Motorcycle Content Marketing: How to Measure Performance

Motorcycle Content Marketing: How to Measure Performance

Is your motorcycle content marketing performing well? Are you sure? How do you know? This guide will show you how to use Google Analytics to gauge the performance of your marketing efforts accurately. You’ll use key performance indicators (KPIs) to look at the metrics from your website. This lets you look at the different aspects of your marketing campaigns and their measure performance. If these are reports you aren’t currently using or have never looked at, don’t panic. The majority of marketers only look at the Audience Overview and Acquisition Overview reports.

Cohort Analysis

How many people return to your blog? When you look at traffic, don’t focus on just new visitors, you also need to look at your returning visitor volume. It’s easy to look at traffic volume in real-time or compare it to traffic volume for last year, but many lack the know-how to analyze their traffic beyond this.

You already know that it’s easier and cost-effective to get a repeat customer than to continually seek out new customers. The same goes for website visitors. Let’s look at your current repeat visitor volume. Go to your Google Analytics account and click on “Audience”, then click on “Cohort Analysis”. Once you select your parameters, you’ll see a chart. This visual display shows you the number of returning visitors over your chosen period of time.

To read the graph, the first column has a set number of visitors. The second column will tell you how many of those people returned in the second week (or days, however you’ve chosen your settings for this chart). The third column shows how many people returned again the following week.

As you move towards the right, you’ll see how many people returned week after week from their first visit. This number will always naturally taper off. The goal is to extend it out as long and larger as possible. The more people you get repeatedly returning, the more your sales will grow.

Get People Coming Back

There are two reliable ways you can improve your return rate. Both are simple to implement and continue using. Consider adding email marketing and push notifications to your marketing strategy.

Email Collection

There are countless plugins you can add to your website to start collecting emails. Once you build your email list, you can start sending out updates. This gives you a direct line of communication with your audience. Harley Davidson uses this strategy to stay in constant contact with their customers. Bikers that are thinking about buying or who have already bought a Harley receive regular emails about the company and its latest developments. Each time you post new content, you’ll want to send an email out. This lets people know that you have new content, and they need to come back to your site. With repeated visits, you’ll build trust.

Push Notifications

You probably have a smartphone. On that phone, you have several apps. Throughout the day, you’ll see notifications pop up on your screen. Did you know you can do something similar on desktop browsers? Visitors to your website can sign up for push notifications. Then every time you have a new post, you can push out a notification. There are services that provide automation services for this. This lets people know it’s time to come back and see the new motorcycle content you have.

Benchmarking

You know it’s smart business management to check in on your competitors. But how do you do this digitally? You look at the benchmarking report. This report will show you how they perform on different channels, their average session duration, bounce rate, or even page views. Now you can benchmark your dealership or business’s performance against the competition. This lets you adjust your digital marketing content strategy so you can optimize your plan for increased brand awareness and the highest marketing ROI.

To look at your benchmarking report, go to your Google Analytics homepage. Then click on “Audiences”, then “Benchmarking”, then “Channels”.

Now, this report won’t give you specific performance data for a specific competitor. But what it will do is show you how you stack up against the industry. If you see everyone else is heavily competing on social media, then maybe you should look elsewhere for easily attainable gains. Another approach to consider is if you significantly outperform the industry in one area, then you may want to focus on beefing up your performance in other areas.

Keep in mind that most successful marketers focus the majority of their efforts and resources on the channels that make the most money. So if everyone is heavily focused on one particular channel, it’s probably the most profitable. Consider focusing your optimization efforts on the same channel to increase your brand’s awareness and create high-quality leads.

Location

Are you a local business? Or do you sell a product that could potentially ship worldwide? Either way, you’ll want to know where your audience comes from. If you’re a local service-based business, you need to look at the “Geo” report to know if you’re reaching a local audience. When you see that the majority of your traffic is coming from outside of your service area, then you need to focus more of your efforts on local SEO. For motorcycle companies that ship goods, the “Geo” report tells you where you have potential market growth. To look at your location stats, head to your Google Analytics account. Click on “Geo” and then click on “Location”.

You’ll probably see that your traffic comes from countries where your website language is commonly spoken. But what you want to look at is the other countries. Look for ones that have traffic growth, but the primary language is something other than your website’s.

Consider offering your website in that language. This opens your business up to a whole new market and potential for exponential growth. Ducati does this well by making it easy to choose your country from a drop-down menu at the top of the website.

Assisted Conversions

Some business professionals claim blog readers don’t turn into customers. The data says this statement is totally wrong. The disconnect happens because these people see money going out today and aren’t patient enough to see the long term return. If they can’t directly connect someone reading a blog post with a sale, then they don’t believe it happens.

Here’s the thing, it’s rare that someone who is completely new to your business will read one blog post and head straight to your online store to buy. There is a way to show the fruit of your hard labor. Head to your Google Analytics account and click on “Conversions”, then click on “multi-channel funnels”, then click on “Assisted Conversions”.

This report shows you the channels that people use to get to your blog. They don’t make a purchase directly through them, but without them, that customer may have never found you or made a purchase. Focus on improving your motorcycle content marketing on the channels that are strong with the first touch. These bring new people into the funnel. Then focus on the strong last touch channels. These close the deal and convinces the person to buy.

User Flow

What is your end goal for your motorcycle content marketing? Hopefully, it’s to get people to buy your motorcycle products or hire your motorcycle-related service. To get people to do those things, you need them to go to your online store, contact, or online scheduler. But before you can start directing people, you need to understand how they naturally interact with your website. Head to your Google Analytics account and click on “Audience”, and then “Users Flow”. You’ll see what looks like a horizontal tree that tracks how users move through your website.

You can use this information to adjust your website to get people to do what you want. Maybe you shorten or lengthen your pages. Perhaps you need to move your menu buttons or change their color.

Analyze Your Motorcycle Content Marketing

As you can see, there are several reports in your Google Analytics that can give you deep insight into your motorcycle content marketing performance. If you need assistance with pulling and interpreting your report, I can help. With the information we gather, I can provide constructive feedback and insight into improving the performance of your motorcycle content marketing.