10 Easy Ways to Measure the Impact of Your Content

Hello friends, how are you doing? Today we talk about the ways to measure the effectiveness of your content in the 4th part of Content Matters series.

Marketers have in many instances become adept at producing content, measuring the effectiveness of B2B content remains a challenge.How do you know if your content initiatives are effective? With this in mind, here are a few important metrics that can help determine whether your content marketing efforts are being effective, as well as some tips to improve their effectiveness.

1. Website traffic

Use Google Analytics to gauge your past website traffic and up-to-date averages. Select any timeframe you like: years, quarters, months or weeks. Make website traffic a measure you examine often. Choose “compare to previous year” to remove seasonality as a factor.

2. Subscriber growth

It’s a rare digital marketing strategy that doesn’t include email marketing. Most marketers now embrace more advanced email techniques and tactics that may be better described as marketing automation.

What kind of content marketing efforts might it take to double the number of email subscribers?

Whether you’re publishing articles, videos, podcasts, graphics or some combination, in the interest of growing your business, you want to see the number of people who get your newsletters and different types of email announcements get steadily bigger.

3. Search rankings

Content marketers certainly want to drive traffic, leads and sales by way of search, which means search rankings is key.

You can subscribe to tools such as Moz, SEMRush and Ahrefs to continually monitor your rankings, however your best bet for tracking your rankings on the cheap is Google Analytics.

4. Time

“Time” measurements can be tricky, but still significant. Consider your content and its goal. Consider content metrics related to time-on-page in terms of how it relates to the time it takes to consume the content - and how the numbers compare to each other.

Examine how individual pages perform. Time on page, as a percentage or whole, is counter to what you want. Is your time on page going up? This indicates you’re creating more engaging content.

5. Social media followers

Provided you earn an audience organically - rather than purchase followers - seeing your social media follower count increase is an indication the content you share on social channels appeals to people.

6. Social media shares

Measuring your social shares will help you determine the traction your content gets on social platforms. You can measure:

• Overall social shares
• Shares by social media channel
• The number of social shares each piece of content earns
• The number of website visitors your website earns from social sites

As a result, you’ll gather insights about the types of content to create and which social platforms merit your time.

7. Links and Authority

Measuring links will help you to gauge the traction your content is gaining. An inbound link - that you earned - is:

• An indicator you created good content
• A traditional measure of SEO progress
• A simple way to measure links is to setup a Talkwalker Alert, which will show you who mentioned (and maybe linked to) your content. You might want to make use of the information to reach out and say hello to the content creators and forge new relationships.

Also, it’s helpful to watch your “Domain Authority” (DA), which tracks your link popularity and search ranking potential. Check your DA (and your competitors’ DA), for free, using Open Site Explorer. The number itself doesn’t matter as much as the gap between your DA and your competitors’—and which direction it’s going.

8. Click through rate (CTR)

If you master just one metric, make it this one. Marketers who earn high CTR will win regardless of the channel.

Click through rate is the percentage of visitors who:

• Click on your listing in a competitive search results page (SEO)
• Click on your post in a fast-flowing social media stream (social)
• Click on your email in a crowded inbox (email marketing)

9. Leads

Generally speaking, though inbound marketers often give you permission to define something as non-committal as a download or email subscription as a lead, a lead is really something more.

“An email address is not a lead. A lead is someone who raised their hand and asked to be contacted about your services.”  - Andy Crestodina

Look at leads as something greater:

An event registration

• A request for a demo or consultation
• A free trial of your product
• A coupon download

Even without incorporating marketing automation systems of CRM applications, you can easily measure and evaluate the conversion rates of your landing pages and factor what you learn into improving the quality of the content offered.

10. Feedback

“When people comment on your article, they bring additional information and content to the table, brainstorm ideas for new topics to write about, and strengthen your website. Comments even add to the words, keywords, and SEO value as seen by search algorithms.” — Neil Patel, from 7 Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic by 206%

Feedback to your content can come in a variety of ways, including:

• Social media updates/shares
• Direct social media messages
• Blog comments
• Email
• Phone calls
• Contact form submissions

Reviews

Gathering and synthesizing feedback is part of the process of improving the quality of your content.

(References: socialmediatoday, orbit media studios, busineess2community)