How to See If Your Blog is Converting

by Helen M. Overland November 19th, 2014

Everybody’s talking about content. Content is the new SEO… content feeds inbound… content drives digital.

For most businesses, it’s probably true, but how do you find out for sure if your content is driving your business forward? Do you have to suffer a lack of data and make business decisions based only on assumptions? Nope!

.Get Blog Conversion Data from Google Analytics

Luckily, Google Analytics (GA) can tell you if your blog is helping, or not helping your business. And, we’ve made it easy for you, so you only need to import what you need from this post. More on that later…

Many of our clients blog on a regular basis. And it’s interesting to be able to see how blogging affects a client in one market positively, and not so much in another market. Remember, in Conversion Optimization there are few hard and fast rules that apply to all businesses in all markets.

For example – here’s a business in a B2B market, for the year to date:

So the conversion rate isn’t that high, which is very normal, depending on the kind of conversion you’re measuring.

But how is the blog affecting the conversion rate? Is the blog bringing the conversion rate up or down??

We can find that out by using the simple magic of Advanced Segments:

As you can see – people who don’t see the blog at all convert at a rate of 0.65%. People who landed on the blog convert at around 0.08%, which honestly is a bit higher than average.

But the interesting one is people who saw the blog, but they didn’t land there. For example, someone who landed on the homepage, thought to check out the blog, then went back and converted. These people converted at a rate of 1.6%, or around TWICE the rate of people who came to the site directly and never saw the blog.

Now – again I warn you – there are few rules which are hard and fast and apply to all businesses in all markets. There are other businesses who find that having a blog actually decreases the conversion rate. For example, this one:

In this case, views of the blog actually brought the conversion rate down.

Now there might be several reasons for the blog having a negative effect on conversions, and they are not all what you might think:

The blog is badly written and it harms the credibility of the brand
The blog is so well written that it gets the visitor thinking about something else and they forget to convert
There are no conversion points on the blog
The blog logo links back to the homepage of the blog instead of the site, and the visitor can’t get back to the site
There are offensive or spammy comments in the blog
The blog is off-topic and the business no longer looks relevant to the visitors problem

So REMEMBER – Always Be Measuring!! (friendly plug to Bryan Eisenberg

Always test to make sure that what you are doing is working with YOUR particular market – don’t ever assume that because something is written in a blog post that it’s true. Except this one, of course.

Google Analytics – Blog Advanced Segments

To get the reports for your own site, import the following 3 advanced segments and follow the instructions.

Step 1 – Import the 3 advanced segments you will need:

BLOG – Saw blog, did not land on blog (ASSIST)
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=KQ7vHR2wQUWlIrbjeS5IOQ

BLOG – Didn’t see the blog (CONTROL)
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=H7_GAyZ3R_WanxDwTr-YKQ

BLOG – Landed on blog (BLOG GENERATED TRAFFIC)
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=_GYvVxa7ROaAA8SjRzyy3Q

.

Step 2. Edit the advanced segments to match your blog.

The advanced segments you just imported assumes your blog is in a folder called “blog”. If your blog is somewhere else, you’ll need to edit the filter.

Edit EACH of the advanced segments to match your blog URLs – see below!