Measuring Content Performance: Analyzing Success and Optimizing Strategies for Maximum Impact

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So, we posted about top tips for content writing and increasing website traffic in the past.

But… how do you actually get to measure its performance? Do you solely rely on page views? Would you consider the number of shares & likes underneath produced content as reliable?

Just a few years back, content marketers were comfortable with measuring the success of their content with just page views. To their defence, at the time, there was little that could be measured.

However, we are all aware that the times have changed and new technologies arose.

Now, thanks to the Internet, marketing automation, and marketing analytics solutions, we can measure nearly everything in marketing, tracing our impact all the way down to influence on revenue and ROI.

This means that the goal for content marketers is not to just be good at only telling stories but to use content to drive business results. Analytics is the key to performance optimization. Real-time feedback on what is working empowers us to improve message quality, creative, channel and offers to quickly improve the outcome.

In this article,  we will be showing you how you can measure the performance and impact of your content marketing strategy.

They say if you can measure something, you can improve it. Let’s get to reading and improving your content to suit a wider range of audience.

Traffic

How are people behaving once they reach your site? That’s the question that engagement metrics seek to answer.

If nobody is landing on your website, it doesn’t matter how amazing your blog posts are – nobody will read them and so they won’t be doing you any good.

Let’s strip it back to basics, traffic is one metric that you must measure. Of course, this traffic can be split up into different categories. In Google Analytics, the metrics you want to be looking at are:

  • Users – the total number of unique visitors to your page
  • Pageviews – the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed
  • Unique pageviews – If a single user has viewed your page multiple times, these visits are combined into one pageview to calculate this metric.

This information can be useful to know for your future content strategy.

For example, if you target primarily UK customers but you’re getting a significant amount of traffic from the US, you can tailor future content also to your US visitors. Or if a large proportion of your traffic is coming from one of your social media channels, you can tailor your content based on your social media followers’ data.

Read our article on Organic Traffic vs Paid Search here to learn more about these two traffic types.

Sales Conversions

People are visiting your blog. That’s good. What is their next move? Are they clicking through all the articles? Would they also click on the links attached within the context? Are they navigating through different options of your website? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Completing an e-commerce transaction?

It’s up to you what you choose as a conversion that counts. In some cases, the goal of your content might be to make a physical sale, while in others it just might be to raise awareness of your brand and increase your authority. If this is the case you might want to focus more on metrics such as social shares and engagement.

However, if your blog is primarily a sales tool, you’re going to want to track how many sales it generates. You can do this after activating e-commerce in Google Analytics by viewing the page value of all your content under the behaviour section.

This will give you the average revenue that each page has generated for you when users have gone directly to make a purchase or complete another goal that you’ve set.

If your business is in the need of a new E-commerce website, contact us here.

At Vindicta Digital we research the best E-Commerce system for you that provides the speed of access and peak usability for your consumer so that you can offer a wide range of services efficiently.

Engagement

As mentioned above, depending on your end goal – sometimes the amount of traffic your content gets is more a measure of how effective you are at getting people to click your links, rather than how good your content is.

To really find out if people are engaging with your content, you’ll need to track how long they’re spending on your site and how many pages they’re visiting in each session.

The obvious goal here is to keep them on your site as long as possible so they can read more of your content (unless of course, you want to funnel them to a sales page as quickly as possible.)

Often, this information can be easily tracked under the Audience Overview in Google Analytics. Here, as well as seeing your total number of sessions and visitors, you can see the average number of pages per session, the average session duration, and your bounce rate.

Insight into these analytics will help you improve your content, website design and customer experience. If you find that customers don’t spend much time on your website, maybe it needs to be redesigned? If website visitors don’t click through a variety of different links, maybe they are not made visible enough?

Evaluating these areas and its figures will initially help you out in understanding your audience.

Ideally, for content that’s designed to be read, you want a high number of pages per session, long average session duration (depending on the length of your content) and a low bounce rate.

Social Media Engagement

If you wonder how social media engagement is different to the website one, there is not much difference really. You still need to keep a track of it. It’s still very effective to measure it and see how well your business performs online.

While there are various metrics you can track here, the most important is how many times your content has been shared on various social networks.

A share shows that others are finding your content valuable.

This information isn’t available in Google Analytics but if you have social share buttons on each piece of content, they will show you how many times that content has been shared on each platform.

You can also track the amount of traffic you’re getting from social platforms, which is another good way of measuring engagement. More clicks from social platforms mean that more people are sharing and interacting with your content.

SEO Performance

Not all your traffic will come from social media, so it’s important that you’re getting plenty of visitors from search too. You can track the proportion of your site visits that come from search in Google Analytics, but this doesn’t give you much insight into whether your site is performing well in search engines or not.

Instead, you’ll need to measure your SEO performance. There are a few different metrics you can track here. SERP ranking is probably the most important one – this is the position of your page in the search engine results for a particular keyword phrase. Rankings aren’t static and do tend to fluctuate a little, but when you’re tracking your ranking over time you want to see it either static (if you’re already in a good spot) or improving, which shows you are gaining trust and authority.

You can use Google Search Console to identify the terms you’re ranking for and keep an eye on how your ranking changes over time.

Better SEO will lead to higher traffic numbers, more leads, and hopefully more sales and conversions.

As a top-rated SEO Agency, we know exactly what it takes to make your website ranking higher. Visit our website to find out more and partner up. 

USE THESE INSIGHTS TO TAILOR YOUR CONTENT

The most successful content marketing strategies are those that see beyond the transactional element to the relationship between brand and customer and recognize that through content marketing, you can inform, engage and entertain.

As yourself what you are doing today to track and measure the true performance of your content. What are you using for insight into engagement? Are their metrics we didn’t mention that are important to your brand?

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