How is your content marketing paying off? Not sure? Luckily, some content marketing analytics can clue you in to how effective your content really is. And there’s a plethora of tools, free or otherwise, out there to help you figure out if your traffic is converting to sales, to analyze audience behavior, and to review your data so you can pivot quickly and refine your content marketing strategy to better suit your company’s goals and needs.
This brief cheat sheet of key content marketing parameters will help inform you on how to optimize your efforts. Depending on the tool used, some metrics and terms may differ. For familiarity’s sake, we’ll be talking about Google Analytics since it’s the most commonly used platform for measuring website and blog content traffic and engagement.
Page views are an obvious one, but they’ll tell you in the simplest possible terms (big numbers or small numbers?) what individual blog pieces are popular or not. They can tell you some other valuable things, too, like which authors are getting the most views and what kinds of topics customers may be interested in. If you find some people are flocking to certain subjects or writers than others, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. Naturally, some pieces of content will remain relevant (evergreen content) while other pieces of content that are more topical will drop off over time.
“Time on page” is useful, too. How long is your audience engaged with your content? If they’re stuck on a particular landing page or article for a sizeable number of minutes, then chances are high you got some mighty engaging content there. This can give you opportunities for optimizing your content, especially if you notice certain landing pages have a highly engaged audience, but few conversions. Adding stronger CTAs (call-to-action) or even re-structuring the design of the page can help turn those engaged readers into real leads.
Page Value is where things start to get really helpful. This is the metric that tells you which page a user visits before landing on a goal page or fulfilling a sales transaction. Assisted Conversions is another metric than give you clues about the customer’s conversion path, such as typing in a URL or clicking a text or picture ad.
Traffic can tell you a lot about your own content and the patterns of behavior of your audience. Besides telling you which pieces of content customers are landing on when they visit your page, monitoring content traffic can tell you where they’re coming from. Knowing the source of your traffic is a valuable amenity, whether it’s a social media link on LinkedIn or Twitter, or a hyperlink on an affiliate or guest blog. If more traffic arrives from a certain source, it could be worth it to focus on promoting your content there. Likewise, if one source is a dud you can quit wasting time with it and re-focus your distribution efforts on channels that drive real ROI.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a pretty big topic we’ve discussed before, but one of the KPIs you should be looking at to measure your content marketing success is how your content ranks in search results. Tools like SEM Rush and Moz are incredibly helpful in providing insight into how well your company is ranking for valuable keywords that drive targeted traffic, and they can tell you which keywords you may be missing out on that are strong opportunities for your organization.
These are obviously just a few of the tools that exist to help refine your content marketing analytics. For more help, drop us a line and we’ll help you get your content maketing back on track.
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