What are some of the tools and methods that you use to monitor and measure the performance of your content?

One of the big challenges, even once you've collected the data is to make it actionable, to automate the reporting, to get the reports in the right hands. You need to constantly evaluate that you are measuring the right data to ensure the content is laddering up to the goals of the business.

It can be incredibly frustrating to try and use metrics designed for marketing content on product documentation (except for landing pages).

In addition to external focused metrics, I'm interested in how content is performing with sales teams. Are they accessing it, using in their sales campaigns, providing feedback on its utility, etc.

Often analytics tools, in particular social media tools, measure and monitor the same things - clickthroughs, engagements, reach - because tool builders have access to the same APIs from the platforms. What's important is your ability to draw insights from the analytics, in particular as they relate to your particular KPIs. We have developed our own dashboards to provide unique insights to customer data, and that way we know if content is achieving its objectives.

Analytics typically show marketing-related data. Personally, I look at search, the viewers (direct vs organic), and how they got there. It's also interesting to see what viewers are looking for and when. From search data, you can find out the user's/customer's language. You can also create word clouds to discover popular keywords. If a support allows posts and replies, you can discover who posts the most and the subjects. You can also see the relationships between posters, topic trends, and schedules.

It sometimes helps to think of the audit in two parts: the hard technical content audit (you'd be surprised how often there are legacy SEO issues or site architecture problems in the background) and the soft content audit. Think of the soft content audit as an opportunity to refresh pages and to power ahead with more of the content that worked, and new channels or new consumption patterns you may have identified.

In the B2B space, a simple example of a lead score model would be one, two and three, where one is when the prospect actually asks for a demo or asks to talk to client engagement. Three might be when a prospect consumes a piece of top-funnel content, or they subscribe to a blog. The platforms make it easier to join up your score model from all the places in your content funnel.

If you have no money for survey tools, use Google forms to create a feedback system. Don't rely on a single question like "was this page helpful?" A yes or no response isn't helpful to you. Create a well-crafted survey with questions that will help you understand how effective your content system is and how they got there.

Tools like Techvalidate from Survey Monkey help to add third-party validity to voice of customer content and customer surveys. In general this type of customer feedback and insight is very powerful, bringing interesting proof points about your product or service. Customers love to learn from other customers! Don't forget that in-person workshops and events are another great way to generate content, especially for any high-value or complex product.

Mutiny is another popular tool to consider for personalizing web experiences and easily testing and implementing conversion optimizations. (Google Optimize is no longer available as of September 2023.)

By deploying e-books using platforms like Turtl or Flipping Book, instead of static PDF content, you will be able to test different content formats and gain a lot of new analytics about content consumption, topics that resonate with your target audience.

Owing to my comedy background, the metric is often "BIS" (Bottoms-In-Seats). That represented ticket sales and, in an appropriately data driven comedy club, this would've represented food, drink, and merch sales, a second order, but wider profit margin metric. After that is the post mortem, what was my vacancy rate and the cost per marketing material? The core principles are the same. How many fans (customers) did I maintain? How many new fans (customers) did I gain? Did these new fans bring new marketing opportunities with them (ie do I remain in the geek niche or did I Matt Rife my way into the mainstream?)? Looking at these insights can tell me if I'm becoming stale and need to broaden my horizons or coast on my current trajectory!