This is a case study on a fake B2B brand using content marketing to achieve a higher content marketing ROI and to increase its website conversion rates. All of the data is randomly generated, but this provides some example analytics to pay attention to when measuring the success of a content marketing campaign.

1. Using Analytics To Optimize Content
Marketing Campaigns

2. Before we begin, what is content marketing?
2
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating
and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent
content to attract and acquire a clearly defined
audience – with the objective of driving profitable
customer action.
– Content Marketing Institute
Which means…
Rather than a brand talking at you via traditional
ads, they’re engaging you in a story.

3. Drive
leads
Create
engagement
Influence
decisions
70%
of consumers prefer getting to know a
company via articles rather than ads.
67%
more leads achieved by companies who
have an active blog.
66%
of the buyer’s journey is complete before that
buyer reaches out to a sales person.
Content marketing is driving real results for brands

4. 4
This presentation is a brief introduction and example
of how a brand* could segment its audience to
evaluate if a one-year content marketing campaign is
achieving its goals.
*The brand being analyzed is a sample B2B company. All data used in this
presentation was randomly generated with reasonable parameters set for traffic and
social metrics.
To optimize your content marketing, you must devote
significant resources to analytics

5. Increase
Conversions
Improve The Content
Marketing ROI
Increase
Engagement And
Reach On LinkedIn
As a B2B brand, we’re
trying to increase the
number of leads for our
sales team.
Conversions are
measured as individuals
who provide an email
address to download a
whitepaper or to stay in
touch.
Content marketing is a
business investment, so
you must prove your ROI.
We must understand both
the value of a conversion
as well as the costs
associated with our
content marketing
program to measure ROI.
Enabling the organic
spread of messages to
professionals via
LinkedIn is essential to
the long-term success of
the brand.
Understanding the brand’s goals focuses the analytics on the
context required to improve the marketing

6. Our basic traffic metrics tell an interesting story, but only
scratch the surface of what’s really happening
-
1,000,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
4,000,000
5,000,000
6,000,000
7,000,000
8,000,000
9,000,000
-
500,000
1,000,000
1,500,000
2,000,000
2,500,000
3,000,000
3,500,000
Pageviews
UniqueVisitorsandVisits
Traffic Metrics
Unique Visitors Visits Pageviews
Unique visitors and pageviews are increasing while visits remain stable
• Pages viewed per visit are increasing…once we capture their attention, they stay
and read more.
• Our audience is stumbling onto the site…growth in unique visitors is leading to a
decline in the repeat visits.

7. -
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
70,000
80,000
Followers
Social Following
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn
The brand’s social following is growing on LinkedIn and Twitter
but staying relatively stable on Facebook
As a B2B brand, we’ve decided to target growth on LinkedIn, which we’ve achieved over the
year.
Facebook’s efforts to reduce organic reach has impacted growth on the social channel.
We’ve consciously decided to avoid sponsoring posts on Facebook, which is challenging our
ability to grow our Facebook audience with the recent algorithm changes.

8. -
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
-
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
70,000
80,000
LinkedInUniqueVisitors
LinkedInFollowers
LinkedIn Followers and Unique Visitors
LinkedIn Followers LinkedIn Unique Visitors
As followers have increased on LinkedIn, so has the ability to
drive traffic from LinkedIn to the content site
Our followers are engaging directly with the content we share on the social network.
• This demonstrates that our topics and headlines are capturing the attention of our
followers as they scroll through their newsfeeds.

9. -
50
100
150
200
250
300
AverageSeconds/UniqueVisitor
Active Duration By Traffic Source
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Search Organic
Active duration is one of the key metrics to measure for
engagement
Just like traditional media companies, active duration is highest from our organic traffic and
relatively consistent between social and search traffic.
• Our target audience from LinkedIn is showing that they are willing to spend their
most precious asset, time, with our content.
• Although LinkedIn traffic is skewing positively on active duration, this engagement
metric has declined in the past couple of months. This requires further

10. 170
180
190
200
210
220
230
240
-
200,000
400,000
600,000
800,000
1,000,000
1,200,000
1,400,000
Avg.DurationPerVisitor
LinkedInVisits
LinkedIn Avg. Duration & Visits
LinkedIn Visits LinkedIn Avg. Duration
Average duration for LinkedIn visitors has taken a nose dive
since October while visits are also decreasing
Despite increasing our social following on LinkedIn, our visits are declining, which is hurting
our average duration per visitor. This is in contrast to the growing number of unique visitors
from the site.
• This demonstrates why it’s imperative to investigate engagement metrics versus
other traffic data. Our unique visitors are visiting less often and thus spending less
time with our content.

11. -
2,000
4,000
6,000
8,000
10,000
12,000
-
1,000,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
4,000,000
5,000,000
6,000,000
Conversions
VisitsandPageviews
Traffic Metrics Vs. Conversions
Visits Pageviews Conversions
Conversions are increasing with our pageviews
The audience visits are staying relatively stable over time, but pages viewed almost double.
• Our audience is visiting less frequently (visits is staying stable while unique visitors
is growing), but each visit is leading to several more pages viewed.
• The visitors are finding our content engaging enough to view several articles during
each visit to the site.

12. -
50
100
150
200
250
300
0.00x
0.50x
1.00x
1.50x
2.00x
2.50x
3.00x
3.50x
Avg.Duration
ROI&Pagviews/Visit
Engagement & Return On Investment
ROI Pageviews/Visit Avg. Duration
The return on investment on content has grown by 14% during
the year as our engagement has increased
Audience engagement with the content is having a significant impact on our ROI.
• Engagement is leading to increased conversion rates while costs for production and
distribution of content are maintaining consistent levels.

13. 0.00%
0.10%
0.20%
0.30%
0.40%
0.50%
0.60%
0.70%
0.80%
0.90%
ConversionRate
Conversion Rates By Traffic Source
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Search Organic
Conversion rates are growing across all traffic sources except
organic
Organic traffic is leading to lower conversion rates than other sources because the organic
traffic has already converted.
• Most repeat visitors who enter the content site directly have already provided their
contact information. We converted them when they downloaded a whitepaper or
signed up for the mailing list during a previous visit to the site.

14. The audience from each distribution channel is interested in
different topics
Audiences from each referral source are engaging more frequently with different topics.
• Now, the brand should target its content at each audience. Rather than randomly
sharing content from our site, we should focus on specific topics on each social
channel.
• Be careful…you may already have a selection bias. Investigate whether or not
you’re already sharing more content on a specific topic on each channel.
27%
15%
30%
28%
Facebook Traffic
29%
33%
21%
17%
Twitter Traffic
50%
14%
10%
26%
LinkedIn Traffic
63%10%
9%
18%
Search Traffic

15. Increase
Conversions
Improve The Content
Marketing ROI
Increase
Engagement And
Reach On LinkedIn
Average duration and
pageviews/visit have both
increased over the year
to yield a 72% increase in
the conversion rate
(conversions/visits).
The ROI has increased
with the conversion rate
despite a 53% increase in
the cost of content
distribution.
Engagement rates have
decreased across our
LinkedIn audience
despite greater reach
and an increasing
number of followers.
The brand should focus
on optimizing its content
to continue to grow its
LinkedIn audience while
maintaining high
engagement across the
channel.
The content is achieving some of the goals, but the marketer
should continue to optimize for engagement

16. We measured a lot, but it’s equally important to understand
why we measured each data point
Metric Why it’s important
Unique visitors
Unique visitors is the best approximation of the number of individuals who saw your content over a
given period.
Visits
Unique visitors may visit your site multiple times per month. Visits tell you if your content is good
enough to encourage your audience to stop by several times.
Pageviews
If your content is really engaging, your visitors may read several articles during a visit. A high
pageview/visit ratio demonstrates engagement with content.
Followers
Social sites allow brands to measure their ability to convert readers into a community. This has
become less valuable on Facebook as algorithm changes make it more difficult to reach an organic
audience with content.
Active Duration
Active duration tells you if your content is engaging enough to keep your audience interested.
Rather than stumbling on your content and quickly leaving, a site with high active duration is
capturing the attention of an audience for a longer period of time. This is the best measure of
engagement.
Conversion Rates
In content marketing, converting an audience into customers or sales leads is the holy grail. Some
brands may measure brand lift rather than conversion rates, but for a B2B brand, like the one in the
case study, the goal is almost always converting an audience into a sales lead.
Traffic Source
Conversion Rates
Measuring conversion rates by traffic source helps a marketer focus attention on specific channels.
There are dozens of social sites, but some are more important than others to each brand.
Measuring conversion rates across sources helps a marketer test what is working with one audience
versus another.
Source Topic
Engagement
Article topics focus the marketer’s attention on what an audience is interested in based on their entry
point to the site. Once you know the topics of interest in each channel, you can focus your organic
and paid distribution tactics.