Introduction
Content downloads are often viewed as micro conversions on the way to a more important macro conversion that is lower in the acquisition funnel, and therefore, an important part of the acquisition process. Through content download analysis, marketers can understand user behavior before and after content downloads and learn how certain downloads influence macro conversions. This would further enable them to optimize user experience, invest in the right content downloads and improve conversions.
Nabler’s Analysis and Insights team has extended the functionality of Acquisition, Behavior, Outcome (ABO) framework to analyzing content downloads. This framework helps to uncover answers for questions like:
- How content that is downloaded drives return visitors
- What is the common visitor behavior prior to downloading content
- Which content should one invest in next
Acquisition, Behavior and Outcome (ABO) model:
The full spectrum of the digital customer journey involves three very top line steps:
- Acquisition: How traffic or customers are acquired.
- Behavior: Customer’s behavior once they land on different platforms.
- Outcome: The business outcomes that transpired through the traffic.
Acquisition
In the Acquisition Analysis, we understand which channel drives more downloads and their effectiveness in bringing more return visitors. This specifically answers the following questions:
- What are the channels that drive the most content downloads?
- Which content downloads help drive return and additional visitors?
- What content is being downloaded multiple times?
To understand the channels that are driving the most content downloads, we create segments for website visitors who have downloaded a document and then break it down by channel and source. This helps us understand the contribution of content downloads by every channel.
To understand the traffic coming from downloaded files, we must tag the links back to the website in the file itself. For example, we can set UTM parameters specific to a download and use that as a filter to understand how much traffic was generated by each document.
Multiple downloads per document often indicates a technical or user experience issue. Such a revelation could lead to a focused investigation to understand what is driving the unintended behavior. Using the downloadable content as the primary dimension we measure ratio of Total Downloads/Unique Downloads. This analysis quickly helps to spot potential issues and improve user experience.
Behavior
Behavior Analysis helps us identify opportunities to improve the navigation, user experience and re-assess our expectation of the relationship between content downloads and macro conversions.
The main objective of this phase is to help us understand the sequential behavior of the visitors prior to downloading the content. To understand the activities before and after downloads, all relevant event actions are tagged, that includes videos, exit links, and tabs among others. Once the tagging is complete, all the actions that took place prior to downloading are tracked sequentially. A thorough analysis of this data is then made by creating custom segments. The whole point of doing this research, is to identify the trends of the visitors who downloaded the content, and those with similar customer journeys but did not download. Hence it now becomes vital that we consider other aspects like channel, landing pages and any intent indicators.
Outcome
For Outcomes, the two metrics that matter are Macro and Micro Conversions. In our context, we evaluate which pieces of content are generating the most interest, and which do not. At the end of this phase, we have a bunch of content that need more investment and few that need optimizations.
There are a few potential analysis action items that decide the outcome.
- Identify the right and wrong channels through which to promote downloads
- Create remarketing lists of non-converting visitors who exhibited the same common sequential behaviors as converters
- Identify the downloads to further promote or deprioritize
- Identify optimization opportunities in download to macro conversion correlations
What’s Next
Get in touch with us if you’re looking to track the content that gets downloaded from your website to improve the ROI on your content marketing spend, and further understand how much your downloads are helping you achieve your set business goals.