Having a web analytics program is a necessary prerequisite for optimizing your content marketing program. Without it, you won’t be able to easily keep track of your metrics.

Many companies are excited about content marketing and the possibilities that it can provide, including: a strong ROI, brand awareness and recognition as a thought leader.

Having a web analytics program to track the progress of your content marketing program is mandatory in achieving those goals. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to scale up your content marketing program.

When should companies begin tracking the performance of their content marketing program?

Companies need to install content analytics (or at least web analytics) before the content marketing program begins. This is mainly so that you can establish basic benchmarks for things like organic search, visitor engagement, leads and more.

If your company doesn’t have analytics in place yet, don’t worry. There are numerous options to choose from including Google Analytics, Tempesta Media’s content analytics module and others.

Best of all, most of them are free. Tempesta Media’s content analytics feature is available to all customers as part of their subscription. Regardless of what you choose, you do need to have it.

If you’ve already started your content marketing program, it’s okay. Just install it right away.

What can I track with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an incredibly expansive web analytics tool. It tracks every major metric under the sun, including many that are necessary for a content marketing program.

Here are some examples. If your content marketing program is new and you want to increase visibility, metrics that you would use to measure that success include:

• How many new visitors originated from organic search.
• The number of new visitors to your website.
• Engagement rate (the time customers spent on site).
• Bounce rate (the customers that came to your site and immediately left because they didn’t find what was there compelling).

These metrics have formed the cornerstone of most new content marketing programs. For new content marketers, it can be quite overwhelming and require significant training to fully grasp these concepts and processes. At Tempesta Media, customers can actually integrate their Google Analytics account into the Tempesta Media platform.

Doing so allows you to see at a glance how your content marketing program is doing against the key metrics that are necessary for a content marketing program.

How can you use a website analytics program to optimize a content marketing program?

It’s something that many new content marketers struggle to understand. Many web analytics programs provide the “what” but fail to provide the “why” behind the data. Most importantly, they don’t provide specific, actionable recommendations to improve performance.

For example, let’s say that new visitors are increasing as a result of organic search. That’s great! However, why is it increasing? What can you do to make it grow faster?
If you can analyze the web analytics data (more specifically the organic search data) you might find that your company is now ranking higher in Google for certain keyword phrases.

Digging deeper, you may discover that certain recently published articles are what is causing those keyword phrases to rank well. With this knowledge, you can change your content marketing program to develop additional content to support these keyword phrases.

Thus, you’ll continue to improve your SEO and gain more visitors to your site.

In summary

Web analytics is a powerful tool that can make your content marketing program soar. Without it, your program will most likely stagnate.

Whatever web analytics provider you choose, make sure you install it ASAP and (ideally) before your program begins. You can then use those insights to drive your program forward.

Need help?

A web analytics program is just one of the many parts of optimizing your content marketing program. If you have a program or are planning one, download our ebook 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.

This ebook will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.