Building a Content Marketing Machine -Dan Patterson's Deck

2/12/16
CONFIDENTIAL. © 2016 CITY PASS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CityPASS®
IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF CITY PASS, INC.

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Who Am I?
● Director of Internet Marketing for
CityPASS
● Oversee SEO, PPC, Display, Affiliate,
Analytics
● Previously Director of SEO for SEO.com
● Been in the industry since 2003

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CityPASS
Package prepaid admission to top attractions in 12 North American destinations
for up to 50% off
Based in Victor, ID
Atlanta Dallas Philadelphia Southern California
Boston Houston San Francisco Tampa Bay
Chicago New York Seattle Toronto

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Lessons Learned in Content & Analytics

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Lesson 1: Content Marketing Isn’t Just
Infographics and Blog Posts

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What is the Main Goal of Content?
● Increase Traffic
● Increase Conversions

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Common Goals of “Content” I Hear...
● Links
● Social Buzz
● Etc.
If that’s your only goal, it’s a link building strategy.
Think bigger!

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Remember Basic SEO?
● Do keyword/topical research
● Identify a need
● Figure out which kind of content would work best for your audience and site
● Build out the content
● Promote the content
● Continue to build links to the content (internal and external)
In other words, think of a long-term piece of content, not just a flash in the pan.

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Where Do Infographics, Blog Posts, etc Shine?
● Building links
● Social media buzz
● Passing internal link value
Links
Social Buzz
Money
Content

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Case Study: “Things to Do” Pages for CityPASS
● Found a hole in our content
● Did the research

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Analyzed the Competition & Built It Out
● Most ranking content at the time was “listicle” format
● Built one out for every city
● Made it part of the main site architecture

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Increased Traffic and Conversions!
Page became a major traffic source
vs. most one-off pieces
Which would you
rather have?

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Lesson 2: Multi-Channel Assisted Conversion
Reports are Your Friend

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Marketing Funnel
Where does most
content fall?
$$$

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… But Attribute to Last Non-Direct Touch
We Live in a Multi-Touch World...

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Is Last-Touch Attribution the Way to Go?

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Enter Assisted Conversion Reports

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A Few Reminders About Assisted Conversions
● Choose one conversion type
● Remember that the attribution
is different in this report, so channel
data won’t match up
● “Assisted Conversions” by their nature
are multi-counted, so don’t use it as
an absolute metric

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Annie Cushing’s Post

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Use Assisted Conversions to See the Real Influence
of Your Content Pages
What do clients and bosses care about?

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Flipping Attribution is Helpful for Multiple Channels

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Lesson 3: Evergreen Content Can Go Stale

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Case Study: “Things to Do” Pages Lost Traction
● Overall format didn’t change for a long time
● Content got out-dated
● Other competitors moved in and took over

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Redesign and Relaunch
● Analyzed the new competition
● Restructured the pages to make them more interactive
● Built out the content more

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New Launch

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Lessons Learned
● Keep an eye on good content
● Don’t let evergreen content go stale
● If it does, analyze the competition and take a new approach

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Lesson 4: Google Analytics Dashboards &
Sheets API are Huge Time Savers

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Limitations of Basic GA Reports
● Have to pull data from a lot of different reports
● Only allowed one secondary dimension
● Filters can get hairy
● Etc

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Build Dashboards

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Value of Dashboards
● Quick snapshots of your KPIs
● Sharing with clients/bosses

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Customize To Your Heart’s Content with Sheets API

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Get the Add-On

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Learn the Language

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Tools to Learn the Language
● GA Regular Expressions
● GA Metrics and Dimensions Explorer
○ Gives you API names of all metrics and dimensions
○ Shows which don’t jive with each other
● Analytics Management API Segments List
○ Gives you the code for each default and custom advanced segment

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Lesson 5: Keep Up on Google Analytics
Errors and Changes

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Some Examples Over the Years...
● (Not Provided)
● Apple iOS 6
○ In 2012 Apple traffic was going Direct
● Bing July-Aug 2015
○ Bing search traffic was going Referral

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Understanding “Direct”
What does “Direct” really mean?

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Some General Suggestions
● Annotate all inconsistencies
● Be patient when you see something off, might be out of your control
● Watch SERoundtable, SearchEngineLand for headlines
● Sometimes the error is on your end
○ https to http
○ Tracking parameters
○ etc
● Fix what you can, understand what you can’t

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@dan_patterson
I Hope You Learned Something!

Building a Content Marketing Machine -Dan Patterson's Deck

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