How to measure content marketing success
You’ve spent weeks, maybe even months, meticulously planning your content marketing strategy, writing content, sourcing images and sharing it on your website, socials and newsletter.
Question is, how do you know your content marketing efforts are paying off, and if you’re measuring your success, what are the metrics that matter?
Why is measuring your content marketing important?
When you release content as part of your content strategy, you should have specific goals, whether that be collecting email subscribers, conversions, or improving brand visibility.
Measuring your content will ensure you know what is working and what you should spend time on rather than focusing on the wrong content that isn’t contributing to your content goals.
Please note: Content means many different things to different marketers. When we talk about content, we’re talking about blogs and other content hosted on your website.
How to tell if your content marketing is working
Keyword rankings
Keyword rankings refer to your website’s position on search engines when your keyword is searched for.
The closer your website is to page 1, the more likely your target audience will see it and subsequently click on it.
A blog ranking for lots of keywords and ranking high on Google usually means you have used the right keywords, written the content to match the keyword intent, and your content is likely very thorough too.
That being said, keyword rankings are quite a superficial metric to use when measuring the success of a blog. Unless your content strategy is heavily reliant on appearing at the top of Google for specific long-tail keywords, keyword rankings are not necessarily the most reliable measure of success.
If keyword rankings are important to your strategy, you want to choose short-tail and long-tail keywords that have low competition and high numbers of searches monthly.
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
CTR on Google measures how many times people click on your website from the search results compared to how many times it appeared in the search results, whether in position 1 or 100. The higher you appear in the SERPs, the higher your CTR is likely to be however, being near the top of the results doesn’t guarantee that people will click on it.
A good CTR can tell you that your content is ranking well but also that your title tags and meta descriptions are well-written and enticing. It can also mean that what you’ve written about is actually interesting to the people searching.
Page views
This is probably the most common metric used and measures how many people see your content overall, regardless of how they got there and engaged.
Page views will show you how popular your content is compared to other content on your site AND how much your audience is clicking through to your content.
You can break page views down on Google Analytics to where they’ve come from. This can tell you much about where your target audience is and where you should invest your time and effort.
New users
Having a loyal audience is a gift. But there’s always more room at the table for new people to join the party.
Measuring how many new users your content reaches allows you to understand how far your message is spreading and whether your message is resonating with people outside of your ecosystem.
It also means that the products and/or services you’re selling are being shown to a wider market, boosting your potential for sales.
Time on page
Building on CTR and new users, measuring the time spent on your page help you understand if your audience is engaged with your content or not.
In theory, it’s not hard to get someone to click on your link if you really want to. Clickbait will entice anyone to click if you make it juicy enough. (We do not encourage you to use clickbait…you’ll see why).
But getting someone to click on your links won’t accomplish much. The real value in your content is the…well, content. That’s where your audience will read or see the information you want to share with them and understand what you want them to do based on your clear CTA (call to action).
Measuring your content’s success based on a time-on-page metric is not always the best because so many factors determine how long someone spends on a page.
Long time on page
Positive – People are super engaged and reading your content
Negative – People can’t find the information they want
Short time on page
Positive – People are easily able to find information (your content is well laid out)
Negative – People clicked on your content, but it didn’t meet their expectations
Bounce rate
A CTA is an action you want your consumer to take when they engage with your content.
This could be leaving a comment, sharing the content with their friends, signing up for your email list, buying a product, signing up for a waitlist, or enquiring about a service…
When someone leaves your page without taking action, this is called a “bounce.” Therefore, bounce rate is the number or proportion of people that consume your content and then leave without taking action or engaging with the page.
Your bounce rate will likely be low if you have a compelling CTA. If your bounce rate is high, try changing your CTA or adding videos to encourage people to interact with your content.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate records the percentage of users who have completed the desired action. In essence, it is the opposite of a bounce rate.
Using conversion rates as a metric to track the success of your content marketing efforts lets you see if your strategies are yielding the results you hoped for, whether that is getting people to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product or send an enquiry.
It’s possibly THE most important metric.
Backlinks and shares
Backlinks and shares are not necessarily relevant for all businesses to track but can be a good indicator of the quality of your content. It’s one thing to convince someone to “convert” thanks to your content, but it solidifies your brand authority to gather backlinks and shares.
Content that usually receives lots of backlinks includes case studies, guides, statistics, controversial or interesting opinions, or just very well-researched and well-written content.
Shares show that your content is valuable and resonates with your audience so much that they want to share it with others.
Is your content marketing getting you results?
Every business is different, with unique marketing goals. Choose the metrics that make the most sense for your mission and start measuring.
If you’re not seeing good results, it could be that you’re not producing quality content, your content strategy isn’t right for your business, or that you’re not following a content strategy at all!
If you want to ensure your content marketing is benefiting your business, why not invest in one of our content strategies? We’re a content strategy agency specialising in creating blogs and website content to achieve your business goals. Get in touch to learn more.
