Articles

How can you measure the successes and failures of content?

by Anant Bansal Consultant
Marketers get the universal concept of content marketing, yet they are still trying their hands on how to fine tune their strategies to generate the biggest return on investment for their business. It is not about the lack of hours you have spent fretting over what your content is but it’s about why it didn’t generate the results you were expecting. Or else you’ve been studying some fruitful piece of content and hoping that you could have figure out how to duplicate its accomplishments.

“As rapid as digital marketing landscape changes, the importance of quality content has remained consistent.”

You need a content marketing strategy with specific objectives to start achieving the success of content. By implementing these goals, you will be able to regulate what makes great content within your industry. After this, your team can make necessary adjustments to improve an effective formula.

How to surpass established goals with great content?

Starting pointers for any business that can be used to highlight some broad content goals are-

  • Develop your online reputation
  • Improve your brand awareness
  • Generate new customer leads and sales
  • Attract more traffic to your site
  • Encourage natural links and optimize search engine ranking
  • Benefit your competitive advantage
  • Boost Audience Engagement

While producing any single content piece, it should be able to achieve one or more of these goals, and your entire content portfolio should accomplish all of them.

“Every digital marketing goal you create should definitely lead to your overall business purpose.”

Getting Started: What metrics help measure your content?

Accuracy in measuring and tracking efforts against aims and goals is very important when proving a return on investment in any digital marketing strategy. To make your strategy more efficient and effective, specific goals and targets are set in place so that the measurement of different metrics is easier to track.

To start with, you should create baseline-metrics which can be used as a point to begin with against future content. Can you give an accurate update on the effect of that work, if you’ve been creating content and implementing best of SEO practices? Did the positive effects and increase in leads or revenue outweigh the cost?

Moreover, analytics tools will allow you to view historical data, so there’s no need to download each and every piece of data currently available to you. Rather, it will be ideal to say that record some general metrics which will further reflect larger trends. For example:

  • Total number of keywords ranking in the top 100 positions.
  • Average number of monthly leads. (filter by channel)
  • Average monthly organic traffic. (filter by channel)
  • Average monthly non-organic traffic.

 

Then after a certain period of time, let’s say 6 months, you can compare your current numbers to those metrics and see what has improved and what hasn’t. Because it’s hard to know how much your site has improved when you don’t know where you started.

Using Google Analytics to measure content performance

Most website owners utilize Google Analytics to effectively measure the success of their content. Though it can be difficult to choose which metrics to track but this tool definitely offers a huge amount of useful data.

How to Measure Traffic volume and time on page?

Since every company wants their content to show up in the search results. But the problem strikes when they limit the measurable targets for their content by focusing on traffic alone. Well, getting a lot of traffic towards your content doesn’t mean obtaining more leads or loyal consumers. Yes, you do want users to visit your site, but there is much more to be done and measured which can enhance your digital marketing.

All websites pages are not created equally therefore in order to use Traffic Volume as a way to measure content success, you should be sure to compare pages of similar content. For example, the home page of most websites will probably be one of the most visited pages on the site — but this isn’t always due to the content found there; basic SEO and promotional strategies can usually be credited with high traffic to the homepage.

The other metric to consider is the Time on Page. When the average time on a specific page is much higher than your site-wide average, it suggests that the page is grabbing and keeping visitor’s attention more than the pages, implying that the content is worth analyzing for additional insights.

Measuring Referral Traffic to your Website

Referral traffic is bit more specific and generalized i.e. it shows the visit to your website or content that originally came from an outside source. For example, when a visitor clicks on a link from your Facebook or Twitter, it leads to your website that is considered a referral traffic or a visit.

It can be done by selecting it as a Traffic Source:

Any Digital marketing strategy, should have content promotion in place to get awesome content in front of your targeted audience. Referral traffic can be sign of distributional and promotional effectiveness as it highlights which sites are actually engaging most traffic and time of which the traffic was referred.

How to measure your content downloads?

In content writing it adds value to your work if we create downloadable content like eBooks, whitepapers, mobile apps, or even PDF’s. and to keep this stable, visitors must fill out a contact form in order to gain access to the desired content.

In order to gain that access, a user must provide their personal information – typically an email address, or their phone numbers. Other times, visitors may not provide any additional information but still be required to download the content like PDF documents, longer videos etc.

If you want to track the times for which the content has been downloaded, you can set up Event Tracking in Google Analytics. Once it has been done, we can establish an event goal to track specific downloaded content pieces.

When the event goal is set up, you will be easily able to find the number of people who are downloading your current content, without any further requirements from your visitors. Similarly, this data can be further used in conjunction with other metrics.

How to define your content’s success?

It’s important to have a defined stance on what success looks like for you and your business. It will always be goal-oriented. Further are few tips which you can follow:

  • Defining what success means for your content and how will you measure it.
  • Establishing a timetable for using and measuring web analytics to gather data on the activity on your site.
  • Use analytic data to adapt future content for optimal performance.

“Measure the effect and make changes to identify strong and weak content”

Wrapping up: Our Measurement Process

Content marketing measurement service will help you sort through the amount of information in Google Analytics to find the most insightful and useful data will generate the biggest content marketing on ROI. Our team will:

  • Determine business goals
  • Establish baseline metrics
  • Dashboard setup
  • Monthly Reports

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About Anant Bansal Junior   Consultant

1 connections, 0 recommendations, 14 honor points.
Joined APSense since, March 5th, 2019, From Delhi, India.

Created on May 31st 2019 01:26. Viewed 423 times.

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