Though many online businesses know how to use content marketing as a strategy across industries to build awareness among their potential clients and educate them, many entities are still burning the proverbial midnight oil to figure out how to measure success. Most online entities are not sure about many things, such as how content is performing and even if it is, how to prove it, how to figure out content marketing ROI, and most importantly, why they should create content in the first place!
It would help if you had definite goals and concrete strategies in place for your content marketing endeavors. Once the plan is in place, in the next step you have to document the same and track the results to figure out if the efforts are paying off.
A study by Semrush says that though 84% of business entities do have a content marketing strategy in place, those with excellent strategy constitute only about 11% among them. Around 76% of businesses have content marketing teams of less than three persons, 61% measure their content marketing ROI, and 89% depend on organic search as their appropriate distribution channel.
The building blocks in content marketing include traffic research, scheduling, and repurposing. If those things are in place, tangible results will show. Where will they offer, and how will we track them? Though content marketing has been in vogue for quite some time, not all online players understand the importance of the same. Specifically, the smaller entities do have issues comprehending that content marketing results will not show as macro-conversions. But the fact is that content marketing plays a key role in garnering new sales or a possible lead. There are other equally pertinent and handy metrics that allow you to measure your content marketing initiatives to gauge how the same is helping your business.
Use just the right metrics that will eventually help you find out the least performing content and work on improving it. Meanwhile, they also allow you to spot your high-quality content as well.
To find just the right 'recipe' for content creation and marketing, Data Analytics comes in handy to you. If you think the content is not performing well, you need to vet the content, improvise it, and rewrite the whole thing.
Takeaways
Before setting goals and monitoring the right Key Performance Indicators or KPIs, you have to know your 'why' elaborately. For, your ultimate content marketing aim is to jack up your brand's share of conversation online. There are five specific metrics your content team has to track regularly to measure success.
Be sure about your objectives and what are the KPIs for content marketing. Before you take a call on which marketing metrics to monitor, each one from your marketing division - your client, if your entity happens to be an agency - should be pretty sure about the objectives and KPIs of each content campaign.
Let's see the five metrics:
First and foremost is traffic, which is the elixir of your digital content. No matter how great your blog posts are, if nobody is landing on your website, the efforts are just a waste of time. So, it is pertinent to measure traffic, which is the primary metric.
In Google Analytics, you can look for three categories: Users, Pageviews and Unique Pageviews, where you get to know the total number of unique visitors, the total number of times a page has been viewed, and how many times a single page has been viewed user had viewed respectively. These visits are then combined into one pageview for you to calculate this metric.
The second thing is conversions, where you can track what they do after reading your blog content. You will get to know whether they are clicking your links and reading more or whether they are signing up for your newsletter, or for that matter, whether they are completing a buying transaction.
User Engagement is the third aspect. Rather than how excellent your content is, the amount of traffic your content garners will tell you how effective you are at attracting visitors to click your links. To figure out whether visitors are engaging with your content, you have to know the time duration they spend on your website, along with the number of pages they visit each session.
Under Audience Overview, you can ferret out this information, and along with that, looking at the total number of sessions and visitors, you will be able to figure out the average number of pages per session, the average session duration, and the bounce rate. A better way to track your content engagement is to view how well it performs on social media. The more your content is being shared; you can conclude your content is valuable.
The fourth aspect is gauging your SEO performance. You can't expect to attract the entire traffic from your social media handles. For, traffic flows into your website through Google search engine as well. But then, that will not throw much light on whether your website is performing well in search engines or not. What you need to do is to measure your SEO performance. A gamut of metrics is in place to track it. Perhaps, SERP ranking is the most important one as this is your page's position in search engine results for a specific keyword phrase.
Last but not least, authority is the key. It is not hassle-free to measure authority in contrast with other metrics. Nonetheless, it is pertinent to increase your authority over a while. In addition to improving your SEO, the authority will also help build your brand, boost trust, and further enhance your conversion rate. You can try Moz, which has its authority metrics. This can be used generically to know how Google judges your page and your website's authority, as these Domain Authority and Page Authority scores will be between 1-100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater authority.
