, and this is Google Analytics three now, um, is page value.

So if your goals contain a dollar amount in them, even if it's just like a dollar, right? You say like a newsletter sign up's worth a dollar. Um, but as long as there's a dollar amount, then what Google Analytics does, and they have this explain in their documentation about how they calculate page value. If you have a goal, then it starts to basically spread out the value of that goal across the different pages it took to get there. And you can read this in the Google Analytics um documentation.

If I go to our behavior, go to site content, let's go to all pages, and let's uh really go back maybe like uh a few months here, just get a nice big picture, and I'll sort by page value here. You can start to find uh like this influencer identification walkthrough has a higher value. Like obviously the contact page, yeah, okay, that's kind of a given. Um, this services page has higher value. This blog post has higher value.

This is not as good as you like using a you know a more fancy machine learning model like Markov chain modeling for for assessing it. But if you don't have anything else, the page value computation is actually really good because it says this page has contributed economic value as part of that path towards conversion. And so those are pages that you might want to pay some attention to. So if I had to pick just one number, it would be that number. But you gotta set it up right.

Let's let's do one more question, Chris. One more question. Okay. Um here's one from Tiffany as uh I think an easy uh winner. Um what too often analytics gets lost in the weeds.

No one wants that. What metrics should leadership actually care about? John, we do know it's closed one. So it's why do you keep asking me this? Um, you know, again, I always have to go back to you know, what's the goal?

And so if you can safely assume that for the majority of companies, the goal is going to be revenue, then as you're looking in your Google Analytics, uh, just as an example, as one system of record, um, you probably want to look at the goals that are tied to people buying something. So that's the contact us form. That's the, you know, fill out your information if you want a free demo form. So those would be the metrics to start to look at, but then also sort of breaking it out into the you know the three chunks of your funnel. So you know, a simple awareness metric is people actually coming to your website.

If people know about you, they're gonna come to your website. So that number should continue to go up. Engagement might be looking at, you know, people uh coming back to your website. So retention, so return users. So you start with net new users, then you have return users, and then you have people who buy something.

So if you have nothing else, I would say that would be a good three places to start to build out uh a funnel that would lead back to uh your overall goal of sales. Yep. I would say for leadership, well, for you, whoever you are. Um what number do you get your bonus for? You should care about that.

What number does your boss get their bonus for? Right. And and those are kind of the things that that you gotta report on because and you know, if you want to be generous and ex and look up the ladder, depending on how far you're looking up, um, you know, what number does your boss's boss get their bonus for? That's that to me is the easiest way to suss out what should be in your reporting because ultimately nobody cares unless it's it benefits them in some way. You know, obviously you there's the there's the whole you know corporate governance and all that stuff, but really at the end of the day, like the CEO is held accountable for revenue.

If the company didn't make money, you're in a lot of trouble, right? Um the CFO is is held. The CFO is held to things like margin, right? You know, are we profitable? If we're not you know, you may be making money, but we're not profitable.

Uh it's kind of a lost cause. The chief sales officer, it's closed one deals, right? That's that's what the makes the world go around, baby. Exactly. So that's the easiest way to answer that question is who you know who are the leaders, what are they getting their bonuses for?

And are you reporting on that? And and you're reporting on that number and the one or two numbers that lead to that number. And if you're not, chances are nobody's reading your report. Agreed. I think the the big takeaway there, which you know, I hate I really hate to say that this is sort of the the PSA of it, is that at the end of the day, we're we all have some degree of narcissism.

We're all selfish to a certain degree. And so first and foremost, we care about the things that are going to affect us first. And so to Chris's point, find out what that is from your leadership team and build that that report. Exactly. So we covered a lot here.

We will there's even more to be covered, more questions to be answered. So if you have if we didn't cover your question on today's show, uh, we will probably on another show or in a newsletter or in a blog post or in our free Slack group, analytics for marketers. Uh, but no matter where it was, thank you for your participation. Thanks for the folks who are on live and asking questions live. We love that.

Uh and we will be back next week. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast.

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