How to Monitor and Measure Your Content Marketing Performance

Increased awareness of content importance has led to an explosion of content marketing campaigns. However, creating high-quality content is not enough to succeed online. It’s also crucial to measure its performance, so you’ll know what works and what doesn’t.

Through analyzing performance metrics, you can evaluate the content, find the perfect formula that resonates with your audience, and eventually improve its performance. And in this article, we will show you exactly how to do it. Let’s start!

Why Is It Important to Measure Content Performance?

Different content has different purposes. In general, you should have several types of content that match the stages of a purchase channel:

• Top funnel (awareness stage) — focus on delivering solutions to attract potential customers.
• Middle funnel (consideration stage) — convey your product as a problem reliever. Hence, potential customers would consider purchasing the product.
• Bottom funnel (conversion stage) — convert your potential customers into paying clients. For instance, display CTA (Call to Action) buttons and testimonials to encourage them to purchase.

Since each stage has its own goals, you have to measure different metrics when targeting different stages. For instance, content for the awareness stage must have a high engagement rate, while ones for the middle funnel helps you gather many new leads.

If you don’t measure your content performance or don’t know what metrics to asses, it’s hard to identify the success of your campaign.

How to Monitor and Measure Your Content Marketing Performance?

Here are several things you can to do to monitor the performance of your content:

1. Set Your Marketing Goal

First thing first, identify your goal. Start by asking these questions: “Does my potential customer know my brand?” or “What kind of solution do they need?”

Answering those questions would help you understand the customers, so you can deliver what they need at the right momentum.

Let’s refer to the purchase funnel again. If you want to target customers in the top funnel, you can understand what they need by knowing their queries. Use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest.

For example, here are the keywords you can use in your content if you’re offering web design services:

2. Track the Metrics

As mentioned before, there are several metrics you can measure to check the performance of your content marketing:

Traffic

It’s the number of people who visit your website. The higher the traffic, the higher the chance to get leads! You can get information about your website’s traffic from tools like Google Analytics.

There are two different categories of traffic:

• Pageviews — total views of a page. Repeated views by a single user are counted.
• Unique Pageviews — it’s the same as page views, but repeated views by a single user are not included.

Pay attention to the demographics, location, and device. You can use the data to discover your potential customers.

It’s also important to check the average amount of time your visitors spend on each page. A longer time implies that the content is engaging.

To check the average time spent on a page, enter Google Analytics, and navigate to Behavior >> Site Content >> All Pages.

Engagement and Bounce Rate

An engagement rate shows the number of people who interact with the content. It is indicated by the total of likes, comments, and shares your content gets.

On the other hand, bounce rates represent the number of visitors that leave your site without any interaction. Having a high bounce rate indicates that they aren’t interested in your content.

You can use Google Analytics to view your site’s bounce rate and average session time by navigating to Audience >> Overview. If you want to know your social media engagement rate, use Buzzsumo.

It’s vital to check the engagement rate of content that targets the top and middle funnel, as you’re trying to keep your brand top of mind.

Conversion Rate

As you might probably guess, this metric is the percentage of customers who buy your products. By tracking the conversion rate, you will know the effectiveness of your content in encouraging people to purchase.

The type of content in this stage might vary, from a product page to a demo page. But the main objective remains the same: lead them to convert.

To measure your conversion rate, activate ecommerce tracking on Google Analytics. It’s a snippet of code that allows you to collect transaction data, such as product performance, sales performance, and billing locations.

After that, head over to Conversions >> Ecommerce >> Overview to see the statistics.

3. Put the Information to Good Use

It’s not over after you track the metrics. On the contrary, the metrics are the means to an end. You need to use the results to evaluate each content.

For example, by monitoring the traffic rate, you would understand the type of content that attracts customers. You’ll also know how to write an article that makes them stay longer on your site.

Always learn from the metrics. Fix all the mistakes, take them into account for further evaluation, and reiterate the process to improve the performance gradually.

All in all, make sure that the metrics are aligned with your marketing goals.

Conclusion

In this article, you’ve learned how to measure your content performance. And luckily, the steps are simple. You just need to identify your goals, create several types of content based on those objectives, track the metrics, and use the information to improve your content.

Do you have any questions regarding the topic? Let us know!

About the Author : “Mary is a passionate blogger and the chief editor at her own content marketing company PRable.com. Since college, she’s been interested in break-through technology and technical writing about innovative products and services that change our everyday lives for the better. She’s also interested in web design and photography.”