Measure the SEO
So far, I've described how to measure the success of your newsletter campaign based on how the email delivery portion generates traffic to your website. However, that's only the initial piece of your newsletter content's value. The bigger, and longer-lived, portion comes from how this content benefits your site in terms of search engine optimization.
In the screenshot below, I'm showing a Google Analytics report of the top 20 pages on our website and have highlighted the pages among the top 20 that are from our newsletters. 7 out of the top 20 are individual newsletter pages and 1 of them is our newsletter landing page. That means that our newsletter content represents 40% of our top website content. Not bad. Another thing to notice is that 4 of those pages have a bounce rate below 40%, which is also encouraging. (I don't mind at all that almost 70% of the readers that land on our newsletter about ajax website development leave after reading it- most of them are probably developers themselves, not people looking to hire web developers.) If you're not familiar with Google Analytics, check out our newsletter on How to Use Google Analytics.
The next obvious step would be to use Google to search for your page's meta title and see where it appears among the results. Just to give myself a bit of a handicap, I searched for "web content strategy" rather than the exact meta title, "defining a web content strategy," which retrieves our page first (see the screenshot below). Despite the shorter version being a much more competitive phrase, our newsletter from July, 2008 on developing an effective content strategy, shows third in the list. That's definitely a win for us. Oh, and so we don't seem too full of ourselves, if I pull out "web" from the query, we don't show on the first page at all. As of this writing, we're #17 for the phrase "content strategy."
The last measurement step that I make sure to take is to look at the data from our own Google Optimization tools, which includes a tracking system that records every visit from organic Google search engine results pages (SERPs). We record the initial visit, including all page views and the originating search phrase. With this data, we are able to effectively monitor which pages are hit the most from Google, which phrases perform best, and - most importantly - which pages and phrases "stick." Additionally, we can take this data and place it contextually on every page on our website. In this case, I can go to our content strategy newsletter's first page and open up the "Google Stats" box that appears if I am logged in to our content management system (see the screenshot below). Right in that small box, I can see the last time that Google indexed the page, as well as the last time a user came to this page as a result of clicking our link among results of a Google search. Incidentally, I can see that the last phrase hit was today at 10:39 in the morning. If I click the total phrase hits number (336), I can browse through a list of phrases, ordered by frequency, that brought visitors to this page from Google. I'm happy to see that the phrases I'd expect to be listed are there- "web content strategy," "content strategy," etc.
Optimizing your newsletter content for search engines can be a process of trial and error, but it's made much easier if your site is being indexed frequently. The more often you add content to your site, the more often Google will deploy its bots to crawl your site. If this is happening on a daily basis, you should be able to start seeing how your content is peforming in terms of organic search very quickly. If you're not happy with the results of your own tests, you can change the meta title and tweak your content and see how those changes affect your placement fairly soon after. I can't overemphasize the importance of SEO measurement of your newsletter content enough. Remember, your newsletters have a much longer and more valuable lifespan as indexable website content and potential landing pages than they do as email. Emails get deleted.
This newsletter begins what will be a series of upcoming newsletters on different inbound marketing strategies. Newsletters are somewhat of a hybrid of outbound and inbound marketing, but as I've tried to stress, the inbound aspect is much more valuable overall. Among the upcoming newsletters, we will cover how to use social media, webinars, and optimizing your website with effective calls to action.
Why does the tracker data end earlier than the other three metrics?
Ira,
Good question- I probably should have mentioned this in my explanation of the graph. We send out our newsletters at the end of every month (we sent out our April newsletter yesterday). So, at the time when I wrote April's newsletter, we had no tracking data for April. Now that we've sent out the newsletter, though, the tracking data is coming in.
Chris
Chris, Thanks for sharing all this data. Do you have a longer range of data for your newsletter tracking? I'm interested in speculating the reasons the numbers vary so widely.
Last month you wrote a bit about the time it could/should take to write. How much time do you spend reviewing your tracking, analytics and SEO for your newsletters?
Alex,
It varies depending upon what I'm looking for in particular. I almost always keep our CMS tracking report open in a tab of my browser, so I can quickly check it after I receive a tracker alert via email. I also keep Google Analytics open and tend to spend about 15 minutes a day reviewing the data in general every day. If I were to combine the amount of time I spent analyzing data related to a newsletter after I send it out, which would include looking at the tracker, Google Analytics, our Google tracking data, and making any adjustments for SEO, it would probably amount to 2-3 hours per newsletter.
Hope that answers your question,
Chris
Is it really that impressive that your newsletter content pages represent 8 out of your top 20 pages? Makes sense to me since they are probably the most often updated kind of content- every month, right- and are pretty long?
They are in the top 20 because their meta titles are corresponding well to keywords and phrases that are being searched often. Also, the newsletters are added once a month, but we update our blog much more frequently- some months as often as once a day!
What you can't see in the screenshot I pulled from our Google Analytics account is that it also shows that 2,224 pages were viewed a total of 46,755 times on our site this month. Of those 2,224 pages, the top 20 are the ones listed in the screenshot. Of those 20, 8 are related to our newsletter. From that perspective, it is a significant statistic. What does make sense, in general, is that the content we value most highly, and create most carefully and strategically, would be so often among the top pages. That's a SEO pay-off of our effort, though, which, in my opinion, is impressive!
Once again, so much to take in! You guys always have the neatest graphs. How do you make them?
What do you do with the email addresses that you're tracking? Do you have a privacy policy on your newsletter?
This is a great follow-up to last month's piece about newsletter writing, though I guess it could have just as easily been about writing- in general. Will you be doing more about marketing rather than web development? How do you all divvy up your company resources between development, design and marketing? Are you guys heading more in the marketing direction- if so, that's smart. It's the future of this industry. If you can't design and do marketing, you won't last.
@Andrew, Thanks! Most of the time, if I know I need to plot something out in a graph, I'll draw it first and then create the final image using Photoshop. I posted some graphs and the original drawings on my blog last month after a commenter asked a similar question. @Alex asked if I run some kind of script to collect and visualize this data. Sadly, my approach is much more old-fashioned and less sophisticated. I manually collect the data I'm looking for, sketch it out on paper, then create a graph using Photoshop, but there's no automated script or software plotting it out for me.
@Alex, We don't have a privacy policy on our newsletter, but we do nothing other than send them to our subscribers. We don't share the list with anyone, under any circumstances. We consider the tracking we do to be well within reasonable bounds since our readers willingly provide that information to us and the only usage we track is their use of our site. Internet privacy is something I care a lot about, so I'm definitely on-guard to make sure we don't do anything contrary to those values.
@Ryan Brown, Our next newsletters will definitely be about marketing, as are most of them. Specifically, we're planning newsletters on practical social media use, how to do webinars, and optimizing your website with calls to action. Each of these newsletters deal with marketing, but from the perspective of a web development firm. We partner with many marketing-focused agencies, and don't want to compromise that relationship. However, we do provide expertise as it pertains to marketing on the web. So, no, we're not heading in an entirely new direction. We're a web development firm that wants to make sure that the sites we build achieve the business objectives planned for them- including marketing.
@Chris Butler, yes, but you are tracking people. Isn't it true that the Google Analytics API restricts this kind of thing because of the very privacy issues that you claim to care about?
Ted,
You've got a fair question here. Google doesn't want their API being used to track individuals because all of that data goes through their system, so any sticky privacy issues around the practice of tracking user behavior and tying it to individual IP addresses or email addresses would become their problem too. In our case, we are simply tracking our newsletter subscribers' behavior on our site using a proprietary tracking tool that keeps the data on our private server. We would not even have those email addresses if the users did not willingly subscribe to our newsletter. The data we collect is only relevant to our site and never leaves our server, so it wouldn't present any real value to anyone other than us. Furthermore, any user that is concerned about this still can avoid it two ways: (1) by not clicking the 'read more' link in the newsletter email they receive from us, or (2) deleting their browser's cookies. As I mentioned above, internet privacy is something I care a lot about, and I feel that our tracking practices do not violate user privacy in any way.
Thanks for your concern about this, and for your comment.
Chris
It is quite difficult to manage newsletter campaign if you are not using right tools. Here I am talking about email marketing.
Some days back(before 2 years) I used a form in my website to capture emails of my visitors and I used to mail them from my Gmail. I used to put them in BCC and send. :) Looks crazy right.
Now I have learnt. I am using lot of newsletter managing software. So, what I want to tell is please learn about newsletter campaigns.
Maintaining a newsletter for my website subscriber is quite cumbersome. I face lot of problems. But this post gives me an insight of how this is handled by newfangled. May be I should checkout the pricing and try this.
It is quite difficult to manage newsletter campaign if you are not using right tools. Here I am talking about email marketing.
Some days back(before 2 years) I used a form in my website to capture emails of my visitors and I used to mail them from my Gmail. I used to put them in BCC and send. :) Looks crazy right.
Now I have learnt. I am using lot of newsletter managing software. So, what I want to tell is please learn about newsletter campaigns.