Assessing the success of your publication on a third-party resource may be challenging, especially if they prohibit inserting UTM parameters in links that lead to your website from this publication.
Identifying the referral traffic coming from your external publication can help you analyze your content performance and report your results to your boss or client.
If you’ve just started to work with a new publishing resource, this data will also help you to make a decision on whether you should continue working with them (e.g. publish more content) or look for another resource that would bring you more traffic and better results.
Using Post Tracking, you can track your referral traffic from your guest post published on a third-party website.
How can this be done?
- Go to Post Tracking and set up a project for your domain.
- Next, add your article’s URL to start tracking its performance. You’ll see the number of social shares, backlinks and estimated reach the article has.
- Connect your Google Analytics account to track referral traffic that comes to your domain starting from the article’s publication date.
- Click on the URL to track daily changes in referral traffic. Filter the time period above the trend to focus on a particular period or to see the full picture.
What to do next?
When you’ve analyzed your referral traffic coming from a publication on a third-party resource, you can:
- Assess your publication’s performance along with keyword rankings, shares, backlinks, and estimated reach. Report the main metrics to your boss or client.
- Decide if you want to publish more articles on this resource depending on if the traffic is enough and the results outweigh your efforts. Don’t make snap decisions - wait a week or a couple of weeks (depending on their publication turnover) to see the results.