Marketers have to measure different metrics to measure the success of their content marketing efforts. By watching different metrics, your clients can gauge the effectiveness of their content and identify key performance areas that can improve the quality of leads generated at their websites. Below are 5 key metrics:
1. Unique Visits (UVs)
UVs refer to the number of visitors that viewed the content within a particular timeframe (usually 30 days). Using an analytics application, you can determine the source of website traffic, which keywords visitors type on search engines to get to your website, geographic information of your readers, and so on. This information is crucial to understanding the audience to determining offers that will be relevant to them.
When measuring UVs, you should segment the visitors based on the actions that they take on your website. With lead segmentation, your clients will know where to focus your traffic generation efforts. For instance, if you find that your whitepapers are not getting as many views as you expected, you can step up your efforts to promote them, perhaps through other inbound marketing techniques. The quality of the visitors you get will determine whether or not your clients will improve their bottom line.
2. Page Views
Unique Visits give a general idea on the size of your audience while Page Views (PVs) indicate how engaged your audience is. In a recent survey by Econsultancy, 76% of marketers indicated that they measure page views (PVs).
PVs can indicate which content is popular with your audience and the topics they are interested in. If a particular post gets more page views, shares and comments than you would expect, this means it relevant to your audience. If this is the case, you can build your content creation strategy by expounding on the subject, producing additional content such as reports, eBooks or podcasts, and addressing the subject during your webinars.
3. Bounce Rate
One of the pillars of good content marketing is providing value to your audience. Bounce rate can help you know how effective your content is. A high bounce rate may mean visitors do not find your content relevant or interesting. It can also mean that your website has technical or design issues. For instance, if your website loads slowly, your bounce rate is likely to be high.
Together with bounce rate, you can also measure how much time visitors spend on your website. The time spent can help you get an idea on the value of UVs. If you get 10,000 UVs but the average time spent is 9 seconds, something is wrong with your content marketing strategy. You can increase the average time spent on your site by offering a targeted content mix. Your clients can experiment with short and long articles, post slideshows and videos, have audio interviews and so on.
4. Inbound Links
One of the goals of creating compelling content is to get inbound links and emerge as an authority in one's industry. Inbound links boost your website’s rank on Google and drive free targeted traffic from different websites.
Inbound links can help you know which topics are important to players in your industry. With this knowledge, you can craft your content strategy to cover the important issues in your industry. This will result to increased traffic, improved brand awareness and new leads. Creating compelling content that is optimized to rank well on search engines should be at the core of your clients' content creation efforts.
5. Engagement
Measuring the engagement triggered by your content is important to understanding whether you are delivering the right message. Your clients' content should be educational, compelling and entertaining to elicit engagement. Check the comments that your readers make on your content and respond in a meaningful and timely manner.
Sometimes, the comments about your brand may not be positive. You have to find a way to address the comments tactfully. To have more control on the comments that appear on your blog, make it mandatory for comments to be approved by your team before they can be shown.
Another form on engagement you should check is content sharing. Make your content easy to share. Most content management systems have widgets that enable sharing of content on different social media networks. By sharing your content, your visitors can drive additional traffic to your site and attract new leads.
To achieve a positive ROI with content marketing, you need to understand your audience, segment them based on their activities on your website, and produce content that is tailored to each segment. A good content marketing strategy will increase your brand’s reach and position you as an authority in your industry. Measuring the above five metrics will help your clients understand the impact and success of their content in generating leads and improving the bottom line.
