Our curated Online Marketing magazine, BLIP, includes articles from our favorite strategic thinkers and our experienced marketing team.
We’re pleased to announce the launch of BLIP Magazine (@ BLIPmagazine.com) — a curated publication featuring articles for marketing communications professionals on strategies and tactics for SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing, A/B Testing, Conversion Rate Optimization and more. Inspiration for the name BLIP came from how fast things move in this space — Blip… Google has changed its algorithm… Blip we’re mobile centric now… Blip… there’s a new social media marketing tool. You get it.
Earlier I wrote about four different content curation tools we use and one of them is FLIPboard, the technology behind BLIP. It’s hip (sorry, couldn’t resist that). But seriously, we like it as a collaborative tool for our SEO Editing and Marketing Consulting team to work together to find intermediate and advanced level articles on strategic marketing. The app versions are strongly implanted on the majors — iOS, Android, and Windows. We like how the app versions flip you from page to page with your index finger — recalling that “old technology” experience… reading a printed magazine.
BLIP: Great Analytics Tactic To Find Blog Post Ideas
So here’s a take-away from the latest BLIP issue — an Analytics tactic to uncover your popular content so you can write more articles on the same topics. The original article written by Andy Crestodina at Unbounce.com, talked about zeroing in on top posts by comparing time spent on them to site average time spent on content. This is great because it requires you to get out of the comfort zone of standard reports in Analytics and click to rejigger a view offering fresh insights.
We tried Crestodina’s recommendation at Webdirexion and found out that some posts we thought were high value to us were probably not the most engaging. Let’s compare what you’d see in a standard view to the “average time on page view”:
Standard view –Everyone likes to look at traffic to posts and content:
This standard view shows most popular articles in terms of page views, and goal $ values.
Above you can see the standard view (no rejiggering) in Analytics for top content suggests that our top two stories are:
- One on Four Marketing Funnel Strategies, with 229 visitors, and a conversion goal page value of $7.61
- A WordPress category for Healthcare Marketing articles with 94 visits and a conversion goal page value of $17.35 (we are happy about this one because we have five clients in healthcare)
I think that the second item — the category of articles — is perhaps showing some true value because of the high dollar goal values, where goals we set follow visitors through our site to desired outcomes like lead gathering, PDF downloads, etc. But what about that article on funnel strategies — is this analytics data view telling us we need to write more articles on this topic? Well, let’s apply our new technique to get to the answer…
Time Spent on Content View Tells a Different Story:
When we compare average time on page (engagement), a different set of article topics take the lead.
Above we can see that our top two topic candidates for new articles are:
- Articles on curating publications — 633% time on article compared to average time on pages
- Articles on WordPress site design — 263% time on article compared to average time on pages
A couple of trailing questions and some initial answers — but we’d love to hear from you too on analytics for blog topics, and what you’d like to see more of in BLIP Magazine…
Should we focus more on conversions, or engagement? Rand Fishkin (of MOZ) has an interesting insight on this question in a recent interview — he said SEO and Content Marketing are NOT in conflict with conversion rate optimization. Paraphrasing, he says let content be content for engaging visitors, and let landing pages focus on converting visitors to leads. Translation: it’s more important to engage visitors so they will come back than try to give a call to action for a conversion on the first visit. This means in the two views above, we should focus on the second one as the best indicator for desirable future content.
Is Analytics the best and final tool to gauge visitor behavior? No. Analytics only tells you what visitors do and what they do not do. It cannot tell you why. To learn why, you have to ask visitors. You can to that with comment interactions, polls, tests that ask for written feedback, and that good old technology of phones and email. Wait a minute… I don’t have a “phone” anymore other than a mini-computer I call a smart phone. Oh well… I can still talk to prospects and clients and find out what works and doesn’t work.
