Metrics that matter

Stacey MacNaught from content marketing agency Tecmark explains the best ways of defining and measuring content marketing success

Content marketing isn’t new. Michelin and Jell-o are amongst the brands that have been engaging in the practice for over a century. But changes within Google have contributed to a surge in content in the past couple of years. Couple those changes with our always-connected online landscape and mobile content discovery capabilities, and it’s not difficult to see why the content space is as saturated as it is.

But content marketing is essential for those of us looking to reach an audience through search and social. With investments in content increasing, measuring the effectiveness of content is of paramount importance. But just where do you start? What are the metrics that matter?

To say, “it depends,” sounds like a cop out. But it does. It depends on your objectives. That said, certain metrics are likely to be key in understanding how content has performed across the board.

Audience acquisition
Most people involved in content marketing will be tracking the number of visits they drive to content in their campaigns. Other metrics to add into the mix here are the new visits specifically, which allows you to quote a figure for people reached who had never previously been on the site and could therefore reasonably be considered as a new audience.

It’s particularly important to split new and returning when you’re promoting content to an existing engaged social audience. As important as retaining your audience is and keeping them engaged with new content, if your goals are in any way centered around new audience acquisition then splitting the two out is important. You can track this easily through Google Analytics or any other web analytics package you might be using.

Social engagement metrics are a bone of contention in some ways. Some see no value in it, others would argue that there is a value from an SEO perspective to social metrics. I certainly see correlation (not to be mistaken with causation) between sites with large engaged social audiences and organic search visibility.

In addition, keeping your existing audience engaged means you have a ready-made audience there for future promotion. I struggle to put a value on social interaction, but it’s difficult to ignore the growing role of social in driving customers and influencers and you certainly have to pay attention to anything that correlates with increased search visibility. So I often track this as a metrics either using a tool like www.buzzsumo.com or a free tool like www.sharetally.co.

Conversions and assisted conversions
If your content is designed to reach potential customers (perhaps customers at the top of a conversion funnel or researching online casinos) then you’ll want to know whether any of the traffic you drove converted. Tracking sign ups as conversions is easy enough in Google Analytics. But what about assisted conversions?

If someone finds a piece of content in search, visits and consumes that content then leaves the site without signing up, that isn’t the end of it. What if they then return directly later on and sign up? Or what if they come back through a brand organic search? In the latter case, Google Analytics will show the sign up/conversion as attributed to organic search where a user landed on the homepage. But the piece of content you created had a role to play and it’s important in designing future content strategies that you know this.

Google Analytics has a feature that lets you see this. Under, “Conversions,” in your Analytics sidebar navigation, you’ll see ‘multi channel funnels’. Under that, you’ll see ‘Assisted Conversions’ and then ‘other’, and ‘landing page URL’. From there, you can filter landing pages and start to get a picture of the real influence that certain content is having. And that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it?