If you do content marketing, you probably want it to help increase sales in the long run. However, the tricky part is that usually there is a time-and-space gap between a piece of content you publish and a closed sale.
So, what metrics can marketers track to make sure their content strategy is headed in the right direction?
1. Traffic: Down the Black Hole
Launching a content marketing campaign is a little bit like setting up a sales funnel: Your task is to capture as many people with your content as you can, and to make sure they make it to the end of the funnel.
So, the first metric to measure in this respect would be the sheer number of people you managed to get into the "funnel"—that is, traffic to the page where your content is located.
In turn, the amount of traffic you manage to drive to your content depends, in part, on...
- The page's search engine rank
- The size of your email subscription base
- The number of social followers you have
- A host of other factors
How to Measure Traffic
Measuring raw traffic numbers is not that hard. It gets trickier later, when you have to go deeper into the data, but not at this point yet.
If you publish the content piece on your own site, you can see pageviews in Google Analytics. If it's published elsewhere, you can't see how many people viewed the page, but you can track referral traffic, since your content likely links to your site.
Apart from Google Analytics, there are other free and paid Web analytics tools that can let you know the same (for example, free analytics in WordPress).
If there is not much traffic coming to the page where your content is published, look into the "supporting" factors: search engine rankings, email titles, the way you announce the content piece to your social followers (also timing is important here).
In my own experience, to get bigger reach, you should...
- Optimize your content for the search engines (use appropriate keywords, encourage others to link to it).
- Aim for publisher platforms with a decent list of subscribers and social followers.
- Build your own extensive email list and social following.
2. Engagement: Now We're Talking
Engagement is the next performance indicator you'd like to measure after you see how many visitors have been drawn to your content.
What's engagement? It's the length and quality of people's interaction with your content. It normally translates into bounce rates, time on site, abandonment rates, comments, social shares, etc.
What drives engagement? Why are some content pieces read and re-read, shared, and re-shared, while others are just given a quick look-through? Here are some things to pay attention to:
- Content relevancy is key.
- Design and layout are important.
- Content "stickiness" (its ability to grab and hold attention) is important as well.
How to Measure Engagement
If you use Google Analytics, look into...
- Bounce rates
- Average visit duration
- Pages/visit, etc.
Sometimes, despite sufficient traffic, there isn't much engagement going on, which could be for several reasons:
- Something puts people off (too many ads on the page, small print, etc.).
- Your content is poorly targeted.
- You have too much content, more than required (so, people don't bother reading the whole thing).
- Your content is poorly structured (it should be obvious to content consumers where they should look first, second, etc.).
- Your content lacks substance (to me, any piece of content should have something substantial to it: something helpful, new, entertaining, insightful, inspiring—something in it that makes it worth reading).
Some click-tracking tools (such as MouseFlow and CrazyEgg) actually let you see what users do on your site. You can use such software to get an idea of what may be causing people to stop interacting with your content.
3. Social shares: how much ripple can you produce?
Another measure of content success is the number of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other shares it receives.
Top underlying metrics here would be traffic and engagement (the last two in the image). However, sometimes people just bookmark or retweet your post without actually reading it, in hopes of giving it a read later. In that case, you'll see the number of shares, but it doesn't necessarily mean those people engaged with your post.
