One of the key questions in social media marketing (and content marketing overall) is how to figure out which content is worth promoting. Will a blog post go viral? Is a tweet more or less likely to succeed? Predicting the future is tough and costly. While predictive analytics can give a general idea of what might succeed or fail, not many companies have the technology and know-how needed for that.
Most marketers review their analytics at the end of the week, month, or quarter. This makes it hard to take advantage of trending content. What if there was a way, if not to predict the future, to at least get an early alert about what content to promote? You can do that with just Google Analytics(tm) and an alarm clock.
Strategy
We want to know when something is going to take off. To get a better sense of that, we have to understand when some content is ahead of the curve, when something is performing better than expected. In turn, to understand that, we must know what the baseline is, early enough that we can do something about it.
Implementation
To start, we want to understand what the hourly traffic on average looks like for your website. We’ll do that by creating the aforementioned baseline. Open up Google Analytics. There is no default hour of day report, so we’ll need to construct one under the Customization menu:
Create a new report that looks at Sessions by Hour:
In the report that’s created, you’ll want to find how much traffic your site has gotten by hour, by percentage. Sort the table by Hour, and then turn it into a bar chart:
Next, do some quick math and start adding. Keep adding percentages until you get to 25%. (this is what’s called the lower quartile in statistics, and means that 25% of your progress has been made) Make note of what time by hour that is – for me, that’s about 7 AM. Remember this!
Go to your general audience overview in the regular Google Analytics reporting.
Take an average of your traffic. In the example below, my site gets an average of 414 sessions per day:
Based on our earlier exploration of when I get the first 25% of my site’s traffic, 25% of 414 sessions is 103 sessions.
This number is your “alert” number. By 7 AM each day (when I should have gotten 25% of my site’s traffic), if my site has gotten more than 103 sessions, then something’s up. If it’s significantly more than 103 sessions, I might want to do some paid promotion of the content that’s taking off.
Set that in your smartphone as an alarm, and be specific so you know what to look for when the alarm goes off:
What’s Taking Off
The last thing you’ll want to know is what content to promote. Set the time frame in Google Analytics to today, then go to Acquisition > Source/Medium. Set the Secondary Dimension to Page and you can see what’s hot:
Once you know what’s hot and where, you can take concrete action. In the example above, there’s a blog post that’s doing reasonably well on Twitter. The logical next step would be to do some promotion of that tweet, maybe pay $10 to promote it.
Conclusion
Is this system better than a million dollar predictive analytics system? Of course not. But it’s not a bad start, doesn’t cost a million dollars, and it’s easily implementable with only Google Analytics and an alarm clock. Everyone from a Fortune 10 to a lemonade stand can implement this. Try it out and see if it helps you identify what content to promote!
