We’re Creating Content – Hooray! But How Do We Know It’s REALLY Helping?

This article comes from the blog archive – figures and examples reflect the year it was published.

Thrown yourself into content? Great... Determined to stick with it? Even better. But how do you find out what it’s bringing you, apart from bags under your eyes and sleepless nights? Let’s look at which parameters you can track so that you can evaluate what your efforts are actually delivering.

Which Areas to Track

Website traffic Website traffic is a key parameter for any online business. If nobody reaches your site, it makes no difference at all how brilliant the articles you publish on your blog are. Conversions Even though online marketing isn’t primarily meant for direct selling, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t track the conversions your content brings you. Quite the opposite. Knowing how much you ultimately earned thanks to content is essential if you’re to evaluate the return on your investment in content marketing. Engagement The number of people who respond to your content is the litmus test that shows whether they have truly taken to it. The number of likes, comments and shares is among the basic metrics. SEO Content marketing also has a fundamental impact on a website’s organic traffic. If you do it right. That’s why tracking the number of visits from Google organic search, or the site’s SEO ranking, makes a great deal of sense in the case of content marketing. An increase in organic traffic naturally means more traffic and a better chance of successfully converting a visitor into an active customer. Domain strength (Authority) You won’t manage to track these parameters through Google Analytics, and they have no direct effect on SEO or the site’s organic traffic. Even so, it makes sense to track domain strength (domain authority) and page strength (page authority). The stronger the domain and the page, the more trustworthy the source of information.

Which Parameters to Track

The choice of a specific set of parameters is of course up to you, your resources and the time you’re able to devote to reporting. There’s no point in spending whole days over numbers that will be of no use to you. In any case, we recommend sticking with the metrics you’ve set and not changing the make-up of the report too often.

Website Traffic

• page views = the total number of pages visitors have viewed on the site – the aim is a rising trend
• unique visitors = the total number of individual visitors who have come to the website – the aim is a rising trend
• average time on page = the time visitors have spent on the page – the aim is a rising trend
• pages per visit = shows how many pages visitors look at during a single visit
• visitor flow (Behavior Flow) = shows the path visitors most often take through the site – it shows which page they move to from which, and this analysis can reveal which pages you need to adjust if you want to steer the user somewhere else
• bounce rate = expresses the proportion of visitors who leave from a given page – the aim is to bring this parameter down gradually to the lowest possible level

Social Media

• number of followers – the number of followers tells you more than the number of fans, because these are people who actively follow the page and its activity – the aim is to increase this parameter
• number of likes and shares = the basis for measuring success on social media – the aim is to increase both parameters
• number of comments = from a content marketing point of view, comments are the most crucial thing on social media, because by monitoring them you’ll learn not only how users are responding, but very often they’ll also uncover new ideas and topics for content creation

Content Creation and Management

• time needed to create content = shows the time you’ve devoted to creating content using in-house capacity
• content creation costs = the sum of external costs of creating content (external authors, bloggers, influencers, a photographer, licences...)
• content distribution costs = the cost of the external systems you use to distribute content and the cost of promoting the distributed content (campaigns, PPC support and so on)

Sales Parameters

• number of contacts gained = the number of new contacts you’ve managed to gain through content (by someone filling in a contact form, taking part in a competition / poll, in exchange for an ebook download, signing up for the newsletter and so on)
• quality of contacts gained = how closely the contacts you’ve gained match your target group
• revenue = the sum of the orders placed by new contacts