Hard to believe but Boxcar Marketing launched in January 2007. We'll be celebrating 12 years of helping clients with website analytics, social media, digital marketing strategy, and tactical tips to make all that work! Every year brings about new conversations and ideas about how to best leverage social media tools, and the Boxcar Marketing blog is the place where we test our assumptions or report on best practices. 

The top blog posts of this year reflect the perennial favourites: how-to tips for Facebook and Google Analytics, and (my favourites) marketing audits and strategy. Before I call out the top 5, I want to bring forward one of my favourite posts that did NOT make the list: 

Outcomes-Driven Marketing (and how to measure succes) — I thought this framework for the marketing funnel would lay out in simple terms the 4 high-level outcomes that are possible for any given marketing campaign, and the metrics that should be tracked for each. 

Now, on to the top 5 list. Here are the top-viewed blog posts for 2018:

Number 5: How to Integrate Google Analytics with Constant Contact — Although MailChimp is our preferred email client for sending newsletters, there are lots of corporate clients using Constant Contact. This post shows how to add the email tracking code to Constant Contact's second-generation editor so that the traffic is properly attributed in Google Analytics. Many readers are disappointed to discover that Constant Contact's newest version of the editor does NOT offer this analytics integration. So hey, smile now if you are using MailChimp!

Number 4: Year-End Review Template for Agencies and Consultants — Running a business, regardless of whether it's an agency or a consultancy, requires some reflection. Twice a year Boxcar Marketing does a little business review to see if we are on track to reach our business goals, and what tweaks might be needed. This post outlines the steps we follow for a mid-year or year-end review. 

Number 3: 5-Step Marketing Plan — The 5-step marketing plan goes hand in hand with the year-end review so it's no surprise that these two posts appear in the top 5 list. If you haven't re-visited your marketing strategy and tactics lately, then this post is a way to review what you are doing and why. 

Number 2: How to Grant Uses Access to Google Analytics Reports — One of the first things we need at Boxcar Marketing when taking on a new client is access to their Google Analytics reports so we wrote this post to make it easy for people to see what we need. But the post also gets a lot of search traffic so it's not just our clients who need a handy guide. 

Number 1: Can a Facebook Group Be Converted into a Page? — Ages ago it was common practice to create a Facebook Group, then Facebook introduced Pages. Now that Facebook offers advertising options and insights for Pages, many businesses want to convert their group to a page. 

What I find interesting about the top 5 list is that many of these posts are from five years ago. The lesson for me is that good digital marketing strategy provides a solid, long-term foundation for businesses, whereas the how-to tips offer short-term wins that allow for steady progress. 

TIP: What are your top 5 or top 10 blog posts of the year? Log into Google Analytics. Go to the standard reports (left nav) and select Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. In the top right corner, set the date range for the past year. The resulting report will show you the traffic to all pages of your site. Look at the volume of traffic, but also the average time on page. Pick out the blog posts that have high traffic and a reasonable time on site. For example, some pages might get a lot of spam traffic so eliminate those from your list and spot the posts that have high volume and high-quality traffic. Can you update those posts? Can you create new content related to those posts? Can you find ways to leverage that content and help even more people discover it?

What's interesting about the top 5 posts above is that the average time on page ranges from 3:35 to 9:58. This is way above the overall site average of 1:47, and it tells me that not only do those top 5 pages get a lot of traffic, but people are carefully reading the tips or keeping the page open to actively follow the steps.

Thanks everyone for the support this year, and have a fantastic 2019! 

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