Measure Your Content Marketing Results With These Key Metrics

Eval­u­ate the suc­cess of your con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paigns by look­ing at these impor­tant con­sump­tion, con­ver­sion, and engage­ment met­rics.

Katie Bennett By Katie Bennett from White.net. Join the discussion » 0 comments

A suc­cess­ful con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy can help build rela­tion­ships and encour­age brand loy­al­ty by cul­ti­vat­ing a sense of com­mu­ni­ty for your brand. It also pro­vides you with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to posi­tion your brand, sell, and pro­vide insight to your tar­get audi­ence.

From cre­ation to pro­mo­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion, the abil­i­ty to eval­u­ate your con­tent mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty is cru­cial to deter­min­ing its suc­cess. Inter­est­ing­ly, only 8 per­cent of mar­keters believe they are suc­cess­ful­ly track­ing and under­stand­ing con­tent mar­ket­ing ROI.

Per­haps the most impor­tant ques­tion a con­tent mar­keter should ask is: why am I writ­ing this piece of con­tent? Ulti­mate­ly, what you mea­sure will depend entire­ly on the goals of your con­tent. There is no advan­tage to writ­ing con­tent and then estab­lish­ing the objec­tives and mea­sure­ment met­rics. Always avoid cre­at­ing a piece of con­tent with­out set­ting the objec­tives in the begin­ning, they are vital to deter­min­ing the para­me­ters of suc­cess. Stan­dard con­tent mar­ket­ing objec­tives may include increas­ing brand aware­ness, upselling, or cus­tomer reten­tion. Whichev­er objective(s) you set, be sure to under­stand these before putting effort into cre­at­ing your cam­paign.

Consumption Metrics

Con­sump­tion met­rics look at the num­ber of read­ers who con­sume your con­tent, the chan­nels they use, and the fre­quen­cy of their con­sump­tion. Those who are in the con­sump­tion or shar­ing phase are like­ly to be in the ear­ly phase of the sale process or at the top of the fun­nel. These con­sump­tion met­rics are fair­ly basic met­rics, use­ful as a start­ing point. They will answer your most fun­da­men­tal con­tent ques­tions and pro­vide you with an overview of how your strat­e­gy is per­form­ing.

Google Analytics

  • Users: This pro­vides the total num­ber of unique vis­i­tors to a par­tic­u­lar page on your web­site.
  • Pageviews: Records the total num­ber of times a par­tic­u­lar page on your web­site, be is a prod­uct, or blog post, is viewed.
  • Unique Pageviews: This met­ric com­bines pageviews that are gen­er­at­ed by the same user dur­ing the same ses­sion, so you can gain an insight into the num­ber of ses­sions dur­ing which that page was viewed.

Don’t for­get to com­bine the basic con­sump­tion met­rics with the addi­tion­al insights with­in Google Ana­lyt­ics.

  • Source/Medium: Pro­vides infor­ma­tion on what chan­nels assist­ed with the con­sump­tion of your con­tent, so you can cre­ate con­tent to com­ple­ment these chan­nels
  • Loca­tion: This can real­ly help with your con­tent cre­ation process. For exam­ple, if the major­i­ty of your blog traf­fic comes from Cana­da, per­haps you should focus on try­ing to reach out to promi­nent Cana­da influ­encers to con­tribute to your blog.
  • Mobile: This is use­ful to look at how many users are con­sum­ing your con­tent via mobile devices. This will allow you to estab­lish how much you should focus on for­mats that are easy to view on mobile (e.g.,  video).

Conversion Metrics

Con­ver­sions from your leads, sub­scribers, and vis­i­tors dri­ve rev­enue for your busi­ness and illus­trate the true val­ue of your con­tent mar­ket­ing. Mon­i­tor­ing the impact your con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts have on your con­ver­sion rate can help you to bet­ter tar­get your audi­ence and edu­cate them on your exper­tise.

Lead Generation

If you have a form on your site, you can mea­sure lead gen­er­a­tion suc­cess by deter­min­ing how many peo­ple went to the lead form imme­di­ate­ly after con­sum­ing your con­tent. You have the abil­i­ty to set a brows­er cook­ie and track when some­one com­pletes the lead form after view­ing the con­tent. If your leads are han­dled pure­ly via phone, you can install a sim­ple script that shows a dif­fer­ent (trace­able) phone num­ber when peo­ple first watched the video or down­loaded a white paper. Top Tips Set up goals with­in Google Ana­lyt­ics to help you mea­sure to what extent you have achieved your tar­get objec­tives through your web­sites con­tent. For exam­ple, you could set up goals includ­ing newslet­ter sign ups or con­tact form com­ple­tions. The key ques­tion answered here: How often do con­tent con­sumers turn into leads?

Sales

Deter­min­ing how many sales have come from con­tent pieces on your site can be a lengthy process and a rel­a­tive­ly dif­fi­cult objec­tive to com­plete. If you are using a data­base for your sales, you can note in the prospect col­umn to record when a poten­tial cus­tomer con­sumed con­tent pieces A and B. When your sales team then goes on to turn the prospect into a sale, you are able to deter­mine the project rev­enue and prof­it of that cus­tomer and assign it to the con­tent pieces. Top Tips

  • Use the trans­ac­tions in Google Ana­lyt­ics to apply a fil­tered view. Here you can eas­i­ly see what per­cent of rev­enue for online trans­ac­tions your blog, for exam­ple, was respon­si­ble for.
  • Time to pur­chase is a met­ric that can show you the total num­ber of days it took a user to com­plete a pur­chase, help­ing inform your con­tent cre­ation and map the dif­fer­ent stages in your sales fun­nel.
  • The assist­ed con­ver­sions can be fil­tered with­in Google Ana­lyt­ics to view assist­ed con­ver­sions in rela­tion to your con­tent on a goal by goal basis.

Engagement Metrics

Engage­ment met­rics are vital for under­stand­ing the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship and loy­al­ty. The fol­low­ing met­rics can help you deter­mine how much engage­ment your con­tent is gen­er­at­ing among your audi­ence.

Google Analytics

  • Aver­age time on page: If the aver­age time a user spends on one blog is 5 min­utes and anoth­er blog is 2 min­utes, you’ll have new insights about how well your con­tent is per­form­ing.
  • Refer­ral Traf­fic: This report can give you insight into which web­sites and what types of indus­tries are read­ing, link­ing to, and shar­ing your con­tent.
  • Page Ses­sions: This report will help you under­stand the extent to which users are inter­act­ing with your con­tent.

Social Media

Track­ing data such as shares can demon­strate the reach of your con­tent, and includes insights of retweets, re-pins or any­thing else that is chan­nel spe­cif­ic. Bench­mark­ing and track­ing fol­low­er growth can assess those who have con­scious­ly decid­ed to be exposed to the con­tent you pro­duce, keep track of these with reg­u­lar report­ing. In addi­tion, you can also take com­ments into con­sid­er­a­tion, show­ing how often indi­vid­u­als are engaged with your com­mu­ni­ty. For Twit­ter, this could include things such as men­tions.

Email Marketing

Ana­lyz­ing sub­scriber growth and unsub­scribes can pro­vide you with an under­stand­ing of how well your email data­base is engaged with the con­tent you reg­u­lar­ly pro­duce. Sub­scriber growth, as with social fol­low­er growth, gives you the view of users who have active­ly cho­sen to receive con­tent updates. Although this is an unde­sir­able met­ric to review con­sis­tent­ly, unsub­scribed num­bers are still a rep­re­sen­ta­tive how your audi­ence is engag­ing with your con­tent, or per­haps not as the case may be.

Katie Bennett

Written by Katie Bennett

Ddigital Marketing Specialist, White.net

Katie works as a digital marketing specialist for White.net, an award winning digital agency based in Oxford. Since leaving University in 2013, she has loved being able to work with different brands, helping them to achieve their goals.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

Discover why brands and agencies choose Linkdex

  • Get started fast with easy onboarding & training
  • Import and connect data from other platforms
  • Scale with your business, websites and markets
  • Up-skill teams with training & accreditation
  • Build workflows with tasks, reporting and alerts

Get a free induction and experience of Linkdex.

Just fill out this form, and one of our team members will get in touch to arrange your own, personalised demo.