One service many B2B marketers clamor to is SlideShare, the online presentation sharing site. As over 65 percent of B2B marketers use online presentations in their marketing campaigns, SlideShare is one of the popular places to share them on. Almost half of the marketers surveyed in CMI’s recent B2B Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report (41% to be exact) said they use SlideShare, so understanding their reach on the site is becoming more important.
That’s why SlideShare has introduced some basic analytics for free. Previously only available to PRO SlideShare members, the powers that be decided to release some of the basic analytics options they offer to all members.
Now all members can track basic data points like view numbers, view sources, engagement rates, and more. Amit Sawhney of SlideShare said they decided to make these features free to all users “so that everyone will be able to broaden their audience and improve their SlideShare uploads via detailed insights.”
What can you track?
SlideShare now lets you view a number of different performance metrics on your presentations, grouped into three main categories:
- General performance (“Your top SlideShares”)
- Traffic (visitor numbers and sources)
- Engagement
On top of that, you can also export your data in a handy CSV file that you can then incorporate into your bigger-picture marketing metric reports. For more help and details on the analytics features of SlideShare, read through the topics on their Help page.
Your general performance metrics
Covering everything from your top content to SlideShare actions taken on your content, the main dashboard displays all of the information. Combining a few line and pie chart graphs, the Analytics dashboard displays an overall view of your performance, which you can then drill down into for more details.
Your traffic metrics
In the Views dashboard, you can check out the number of times your SlideShare was viewed in total, through the web portal, or even how many times it was embedded on someone’s website. This last metric is a very interesting, as it’s often difficult to know when people have embedded the content somewhere. You would only find out if visitors clicked the SlideShare link at the bottom of the embed window to view it on the web portal. This way, you’re getting all of the data you need for your SlideShare in one dashboard.
Next up is the traffic source tab, which tells you how visitors are finding your content: through shares on social media, through direct links, embed windows, and more.
The final traffic metric is the geographic source for your traffic. You’ll be able to learn where visitors are accessing your content from. Aside from the curiosity factor, it’s good to know from a sales and marketing perspective, since there may be new opportunities for reaching out to visitors from various locations.
Your engagement metrics
The engagement metrics for your SlideShare content is found on the Actions dashboard. There, you can see everything from straight clicks to likes, comments, downloads, and shares. Knowing how visitors are engaging with your content can give you ideas on what content they like more (or least), and how they’re sharing it. Again, this information will help your marketing team capitalize on opportunities to create or change your content strategy to take full advantage of your visitors’ preferences.
Are you using the new SlideShare analytics as part of your marketing metrics program? If so, how has it made a difference in your marketing strategy sessions?
