Content marketing is being recognized as one of the most productive online promotional techniques. But, it’s a lot easier to launch a concerted content marketing effort than it is to quantify its effectiveness. Businesses need to know if their efforts are working. So, how can we measure performance?
Modern web analytics enable businesses to track many aspects of their online marketing campaigns in real time, which can help us gain insight. Here are 5 excellent metrics by which the effectiveness of content marketing can be judged.
Social Media Mentions
Today, businesses can gain a wide audience for content through the use of social media networks. Thanks to hashtags on Twitter and Google+ as well as powerful native analytics on Facebook, tracking social mentions around the web is a fairly simple task. One can also use the custom analytics functionality found in programs like Hootsuite and Buffer to accurately track social mentions.
Unique Visitors
Websites often tout their traffic numbers by listing unique visits per month. Knowing roughly how many monthly visits are unique is especially important for SMBs trying to expand their reach and increase awareness. Pretty much any analytics engine such as Google Analytics or Piwik can be used to determine this figure for your main website. One of your primary goals should be to consistently increase this number every month.
High-Profile Inbound Links
If you’ve gotten the attention of your more well-known peers, it’s likely that ordinary web surfers are familiar with you as well. You’re no doubt aware that having authoritative, high-ranking sites link to your own domain can significantly boost PageRank. This in turn leads to better placement in the organic SERPS. Tools like Link Explorer can help you to analyze inbound links and identify valuable referrals.
Time Spent Per Page
Bounce rates rarely tell the whole story when it comes to determining the relevance of your content. If a visitor leaves immediately, it might be because the content they’re presented with doesn’t exactly match up with their expectations and they’re looking for something either more specific or more general. The amount of time any given visitor spends perusing a single page on your site is a better indicator of content quality and effectiveness.
Pageviews Per Visitor
Most businesses would love to have a visitor make an immediate purchase after only a single visit to their primary website. The reality is that it often takes multiple exposures to your brand via your content to convert a window shopper into a buyer. If you’re seeing sustained interest in your site’s content from a single viewer, it’s more likely that your content strategy is working and that they’ll become a paying customer.
Putting the Data to Use
Although traditional metrics like total pageviews matter, they’re by no means the only way to assess the health of your content marketing strategy. The metrics discussed in the preceding paragraphs give marketers and businesses deeper insights into their content’s impact online. By paying close attention to the metrics that really matter, you’ll be better prepared to adapt your content strategy to the ever-changing realities of online marketing.
