Analyzing Content Conversions and Lead Generation

Driving traffic to your website is great. Getting your audience to engage with your content is even better. But for most businesses, the ultimate goal of content marketing is to generate tangible business results: leads and sales.

A conversion is any valuable action that you want a user to take on your website. Analyzing your content's conversion performance is the crucial final step that connects your content marketing efforts directly to your business's bottom line. It's how you measure your return on investment (ROI).

This guide will walk you through how to analyze your content's performance in terms of lead generation and conversions.

The Prerequisite: You Must Have Conversion Tracking Set Up

You cannot analyze what you do not measure. Before you can do any of this analysis, you must have conversion tracking (or "goal tracking") set up in your Google Analytics account.

This involves defining what a conversion is for your business (e.g., a contact form submission, a newsletter sign-up) and configuring Google Analytics to track when those actions occur. The most common way to do this is by tracking views of a dedicated "thank you" page.

Key Conversion Metrics to Analyze

1. Total Conversions

• What it is: The total number of times a desired action was completed on your website.
• Why it's important: This is your top-line business metric. It's the number of new leads or sales your website has generated.
• How to analyze it: You should track your total conversions over time to see if your marketing efforts are leading to overall business growth. You should also filter this by traffic source to see which of your marketing channels (e.g., Organic Search, Social Media) is driving the most conversions.

2. Conversion Rate

• What it is: The percentage of your website visitors who complete a conversion. It's calculated as (Number of Conversions / Number of Users) * 100.
• Why it's important: Conversion rate is a measure of your website's effectiveness. A page might not have the highest traffic, but if it has a very high conversion rate, it means it is incredibly persuasive and valuable.
• How to analyze it: Look for the pages on your site that have the highest conversion rates. Analyze them to understand what makes them so effective, and then apply those learnings to your other, lower-converting pages.

3. Conversions by Landing Page

• What it is: This report shows you which of your pages are most effective at generating conversions from the traffic that starts on that page.
• Why it's important: This is the best way to measure the direct business impact of a specific piece of content, like a blog post or a service page.
• Where to find it: In Google Analytics, go to the Engagement > Landing Page report. The "Conversions" column will be on the right.
• How to analyze it:
  • Identify your top-converting blog posts. These are powerful assets. You should ensure they are up-to-date and that you are driving as much traffic as possible to them.
  • Identify important pages (like your main service pages) that have a low conversion rate. This is a sign that the page's copy, design, or call-to-action needs to be improved.

4. Assisted Conversions

• What it is: A user's journey to conversion is often not linear. They might first discover your brand by reading a blog post, then leave, then come back a week later by clicking on a social media post, and then finally convert by searching for your brand on Google. In this scenario, the blog post and the social media post were "assisted conversions." They played a role in the journey, even though they weren't the final click.
• Why it's important: Looking at assisted conversions helps you to understand the true value of your top-of-funnel content (like your blog). A blog post might not have a high number of direct conversions, but it might be playing a crucial role in introducing new users to your brand who then convert later.
• Where to find it: In Google Analytics, go to the Advertising > Attribution > Conversion paths report.

Conclusion

Analyzing your content's conversion performance is how you prove the value of your content marketing. It's about moving beyond vanity metrics like traffic and focusing on the actions that truly drive your business forward. By setting up conversion tracking and by regularly analyzing which channels and which specific pieces of content are most effective at generating leads, you can make smarter, data-driven decisions and continuously optimize your website to be a powerful engine for growth.