You probably know that content marketing can make or break your business. For this reason, you should ensure your content marketing efforts are generating the desired results. Tracking and measuring your content's success is vital when determining its effect on your marketing campaign.
Key Steps to Measure Content Performance
Following are the three steps you need to take to measure your content's performance:
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Decide on the aspects you'll track
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Track, analyze, and manage the data
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Turn the insights obtained through content performance analysis into an action plan
Measuring your content's effectiveness can be as simple or sophisticated as your business model demands. If you have decided on the metrics you need to track, make sure to further analyze your decision with these two questions:
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Do the metrics support my overall business goals?
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Will I extract insights that will help me improve my content marketing program?
Reports that Help Measure Content Performance
Google Analytics avails a treasure trove of powerful insights that can help you improve your content's effectiveness. Here are four reports that will help you measure your content's performance:
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Traffic Reports - They give you a breakdown of the pages that are drawing in the most traffic.
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Navigation Summary – It shows how visitors get into and navigate your site.
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Organic Search Traffic - This provides you deep insights into the motives that lead searchers to your content.
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Conversions - These are the definitive measure of your content's success; they represent the goals reached.
Metrics that Will Help You Calculate Content Marketing ROI
1. Traffic
In your Google Analytics report, you should pay particular attention to traffic metrics including, among others:
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Users – the sum total of unique visits to a page.
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Pageviews – the number of times pages on your site have been viewed.
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Unique pageviews – If a user visits your pages on multiple occasions, the visits are counted as one pageview and not as unique pageviews.
These metrics will help you figure out how to tailor your content in order to make it more appealing to your target audience.
2. Conversions
People may be visiting your website and consuming your content, but what actions do they take once they are done engaging with your content? Do they read more? Do they click on your links? Do they sign up for your offerings? Do they make a purchase? The event or action that can be defined as a conversion comes down to your business model and your goals. The goal of content marketing, in some cases, maybe clients contacting you to inquire about your services or making physical purchases. Conversely, the goal may be to establish authority and increase brand awareness.
3. Engagement
In some cases, the traffic streaming into your site is only an indicator of how proficient you are in persuading people to click into your site rather than the value of your content. To find out if your users are finding your content useful enough for them to engage with it, you need to track how much time visitors spend on your site as well as how many pages they visit in each session.
4. SEO Performance
Some of the best leads come from search engines. To draw in organic traffic from the search engines, you must be visible in SERP (search engine results pages) for relevant keyword phrases. SERP ranking tends to change slightly over time, but if your content marketing efforts are effective, you can either maintain a good spot or rise higher, thus increasing your brand's authority and trust.
When measuring your content's effectiveness, the metrics you use should be hinged on your overall business goals. Content marketing can take a lot of time and effort to reap the rewards. Sound like a lot of work? Get the right team of professionals to help out. At Stratosphere, our highly-trained team is ready to assist you with all your content marketing needs. Contact us today at (818) 456-1648 to see how we can help your agency.
