What are the most common mistakes to avoid when analyzing content performance?

Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do? What do you want them to know? Get clarity here first, and your goal setting becomes much easier.

Is it WHAT you know or WHO you know that matters? The answer is much more nuanced. "Who knows what you know (or offer) is what matters. That requires conducting a stakeholder analysis and targeting that audience with precision. It's nice to have 10,000 likes, but if none of that engagement is from the target audience, it wastes time. Use SMART objectives as a framework with short-term, intermediate, and long-term objectives. Focus on stakeholder analysis to target accurately and ensure engagement aligns with business aims, not just vanity metrics.

Without a clear objective your ship will lack a rudder to steer it. Without goals, you’ll be missing a map. Without a desired outcome, you’ll have less wind in your sails.

Make sure the people responsible for achieving the goals, have a voice in how the goals are achieved. Your high performers don’t mind knowing the specific desired results. However, micromanaging them in how to achieve those results will have them shut down. Think of performance goal setting as a negotiation. State your intended outcomes, AND involve them in the process.

In my opinion, WHAT you know should matter most. But let me state that , WHO you know will have much preeminence in other continents. In Ghana for instance, it has become so obvious and more of the order of the day for instance to say that , to ace that job you must know someone in there . I doubt this is happening in the United States or Europe. In these countries, it’s purely rooted on merit . That’s WHAT you know!

Not only using the wrong metrics but only using quantitative metrics. There are many qualitative metrics that don't always get captured or perhaps overlooked - comments, DMs, reshares w/quotes on IG stories to name a few. Make sure to ask for any of that feedback that the creator can share as well to help give a full 360 perspective of the success of the campaign.

Don't over-weight reach. Engagement with your audience, and community is where it's at. Is anyone commenting, forwarding, extending, or challenging the conversation?

The easiest metrics to collect are often the worst metrics to use. Clicks and likes are easy to count, but are they the best metrics for your business? You can't take clicks to the bank, nor can you report likes in financial statements. There are means to an end, and that end is to produce a business outcome. Collecting metrics that matter is often difficult, but it can combine some understanding of who your content reached and how it changed their behaviors or perceptions. A B2B company that gets one view and one click on a piece of content that creates a new $1M opportunity is creating more success than one that gets thousands of views and clicks but produces no demonstrable change in behaviors or attitudes.

Many people on LinkedIn are focused on impressions. It’s natural. It’s the first thing we see when we go to our profile, along with whether we are “up” or “down” to the last 8 days. But are higher impressions without higher engagement meaningful? Yes- we want more eyes on our content. But more important is to have the RIGHT eyes on our content. I try to focus on engagement- reactions, comments, and shares - as opposed to just impressions.

I’d go further to ask what those metrics mean, because sometimes we make assumptions. For example, not all likes convert to sales. And the likes you get may not match your target audience. So there’s more here to be explored.

Segmenting your data is difficult, since measuring who reads your content and how they reacted is not easy. (I mentioned above that easy metrics are often worthless, and great metrics are hard to collect.) Evaluating who engages with your content, whether that be understanding the people who comment or monitoring the people who click and then provide their data, is important. I once had a client who decided they would consider the success of blog content not by the number of comments but by the number of comments that mentioned something specific about the brand, product, or blog post. They didn't want to count the number of people/bots that posted, “This is great content, thanks” but count the people more engaged in the meaningful context.

Segmentation is critical. But it's also important to have a consistent measurement framework, revisited at some predictable frequency, so you can make an objective, data-driven assessment. It's easy to get lost in minutiae given the amount of content you need to publish today to make a meaningful impact from an organic search perspective. Even when you're analyzing channel metrics, it can be difficult to come up with consistent metrics to get a realistic performance measurement.

This is a build from my previous comment because before we put in arbitrary goals, we must understand the audience were trying to speak with. Woth social media, people have a lot of choice, so the focus has to be on the reader. Why must readers give you previous screen time, that’s the crux of it - it’s about the value proposition for them, as opposed to what we want from it.

The more I tailor my content specifically to individual personas, the more impactful and persuasive my messaging becomes. This is only possible through proper data segmentation and analysis. When I assess my analytics in context and filter insights by persona, I gain a crystal-clear view of what resonates most with each audience type. This enables me to be incredibly specific and detailed when educating and nurturing prospects. I can craft messaging that directly addresses their pain points, goals, and motivations. This has significantly improved my conversion rates.

I strongly disagree with this advice. Benchmarking is a profoundly concerning habit that tends to drive poor decision-making and strategy. Benchmarks are problematic for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that good benchmarks are difficult to find. Every brand and audience is different! Second, your goal isn't to beat someone else's clicks or likes--it's to improve your business results. Content professionals don't win trust by telling bosses “We beat a benchmark” but by saying things like, “Our content delivered leads,” “We successfully altered perception of brand,” or “We reduced inbound calls to our call center.” Benchmarks are a trap--stop comparing yourself to others and start measuring success in ways that matter.

It’s good to be aware of where others stand, but at the end of the day, your competition is with yourself, unless of course, you have a defined goal to beat someone else, such as a Premier League type tournament. Setting benchmarks is a good idea, and you can benchmark your own performance too.

Benchmarks are needed for metrics to be relative to growth. Not understanding what the starting point of measurement is or if it’s consistently making progression is important. Often we see we are at a current goal or a bit higher than before and call it an increase in performance. While that may be true, it could be that we take 2 steps forward, a step back and then forwards again indicating an opportunity. There should be stepping stones of benchmarks along the way as well for full clarity.

Benchmarking engagement metrics is obviously important but If you are trying to replicate what your most successful competitors are already doing your chances to lead would be dimmed, the best you can accomplish is to approach their numbers but always from behind. The critical thing here is to benchmark in order to outsmart. Finding the missing opportunities, what is it that could be done instead?

Optimisation is key to improving and shaping your content, and that is driven by the reaction to your content and measured by data. Meaningful data provides a clear picture of what resonates and, more importantly, does not with your audience. You can leverage this data to build a stronger strategy into your content based on the information.

This is absolutely fundamental and journaling can be an useful tool here. Try to document every decision you make every small adaptation, what are the new results and what is it that you are learning. You may find yourself with a set of written principles that can help your team to progress faster.

It can be challenging to avoid getting caught up in the hamster wheel of content creation without acting on the results of the data you collect. The goal is to double down on what's working and improve upon what doesn't resonate. This constant iteration process eventually helps you determine what content performs best for your audience. One strategy that I have found helpful is to sit down monthly to identify three adjustments I will make over the next month based on the results to ensure that I am constantly taking action based on data and not feelings or trends.

Judging a content marketing program too early is a common error, but also a common difficulty in managing internal expectations. The key to content marketing, more than anything else, is consistency. One or two articles a content marketing strategy does not make. Brands need to create and produce exceptional content with frequency and regularity to drive awareness, engagement, and conversion.

Only looking at data. Sometimes content is needed as a foundation for other content to build on; sometimes content is there to support SEO so the bases are covered; sometimes content is needed to help frame a position or keep employees and customers focused. Sometimes the results are hard to quantify but that doesn't mean that good content isn't performing.

Common content analysis mistakes to avoid are neglecting data collection, vague objectives, and ignoring audience insights. For instance, not tracking website traffic leads to missed insights. Failing to tailor content to audience preferences reduces engagement. Not segmenting data can skew metrics interpretation. Relying solely on vanity metrics misleads; focus on objective-related metrics. Omitting A/B tests hinders optimization. Ignoring mobile performance and underestimating SEO are critical oversights. Neglecting qualitative data and resisting strategy adaptation hinders long-term success. Unrealistic expectations and neglecting competitors are harmful.

I am currently experimenting with different ways to share the same content, from video to text and audio, it’s work in process still. I am using new AI-tools such as Grain and Chat GPT. But the point here is always thinking about content as clay in a pottery wheel spins, shaping a formless lump into a vessel of artistic expression.