Content marketers understand the value of metrics in measuring performance. But they aren’t always sure how to take full advantage of their data.
No longer does merely looking at pageviews or time spent on site suffice if one wants to be successful in business – these metrics are output metrics, offering little insight into what drives up or down those numbers. In order to achieve success in any endeavor, one needs an understanding of both input and output metrics.
1. Traffic
Setting data driven content marketing goals involves considering a number of key performance indicators (KPIs). What matters for your business depends on the type of content created and funnel stage targeted.
Traffic is the cornerstone of all content metrics and an invaluable measure of its performance. It measures how many visitors come to your website and engage with its content.
Understanding your traffic source is also essential in order to identify opportunities for improvement. For instance, if a blog post ranks well but receives low engagement or click-through rates or remarketing clicks from readers, this may indicate it does not align with their audience interests. Tools like Semrush can assist in finding which keywords drive most of the visitors and optimize content to attract qualified leads – ultimately improving content production while simultaneously drawing in qualified visitors.
2. Engagement
Traffic data provides a primary indication of content performance, showing how many visitors interacted with your site and which pages are most visited. Returning visitors and newcomers help determine how effective your content is by showing whether it helps customers through their customer journeys smoothly or causes them to encounter roadblocks along the way.
One way of measuring engagement is by looking at average time on page, which provides insight into how long people spend reading your content. This metric can help identify top performing pages and optimize them to increase read times.
Conversion tracking can also help measure engagement, which can be measured using goals in Analytics. Displaying how well your content meets these goals can be vital when trying to secure marketing budgets; keeping an eye on these metrics at regular intervals can enable informed decision-making and stay ahead of trends.
3. Conversions
Conversions are an essential indicator of content success. Understanding each conversion metric’s place within your goals and what information they provide about its performance are keys to assessing its efficacy.
Measuring conversions is one way of assessing whether or not your content is performing as intended at each stage of the funnel, but for an in-depth view of its performance you should also examine a few additional metrics.
Unique page views give an overall snapshot of your website visitors while the number of new and returning users reveals which pieces are drawing in customers. A low time on site may signal that content is not engaging enough and needs to be revised; such metrics are especially effective for tracking the performance of long-form pieces to optimize length and structure.
4. Revenue
Nothing can be more disappointing than investing time, money and energy on a content campaign that fails to produce results as planned. Measuring its performance can help identify areas in need of further investment for success.
Ideal, content performance should be measured against key goals set by your organization. These could include increasing website traffic or sales or identifying a particular demographic which needs additional content development. In order to get the best insights possible from this data analysis process, the best practice would be tracking content performance on a monthly basis initially before increasing or decreasing intervals as necessary.
Find metrics that align with your business goals and are easily measured and analyzed, while avoiding those which can vary in interpretation depending on content type or funnel stage (e.g. upvotes or shares on social media). When you have identified which metrics are meaningful to your business, leverage them to make data-driven decisions that lead to real results.
