What's your strategy for testing content performance?

The choice of metrics should align with your specific objectives. For instance, tracking page views and time on page can help assess content engagement and its ability to hold the audience's attention. Social shares and comments indicate how well your content resonates with readers. However, it's essential to go beyond vanity metrics and tie your measurements to tangible business outcomes. If lead generation is the goal, tracking form submissions or newsletter sign-ups directly connects content efforts to potential revenue. This data-driven approach enables marketers to refine their strategies, focusing on what works best to achieve desired results.

This is a tricky subject. It's not just about determining which content pieces generate the most leads. Other content pieces that improve your awareness by improving your SEO may have contributed.

As every content form has a specific way to measure performance, all of them should be made a part of the overall strategy and done persistently. Engagement and reach are important metrics that impact the ultimate business objectives of growth. Innovating the content creation and distribution on the basis of the performance metrics will help to improve the overall leads generated through long form resources and engagement on social channels.

Each tool serves a specific purpose, so it's essential to align them with your goals and requirements. For instance, Google Analytics is excellent for tracking website traffic and user behavior, while BuzzSumo can help identify content trends and social engagement. Integration capabilities are equally important. Ensuring your chosen tools can work together and integrate with your content management system streamlines data collection and analysis. This not only saves time but also provides a comprehensive view of your content's impact, helping you make informed decisions to enhance your content strategy.

When it comes to digital video, if possible use the analytics tools that the platform provides as they will likely to be most accurate and relevant. Dealing with multiple platforms and manually aggregating together all your data and insights can be very time consuming, so if you have a high volume of content across a diverse range of platforms it's worth investing in a social reporting and insights tools such as Measure Studio, Brandwatch or similar.

A/B tests allow you to compare two versions of content to determine which one resonates better with your audience. You can test various elements like headlines, visuals, or CTAs to understand what drives engagement. Selecting the right testing tool is vital. Optimizely and VWO offer user-friendly interfaces and robust features for running experiments. Additionally, clearly defining your success criteria and understanding your sample size ensures meaningful results. This step empowers you to make data-driven content improvements, ultimately enhancing your content strategy's effectiveness.

If you are testing the effectiveness of your video content and want to compare different types of formats against one another you need to ensure you are not only measuring via the same metrics but also the same time period. Ideally you want to be measuring the first 3, 7, 14 or 30 days as this will give you a strong indication of ongoing performance. This is because social/video platforms pay close attention to how a piece of content performs initially in terms of viewership, time spent, view thru rates and engagement to determine if the content should be shared with a wider group of viewers.