One of the big problems with content marketers these days is that we are often so focused on how we can drive traffic to our content, that we don't put nearly as much thought into what what happens after our visitors have consumed it.

Of course, many content marketers measure Engagement by looking at Behavior metrics such as Bounce Rate or Avg. Session Duration and make assessments on content 'success' based on this data. But this is a short-sighted approach and does not actually answer one of the fundamental questions to why we create content in the first place, namely, how is content contributing to my business goals?

To better answer this question, we need to look at what happens after people have left our content. This is where the Google Analytics Behavior Flow report can play an important role.

Where is it?

Login to Google Analytics and go to: BEHAVIOR > BEHAVIOR FLOW

What content problems does the Behavior Flow report solve?

Behavior Flow reports can show you where your audience is going after they have landed on your blog page and if the content has been successful in driving visitors to the next stage of the buyer funnel

Before you begin your content marketing strategy, you need to decide on the important business goals you want your content to contribute too. Ideally, the role of content is to drive visitors at the top end of the funnel to become potential customers or customers by convincing them that you are the right solution for their problem. As a first step, ask yourself, which pages on the website would you consider to be a ‘conversion’ page? These are pages where, if someone lands on them, they should be considered a potential customer.

For me, a ‘conversion’ page not only includes pages that display your product and shopping cart, but also pages which show purchasing research or intent. These include whether someone visits your ‘Contact Us’, ‘About Us’ or ‘Case Studies’ pages. Visitors who move to these pages are researching your business and your body of work, therefore they might be considering you or your product. In the case of the Behavior Flow report, you want to see how many visitors go from a blog post on to visit one of these ‘conversion’ pages.

Let’s look at a scenario. If someone arrives at a blog post via social media, consume the content and then choose to visit your ‘Contact Us’ page (but perhaps does not contact you), I consider this experience to be a soft goal conversion for your content marketing. The reason is, the blog content did its job in moving the visitor from a ‘reader’ to a ‘potential customer’. What you do with this information is up to you, but your next step could be to remarket to this visitor with more content or a product ad.

With this understood, I will show you how I use the Behavior Flow report in Google Analytics to determine success.

Start by filtering out all the URLs on your site that are not part of your content strategy. E.g. filter to only see the ‘blog’ URLs. Do this by clicking the cog wheel and filling out the Customize Dimension Items box:

Next select a URL that you want to review in the ‘Starting Pages’ column. Then start looking for those ‘conversion pages’ in the chart.

In the example below, we can see that three visitors landed on the ‘About Us’ page, one visitor landed on the ‘Contact Us’ page and someone even filled out a form and received the ‘Thank-you’ page screen.

In total, Behavior Flow report shows this blog post essentially made five ‘conversions’. Now it’s up to you to weight these conversion pages in terms of value. If you suppose that a visitor arriving on ‘About Us’ page from a blog post is worth $5 to the business (3 visitors x $5 =$15); the ‘Contact’ page is worth $50 (=$50) and the ‘Thank-You’ page is worth $100 (=$100); you can surmise that this piece of content made your business $165.

This report is valuable for ascertaining a potential ROI and content budget for future campaigns.

Now, there are many factors that can influence a user’s behaviour path, not just the content; and it is up to you to A/B test the performance of such behaviour. For example, play around with the calls to action (CTA) in the blog posts for three months and then measure the performance of those CTAs in the Behavior Flow report.

In addition, setting up Event Tracking and using the Event Flow report can add an extra dimension to how your audience is engaging with your content, not just where they go after they consume it. Check out Justin Cutroni's excellent post on using the Event Flow report for content reporting.

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