INBOX INSIGHTS February 9, 2022: Good Content, UTM Codes On Websites, SDLC in Marketing Ops - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Good Content, UTM Codes On Websites, SDLC in Marketing Ops (2/9) :: View in browser

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Determining What Content Your Audience Wants

Chris and I talk a lot about content marketing and that all the tips and tricks don’t matter if you’re not writing “good quality” content.

WHAT MAKES GOOD CONTENT????

Wow, I didn’t mean to yell but “good” is such a subjective definition. What I consider to be good is not what you might also consider good.

The basic foundation of good content is that has to be educational, engaging, or entertaining. Again, what I find educational might mean nothing to you.

I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with defining “good” content.

Oh, but wait. Yes, I am.

While “good” is subjective, it’s also dependent. It depends on your audience.

There is it. Your audience will determine if your content is “good” or not. So, how do you know what they want?

I asked our Slack community how they figure out what their audience wants and here is what they had to say:

“I go into Facebook groups where my audience hangs out and search for words around my topic. And when I have the chance to ask them directly (most groups frown upon using them for marketing research) that’s even better.”

“Go check Facebook groups to see what people are asking about. They’ll tell you what they need.”

“People lie. Behavior speaks volumes. Because of that, I like to make a wide variety of media and then see which one gets the most response. I test that over several campaigns (at relatively low effort because #contentrepurposing).”

“Ask them directly! Survey your audience to find out what topics and formats they like to consume.”

“Forums are a great source of content; find out what questions people are asking and see whether they have been answered. To give you an example; I have a property client and we looked on mums forums to see what common questions were being asked and found out people were confused about what work they can do a property rentals, things like ‘who’s responsibility is it to fix a leaky roof?’. Then by doing some basic googling we could see that there weren’t answer answers. So we wrote a blog post and viola we’re in the no 1 spot for keywords around that.”

“You should execute a buyer persona development exercise that includes research with a mix of both quantitative (like keyword data) and qualitative data with actual customer input (talk to your sales/support folks, customer interviews, surveys). The end result you’re going for would be validated personas that inform your content strategy regarding the needs/wants/desires/challenges your customers face in context of your products/services. From there, you should have a clear guide on messaging, buyers journey, topic clusters, etc.”

“I start with Search Console and/or Keyword Planner to see what keywords people are using to find the site. Then move into Google Trends to find similar topics that are popular.”

How do you figure out the content your audience wants? Tell me about it in our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers »

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris walk through the software development life cycle – the SDLC – and how we can apply it to marketing operations. From Data Studio dashboards to Google Ads to SEO, the overall process behind the SDLC applies well to any kind of marketing operations that require planning. Tune in to learn more!

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Data Diaries - Interesting Data We Found

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s see how bad a specific problem is. One of the worst things you can do for marketing attribution is to use Google Analytics UTM tracking codes on your own website, linking to pages on your website.

Here’s why. Let’s look at two examples.

UTM tagging example diagram

In the first example, a lead comes to your website from an email, and the email correctly contains UTM tracking codes. There are no incorrectly tagged pages on your website, so when the lead gets to a conversion page and converts, Google Analytics correctly passes the UTM codes from the entire visit to the conversion and your email marketing efforts get credit for the conversion. All is well.

In the second example, a lead comes to your website from an email, and the email correctly contains UTM tracking codes. They land on a page – say the homepage – and the links on that page have UTM tracking codes on them. Maybe the banner at the top of the page has utm_source = banner and utm_medium = homepage. What happens? The moment the lead clicks on one of those links, Google Analytics OVERWRITES the original tracking codes from the email, and from now on thinks the source and medium is banner / homepage for this lead. When the lead gets to the conversion event, “homepage” is given credit and your email efforts are invisible. This is obviously bad, especially if you’re trying to prove the value of your various marketing channels.

So how do we know if this is a problem? Using the SEO crawling software of your choice, such as Scrutiny, Screaming Frog, or any of the dozens of SEO tools on the market, crawl your own website, then export the results to a spreadsheet and do a search for “utm_”. If it shows up in any links to other pages on your website, you’ve got a problem. Fortunately, the solution to the problem is simple: delete the UTM codes from those links.

For example, we did a quick sampling of 10,471 pages from technology company VMWare’s website:

VMWare site crawl

When we look for UTM tracking codes, we found 14 pages with tracking codes in the URL; those pages will wipe out any attribution if users visit them from the links on VMWare’s site:

VMWare site crawl UTM codes

If you were VMware’s website management team, you’d want to hunt down these links and fix them right away.

Make sure you perform similar checks on your website on a regular, frequent basis – at least once per quarter if time and resources permit. Your Google Analytics attribution data will thank you.

Methodology: Trust Insights extracted 10,471 pages from the VMware website using custom-built software. The timeframe of the data is a snapshot taken on February 8, 2022. The date of study is February 9, 2022. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

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