https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=allMhzXNbf0

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPT)

Hey everyone, I’m Jacob Smedley; I’m an SEO blogger and social media manager for American Marketing Association’s Austin, Texas chapter.

Many writers are strictly just writers. They don’t know or care about Google Analytics – and that’s really okay for a lot of them. But being able report on blog roi by saying “my content influenced ‘x’ amount of people to contact you this month” can be a very useful thing.

And, just an FYI: this video will only apply to those of us that use a separate “thank you” page after a purchase or contact is made. If you want to track a button click, you’ll have to subscribe to my channel and wait for that video to come out – because that’s an entirely different ballgame that involves using a webmaster tool called Google Tag Manager.

So today, I’m going to demonstrate how to set up (1) goals and (2) audience segments within Analytics. These will help you understand and report on your blog’s ROI. This may be easier than you think.

So, let’s get into it.

Measure Blog ROI by Creating Goals in Analytics

Here we are at the Analytics home screen. We’re going to navigate to “admin” and then “goals”. An Analytics “goal” is an action that users take that is valuable to you (or your client).

New goal
Goal slot ID: leave as is
type: destination
Continue
Equals to: the thank you page
Value: enter your $ value
Save

To see your goal:

– “Conversions” tab
– Goals
– Goal Overview

Currently, this screen is telling us how many goals that ALL of our user’s have completed with this time range. To measure your blog ROI, we have to create an audience segment.

Create a “Blog Readers” Audience Segment

An audience segment is a custom group of site visitors that you define. So for measuring blog ROI, we want to know how many people that completed a goal ALSO read one of our blog articles at some point in time. We can make a safe assumption that by reading a blog post and later completing a goal, the blog post influenced them in a positive way.

So, let’s create that audience segment.

– + Add Segment
– + New Segment
– “Conditions” tab
– Change to “page” and “exactly matches”
– Paste blog URLs using “OR” (so important!)

And here we are. We’ve created a goal and a “blog reader” Audience segment. We see the percentage of total goal completers that read our blog. We see the number of goal completions. We see our goal conversion rate.

Applying What You’ve Learned to Other Scenarios

Creating goals and audience segments can be used in an unlimited amount of ways. Maybe you want to measure the effectiveness of last month’s blog posts only on a different goal of “number of coffee cups bought”. Then you’d create an audience segment containing only those March blog post URLs and that new goal.

I hope you have a better understanding of how to use analytics to determine blog ROI. The value of a blog extends beyond these numbers shown in this video, though. Blog posts are the best kind of content to share with a social media following. They’re original (hopefully), and they answer questions that potential converters may have.

Alright, so here’s my plug. If YOU would like to have consistent, SEO-friendly blog content written for your company’s website, contact me by email or through LinkedIn and I’d be happy to give you an affordable quote with a discounted test article so we can get acquainted. Links are in the description.

Also, please feel free to ask me anything in the comments – or to email me. Follow AMA Austin’s LinkedIn page for more of this kind of content.

Thanks for watching.