Content Marketing Analytics Part 2: From Downloads to Purchase

In the first content marketing analytics post we talked about how to analyze videos to improve the conversion on your website. Most companies, however, can't put a lot of money in video. Instead, they might need to utilize PDFs, Case Studies, Product Brochures, and the like to see if that moved any users to entice a purchase. This post is designed to show you how you can verify the correlation between download and purchase.

Step 1: Identify the Key Download

Let's assume you have product brochures on your product detail pages. The first step is to see how well those are being downloaded. If they aren't even being downloaded, why continue to use them? Ensure the brochures are set up with Google Event Tracking (if you haven't set these up here's a good tutorial. 

I suggest the following setup:

Event Category: Product Brochures

Event Action: Download

Event Label: Product Brochure Name (it can be whatever you name)

Assuming you have that setup, create a report where you can see what your best downloads are (if you aren't comfortable with custom reports, please review this tutorial):

After you run this report you should get something like this:

The best idea from here is to see not only the most downloaded but also how many total downloads to unique downloads were there. If you see a high amount of total downloads to unique downloads, it might show either a story of people re-downloading things regularly because it's great content. It can also indicate a user experience problem - just something to think about depending on the type of download you are researching.

Now that you have done your homework, it's time to review the possible correlation between the top downloaded product brochures and products sold.

Step 2: Does a Correlation exist between Download and Purchase?
Now, you could create a report again that shows you a correlation or not, but I don't want you to go through the creation of something that might not be too fruitful for you. Instead, I suggest using the segment creator to see if first a correlation between the download and purchase is present (find a tutorial for the segment builder here.)

The first step is to see the number of downloads by user:

I like the process of building the segment because you can easily see the data change in front of you. I also want to make sure you notice that I am specifically looking for users, regardless of session. The reason for this is that you have to assume people might download a product brochure, research, and then come back and buy. Now you need to add transaction is equal or greater than 1, and the product you were interested in:

You can do this type of research for any of your brochures, but I suggest only looking at your top 10. It becomes too cumbersome to do more than your top 10 product, and your time is valuable, make it count.

You see that out of the 3,302 of users that downloaded that brochure,1,311 ended up buying it. That's pretty good - now we need to see where these users come from. Maybe we can optimize some of these channels to pour some gas on this?

Step 3: Marketing, Marketing, Marketing!

Now that you have found the correlation between downloads and purchase of the product, you need to review the sources of these downloads. The sources will help guide your marketing tactics in order to maximize results of these and other products. Yes, this means another report. In the pic below, I have used the filter for the specific brochure I am looking for and added the transactions, revenue, and conversion rate to isolate channel by performance:

You can see that there are 4 different channels that have done quite well in both download and purchase of the product. Your next step is to click through the channels within the report and see which source produced the best results. After you see the sources, add landing page as a secondary dimension in order to understand where users enter from those sources so you can optimize further.

Pro Tip 1: For Referral sites, I would profile your top performing referrers and see if you can't engage any link building of similar websites. If you don't have an SEO tool like a MOZ or SEMRush to review any sites easily, review Similarweb.com with the referrers to get some ideas.

Pro Tip 2: If you don't have Google Search Console setup on your site, please start that process. Once set up, integrate the console within Google Analytics. What you'll be able to do is get the Google Search Queries that were most used in your reporting to help you further optimize your content. This can also help you get some ideas on words to use within a paid search program.

Conclusion:
Micro-conversions such as downloads of PDFs, white papers, etc. can be huge predictors of sales or other key activities. You need to make sure you always are measuring the performance of both. Without that knowledge, you might be wasting space on your site, or you might not be putting dollars to the right parts of your digital marketing plan that are working.