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.
The following are the three steps you need to take to measure your content's performance:
Decide on the aspects you'll track
Track, analyse, and manage the data
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:
Do the metrics support my overall business goals?
Will I extract insights that will help me improve my content marketing program?
Google Analytics offers a treasure trove of powerful insights to help you improve your content's effectiveness. Here are four reports that will help you measure your content's performance:
Traffic Reports - They give you a breakdown of the pages that are drawing in the most traffic.
Navigation Summary – It shows how visitors get into and navigate your site.
Organic Search Traffic - This provides deep insights into the motives that drive searchers to your content.
Conversions - These are the definitive measure of your content's success; they represent the goals reached.
In your Google Analytics report, you should pay particular attention to traffic metrics including, among others:
Users – the sum total of unique visits to a page.
Pageviews – the number of times pages on your site have been viewed.
Unique pageviews – If a user visits your pages multiple times, each visit counts as a single pageview rather than a unique pageview.
These metrics will help you tailor your content to make it more appealing to your target audience.
People may be visiting your website and consuming your content, but what actions do they take once they are done engaging? 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 qualifies as a conversion depends on your business model and goals. In some cases, the goal of content marketing may be to prompt clients to contact you to inquire about your services or to make physical purchases. Conversely, the goal may be to establish authority and increase brand awareness.
In some cases, the traffic streaming into your site is only an indicator of how proficient you are at persuading people to click through to your site, rather than the value of your content. To find out whether your users find your content useful enough to engage with, you need to track how much time visitors spend on your site and how many pages they visit per session.
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 rankings tend to change slightly over time, but if your content marketing efforts are effective, you can either maintain a good spot or rise higher, thereby 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 yield results. Sounds 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.
