Google Analytics is a wonderful tool. Marketers get tons of information from the data available: Everything from what blog posts are most popular, to what device people are using to get to your website. For more information on how PR pros can use Google Analytics every day, read Vehr’s other blog posts here and here. In this post, I focus on how marketers can use Google Analytics to improve their blog.
As the pop culture queen in the office, I tend to focus my blog posts on what’s trending with new slang, controversial ad campaigns and current news, but blog topics can also be decided based on data from Google Analytics.
With Google Analytics, marketers can follow the flow of traffic to individual pages including blog posts. If a certain blog post topic like social media analytics was viewed more often than others, marketers could assume that that information is important to their audience right now, and they can keep writing blog posts along similar lines to keep their readership strong.
Another piece of data that can inform marketers writing blog posts is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the rate at which users click on a page and click off without exploring the website further. To get a lower bounce rate add links to other parts of the website to the blog post and make sure they open in separate tabs to keep them on the page longer. The goal is to get the target interested in the topic enough to click around the website and eventually signing up for a newsletter, buying a sweater or whatever it is a business does.
As PR pros and marketers, we should be able to talk about blogs to clients about how to use them effectively, including how inbound marketing influences everything we do. Google Analytics is one tool to do that, and a few simple tweaks can turn a blog from meh, to wow!
