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.