You’ve done a great job putting together your marketing strategy, setting SMART business goals, and building an effective workflow. Your content is also very engaging.
Without understanding how your content marketing efforts impact your business, you can’t determine whether your strategy is working. To optimize your content marketing strategy and make sure it’s delivering results, you need to identify and track the right metrics.
Why do these measurements matter?
To begin with, demonstrating the value of your content through metrics is a good way to show that it is worth creating.
Metrics such as engagement, traffic, and others give you a more precise understanding of your audience, their interests, and needs. Your content marketing success depends on using this data well.
Content metrics are important, but it can be difficult to measure your return on investment. This post is, therefore, not going to cover all.
This guide doesn’t cover every single topic.
At the same time, we also want to help you improve your content marketing by presenting important metrics.
How to Measure Content Marketing ROI
You want every blog post and video case study you create to perform even better than those you published before. Why?
Because content marketing is always an ongoing process.
Measuring your results regularly as your marketing campaign progresses is the best way to ensure you are on the right track.
Here’s the catch, though.
But if you want to go further and prove the impact of your content, you need to track conversions Marketers who wish to demonstrate the effectiveness of their content should focus on conversion rates, rather than simply website traffic or social shares. The metrics are not entirely useless, but they are not comprehensive.
In order to understand the big picture, you need to look at more detailed and all-encompassing metrics, like content production costs, lead generation volume, and conversion rates.
You cannot strategize your marketing direction without a reliable understanding of opportunities and costs.
If you want to measure your content marketing ROI, you need to understand the fundamental marketing metrics. This post explains what they are and how to use them.
It is important to remember that there is not always one specific way to calculate ROI. This link can be used to calculate ROI for those in the SaaS industry or running an e-commerce business.
This framework is not as helpful for companies that provide services or content marketing efforts where conversions that are not direct result in most of the profit. To reduce measurement errors, use different types of measurements in your evaluation.
Big Universe of Content Marketing Metrics
The most difficult part is figuring out which metrics are most important when measuring the ROI of your content.
It takes time to find these metrics, but it is worth the effort.
Content marketing ROI can be measured differently, depending on your overall focus and marketing strategy.
Your content marketing metrics should be based on your content strategy goals to ensure that your efforts are providing value to your business.
The first step is to figure out which aspects of your business you want to measure, and what sort of data you need to support those measurements.
You will need to set standards for your analytics in order to gauge its performance.
Once you have all the data, calculate the cost of implementing your content plan to determine the return on investment.
We’ll look at eight key performance indicators:
1. Number of Generated Leads
Your website has great content and is designed well. You also have a good amount of website traffic.
- But what do your visitors do after they finish reading?
- Do they buy a product or service?
- Or sign up for your newsletter?
- Or click on another link?
If people just watch and leave, that means there’s a big issue with generating leads.
A lead is an individual or organization who is interested in your products or services.
If they provide you with contact information, such as an email ID, phone number, or even a social media handle, you will automatically consider them a possible customer.
However, not all leads are of the same value. Qualified leads are the ones that increase your ROI.
- A qualified lead is a prospect considered by your sales and marketing team to be an ideal customer with the intent to buy.
- An unqualified or irrelevant lead has not been nurtured enough in the sales cycle.
Using these content marketing assets to generate qualified leads:
- Optimizing Landing Pages
- Regularly Updating Email Newsletters
- Writing High-Quality Blog Posts
- Active Social Media Presence
Having a process for generating and keeping customers is important for being successful in creating leads.
The average cost per lead for marketing companies is $99.
Most of your marketing efforts should be focused on acquiring high-value leads.
Paid advertising is an effective short-term solution. There are a lot of content marketing tools and resources available, so you don’t need to rely on them to generate leads and make money.
Besides, great content is ageless.
If you create content that is based on research, well-structured, and engaging, customers will continue to come to you even after the content is created.
How to Track Lead Generation with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is considered to be the best lead-tracking tool by many marketing experts.
Follow these six steps to integrate Google analytics into your lead-tracking strategy:
- Set up Destination Goals
- Combine the Goals Feature with Cross-Channel Data-Driven Attribution
- Create a Thank-You Page
- Create Custom Events in Google Analytics
- Integrate Google Analytics with Your CRM Tool
- Use Google Analytics Behavior Reports
2. SERP Rankings
Does Google rank your website highly?
You will need to improve your search engine rankings if you want people to be able to find your website easily. Why?
The reason to use website traffic today is to bring more visitors to your website.
If your website doesn’t show up on the first page of Google, you’re missing out on a majority of web traffic. The top result on Google also has a click-through rate (CTR) of almost 40%. The CTR for the 1st position is more than double the CTR for the 2nd position.
To improve your website’s ranking in search engines, focus on essential SEO activities, such as identifying trending keywords, building links, creating friendly URLs, and acquiring as many backlinks as possible.
It is important for SEO experts to keep track of their rankings in order to effectively develop their marketing and SEO strategy.
Keyword rank tracking shows you where your website ranks in search engine results for specific keywords. This data can help you improve the structure and content of your website.
Best SERP Trackers
AccuRanker. Relative accurate and fast daily SERP tracker that is standalone and relatively expensive.
Pro Rank Tracker. This solution provides comprehensive tracking and reporting of SEO rankings, allowing users to see how their website is performing in search engines. It also has robust reporting features, making it easy to identify areas for improvement.
Advanced Web Ranking (AWR). An advanced web-based keyword-tracking tool with excellent white-label reports.
Semrush Position Tracker. Highly accurate SERP tracker.
SERPWatcher. A tool that is affordable and can track SEO ranks with features that allow for comprehensive keyword rank monitoring and data analysis.
SE Ranking. A rank tracker that is effective and inexpensive to use on all major search engines and in different locations.
Nightwatch Rank Tracker. An affordable and accurate daily rank tracker with in-depth reports and analysis.
If you’re don’t have much money to spend on marketing or your marketing team is not experienced in creating multimedia content, don’t worry.
If you want to improve your SERP features, you can practice on blog posts.
These features include the following.
Featured snippet. The featured snippet box appears at the top of the search results, above the organic results. This means that websites that are selected can expect more people to click on them and visit them.
Images. Having more images in your content can help your website’s ranking.
People also ask questions. It is a Google SERP feature that allows you to increase click-through rate.
3. Keyword Optimization
It’s common knowledge thatclick-through rates on well-optimized content that uses relevant keywords are higher.
It is advantageous to use parent keywords, which are high-ranking and high-traffic keywords specific to a niche business. If you combine seed keywords with short-tail keywords, you can create amazing content.
If you want to optimize your content, don’t just focus on one keyword. Think about all the semantically relevant keywords that could be associated with your topic.
4. Bounce Rates
What is a bounce rate? The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave a website after only viewing one page. This can be the main page or a deep page with an old blog post. A 70% bounce rate means that 70% of people who landed on that page left the website after reading it, without browsing other pages.
The question remains. Is a high bounce rate always a bad thing? The truth is that it depends on the context, just like any other metric.
A high bounce rate uses up a lot of bandwidth and is generally not a good sign. On the other hand, if the purpose of the page is simply to provide information, then a high bounce rate may not be as big of a deal. Bounce rate is not as important if your goal is just to get readers to that page.
If you want people to keep looking through your content, you can check which pages have the highest number of people leaving in your Google Analytics account, and work on improving them.
look at the posts with the lowest bounce rate to understand what is working and develop a strategy.
5. Average Time on Page
People spend a lot of time discussing what bounce rates mean for your content marketing strategy. The average time spent on a page can help give context to that statistic.
The important thing to consider is how much time on average the readers spend on the page, not just the bounce rate.
If you want your readers to spend more time on a specific page, focus on making that page informative.
In this example, the time spent on a page is a measure of how interesting the page is to readers. Readers who quickly realize that the page is not interesting are not counted in the time spent on page metric.
Once you have determined how long visitors are spending on your website’s pages on average, you can then examine the total number of views those pages have received. The average time spent on the best performing content is much higher than the average time spent on the website. Although the number of views is low, it is significant compared to other posts with a much higher number of views.
One of the best examples of the benefits of using multiple metrics together is when there are differences in how various pages perform.
6. Comments
This is a metric in and of itself because it helps to improve the user experience on your blog by increasing the number of comments. In other words, it helps to make your blog more interactive and engaging for readers.
The entire article isn’t more than 3,000 words. The writing didn’t take very long because it is based on strategies the authors are already implementing successfully. (Meaning research and brainstorming time was minimal.)
The number of comments on a blog post speaks volumes to how popular the post was, and how much engagement it garnered If you want to create content that will be popular and engage readers, one metric you can look at is the number of comments on a blog post. The more comments a post has, the more popular it was and the more engagement it garnered. This means that people not only read your content, but they also spend time discussing it afterwards. The next step is to tag commenters on social media to solidify the connection and turn it into a long-term relationship.
The focus is on the 103 comments instead of the 33k views because the comments are more important.
The answer is pretty simple. When you want to measure the effect of social media instead of the hype, it is more exact to look at the comments than at the number of views.
That’s because the videos are on autoplay. If the video is shared hundreds of times, particularly by people who are interested in it, it will play automatically a lot. This doesn’t, however, represent a sign of engagement.
But comments do. The people who engage on the post must have at least an idea of what they’re talking about. This means they must have opened the actual blog post or watched a part of the video.
The same goes for the Bright Side post below. The article has been shared 1,000 times, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that people have read it. An influencer only has to click ‘share’ for a lot of their followers to do the same thing, without even thinking about it.
7. Traffic Source
Social media is complicated. A high social media engagement rate on one platform does not necessarily mean increased web traffic or more leads. The few people who are lucky enough to have everything they want are the ones who are most successful at blogging.
If we want to maintain a perspective on what platform converts, we need to constantly monitor it. It might not be the platform we’re thinking of.
Google Analytics has been surprising in the example above. It is surprising that Pinterest is responsible for the majority of social media traffic for the account being examined.
The client’s niche is not visual, so the results are surprising.
Conclusion
The pages that people convert from are just as important as the people who convert.
If you have a free trial pop-up that appears on every blog post page of your website, people will be able to sign up for it easily. You need to track how long a potential customer spends interacting with your product before they hit the button to create a free trial.
People might need to see your brand several times before they feel ready to purchase something. It’s impossible to track your content marketing perfectly, but that doesn’t mean we can’t track it at all. We can and should track our efforts.
Related posts:
