Content marketing has seen a tremendous surge in popularity over the years and it has become an indispensable part of modern marketing strategies.
When it comes to content marketing, measuring success is the toughest part. Proving and analysing the effectiveness of each strategy can sometimes prove difficult. Content marketing has its own ROI as a channel and to measure results we need to select a set of unique key performance indicators.
Identifying the set of unique metrics and analysing and correlating them with each other is the difficult part. In this blog I will share 3 different KPI’s which can be used to effectively measure the content marketing success. In the case of content we cannot measure with a single metric because no single data point can clearly tell whether the content strategy is working.
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Grouping content marketing metrics and KPI’s:
- Content Consumption metrics
- Social Love metrics
- Conversion metrics
1. Content Consumption Metrics
As a content marketer you can produce the best content in the world but if it is not liked or accepted much by your targeted audience, then the time and energy that you invested in creating the content becomes futile.
The metrics which we need to analyse for measuring content consumption are:
Unique Page Visits and Page views
The simple way of analysing the content consumption is by looking at the traffic it’s receiving. This shows how your targeted audience is receiving the content you produced. Analyse this metric on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to get an idea about how well your content is trending.
New Visits
The number of new visits will show the virality of the content and how targeted and new audiences are consuming the content.
Time on Page and Bounce Rate
These two metrics show you the engagement of visitors in your site.
Visitor Flow
If people visit the content you produce but just bounce off the page, it means that the person isn't qualified and/or interested in the rest of your site’s content. This reduces the retention and engagement rate.
2. Social Love Metrics
These metrics are heavily used to review the virality of the produced content. The sub-metric which you need to analyse is social shares and referring social platforms. Some common metrics which will help us to measure social love are:
Social Share and Reach
Facebook insights, twitter analytics and similarly all social platforms have analytics to analyse the reach and engagement.
Comments
A high number of comments demonstrates more visitor engagement with your content. This metric shows the authority of the content produced and visitor reaction.
Inbound Links
This is one of the important metrics which define the content’s credibility. An inbound link is important because it brings value in terms of more visits and popularity, plus search engines will definitely value these links! Here is a recent blog in which I have explained 13 easy ways to build links.
Mentions
Measuring mentions on the web will also show the popularity of the content. Social Mention is a free tool that can help your measure the mention across the web.
Referral Site Visits
Measuring referral visits from will show the sites from where our content is linked.
3. Conversion Metrics
Downloads
If you are promoting an eBook or guide and be sure to measure the number of downloads; this will give you a clear picture about the content’s consumption and also the rate of these signups and downloads, i.e. conversions will show the effectiveness and virality of your content.
Email newsletter/Blog subscribers
The people who signed up for email and who have subscribed the blog will show the loyalty of the visitors who viewed the content.
Sales/Marketing qualified leads
This is the number of prospects that have met your minimum sales qualification criteria. These leads have a higher chance completing a conversion.
Ensure that you have a system which can track which path a visitor opted to fill out a lead form. This will definitely help you to see what type of content consumption contributed to that final sale.
Sales Cycle and Retention Rate
Retention refers to the percentage of customers you retain. Customer acquisition is not the only reason to write content. There should be content in your site which in turn can help boost retention. If you are service based then you might focus more on retention.
So why not try to combine these 3 key performance indicators for measuring content marketing ROI? Here is a short infographic, feel free to use the embed code to share the image on your site!
on
Hi Christy,
Thanks a ton for a nice write up on KPI and what should one measure as a ROI. What tools do you use to simplify all three metrics?
on
all great metrics especially when connected with google analytics to add goal values and extra valued metrics