Content marketing can be pretty nifty when you want people to come to your website. You can make a badass infographic, do some blogging, conduct surveys, videos... all to grab your audience's attention and get their fingers a click'n. However, where is the line between thinking your content is awesome, and knowing it's awesome?

It's got to be when your audience agrees with you, duh.

Problem. How do I know which content is most successful?

Measuring your content performance metrics can be done in a variety of ways. For instance, you could use Facebook Business Manager to ascertain the number of comments and likes you get on different types of post - always super fun. But when it comes to analysing the pages on your website? It's gotta be Google Analytics, man.

Here's the process to get ya started*:

Go to Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages

And yes, we understand there can be some marketing discrepancies when it comes to 'landing pages', but in this circumstance, we are simply referring to any web page a visitor may 'land on' on your website. That is to say it is the first page they see when they arrive from an external source i.e organic search, social media etc. 

Most likely, Analytics will now automatically categorise your data according to sessions, and will give you some spiel that looks like this:

*This does assume you've already installed Analytics, btdubs.

As you can see from our example, people land on the homepage (/) an awful lot - which makes sense. If you've heard of Noisy Little Monkey and you search for that phrase, you'll probably land on the homepage. In this particular time frame the page that has been landed on most is a useful blog about conference call ice breakers. The top rankers on your site will tend to vary depending on your date range though, so make sure you consider this whilst having a play around. (Although we'd suggest setting the date range to 90 days + to get a clear picture of which pages are performing the best overall, just so ya know.) 

We'd also recommend progressing to the second dimension - and no, we're not referring to a form of physics or dramatic Sci-Fi here. By clicking the "Secondary Dimension" drop down selector at the top of the list of pages, you can sort your GA datasheet (the 'primary dimension') by a chosen secondary dimension, such as Source:

Source is pretty useful as you can tell what platform is driving the traffic - so we're mostly Google search, but there's also a cheeky reference from zoom and some direct traffic. Pretty cool, huh?

So, what questions should I be asking?

Measuring your content marketing success isn't as simple as looking at session rate, I'm afraid. Whilst you may have a grasp on what pages are attracting your audience, you need to think about engagement metrics. I mean, what good is a page with a high click rate, but also a high bounce rate?!

You want these strangers to become visitors - browsing through your website - until they (fingers crossed!) decide to engage with your page e.g. by buying a product or downloading a content offer. Which leads us nicely onto the next question you should be asking; what is the conversion rate?

Obviously, what you classify as a ‘conversion’ will depend on your business goals, but it’s still good to both quantify which pages are best at conversions, and try to qualify why.

You also need to consider the big three when trying to deduce which content is most effective at bringing people to your website - and no, it’s not the Jonas Brothers or the three musketeers - it’s mobile, desktop and tablet, obviously. People don’t like to stick to one device, so your pages shouldn’t do that either. Head over to Audience > Mobile > Overview to have a sneaky look at your audience's’ behaviour.

If you’re wondering why certain pages are doing well (or not so well) at bringing people to your website, here are our main tips to consider:

• Is the title a good ‘un?
• Is your post keyword optimised?
• Does your page properly take into account your buyer personas? 
• Have you clearly defined your goals? What are you trying to achieve with your content? 
• Does your page look good/exciting? Images and videos are far more exciting than plain text, after all.
• Have you considered the time frame? Some posts might be more popular because of events, current affairs etc

It is important to analyse which pages are doing well as you can utlise this knowledge to create similar content that will resonate with your audience, because -  in the wise words of Chris Cornell - "At the end of the day it's the fans who make you who you are"

Want to know more awesome stuff about using Google Analytics to measure your return on investment in digital marketing? Then you’ve come to the right place - we’ve got a guide allllll about it: