For an organization, the true value of content is its capacity to accomplish goals. The company sees a positive return on investment (ROI) if the content is extremely effective with content users. As a result, measuring content performance is a strong predictor of ROI, emphasizing its importance to your bottom line. So, how effective is your content? Only by measuring what matters can you ascertain if your content is effective.
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Metrics You Need to Measure for Content Performance
While you should definitely leverage content marketing tools, don’t underestimate the power of metrics. Here are the most important metrics to measure.
Site traffic
The heart and soul of online content is traffic. If no one visits your website, it doesn’t matter how exceptional your blog posts are — no one will read them. The amount of traffic to your website indicates how well your content is performing. Lots of traffic is positive as long as your website’s bounce rate is manageable.
For those unfamiliar with the term, your site’s bounce rate consists of the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. A rising bounce rate indicates that your main page is dull or unappealing, and your content needs to be more engaging to keep visitors on your site.
Some popular tools to measure site traffic are Google Analytics, Matomo, Open Web Analytics, and Clicky.
The metrics you should observe in Google Analytics are:
- Users – Total number of unique visitors that visit your page;
- Pageviews – Total number of times someone viewed a page on your website;
- Unique pageviews – This metric is calculated when a single user views your page multiple times.
Use the raw data from these metrics to get a vague estimation of the traffic to your site’s pages. You can also drill down into the data to see where your traffic comes from as well as the device they used to visit your site.
On-site time spent by visitors
On-site time (or dwell time) is the average time each visitor spends browsing your website. This metric reveals how captivating your site content is and where there’s room for improvement.
Low on-site time could indicate your website’s pages take too long to load. If this is the case, make sure to investigate your web hosting options.
Materialization of your SEO efforts
One clear indicator of the effectiveness of your content strategy is the return on your SEO efforts. If your website’s ranking has significantly improved, it is most likely the result of your efforts to optimize your site’s content.
Investing in content optimization and SEO content tool allows your website to appear organically in search engine result pages (SERPs). This strategy also drives organic engagement. If you decide to hire a professional copywriter to write and optimize your content, don’t forget to check out their professional copywriting portfolio.
Ease of Website Use
The ease with which your audience navigates your content also demonstrates its effectiveness. Your content facilitates the customer’s journey by helping your audience make a decision, and thus convert into a lead.
Your content should help your audience navigate their customer journey efficiently. You should also evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts according to the user experience provided by your content.
Sales or conversions
What do people who visit your website do after they’ve finished reading? Do they click on your links and continue to read? Do they subscribe to your newsletter? Will they complete an e-commerce transaction?
It is entirely up to you to determine what constitutes a conversion. In certain cases, the primary objective of your content may be to achieve an actual sale, whereas, in others, it may simply be to raise brand awareness and authority.
If the latter is the case, you should pay more attention to metrics like social shares and engagement. If your blog is mainly a sales tool, you should keep track of how many sales it generates.
Engagement
The amount of traffic your content receives can be a better indicator of how successful you are at getting individuals to click your links than how good your content is. To determine whether individuals engage with your content, keep track of the time they spend on your site and the number of pages they visit per session.
The goal is to keep them on your site for as long as possible in order for them to read more of your content. Interactive and engaging content is essential when it comes to content for event promotion.
Wrapping Up
Effective content marketing combines a well-organized content strategy, properly specified goals, and ongoing results analysis. Regardless of how interesting, informative, and well-written your content is, it will ultimately be appraised by the value it produces for your company. To begin measuring and evaluating your content performance, concentrate on the above-mentioned metrics.
