Effective content and content marketing definitions, metrics and KPI. Part 4
Denis Potrubeiko ?
Career coach & consultant, Linkedin mentor ?? I help you understand your value and convey it to employers and clients!
Previous part 3 .
KPI and metrics for content marketing strategy
As we concluded previously, there are much more content metrics for an entire website than for just a part of a website or a single page.
By traffic
By Sales (or goal conversion)
By visitors’ engagement and brand awareness
Please, note, that in general, websites are very different. They have different ages, different yearly budget, different number and types of articles, different number of people working on it. In most cases, different websites comparison is a budget comparison. That is why more important to study content marketing strategy on a base of single pages and articles.
Content KPI and metrics for a single page or group of pages
?By traffic
You may analyze first all traffic sources for your website or just a part of the website is interested in.
By visitors’ engagement
I left here only user engagement metrics that evaluate self-promotion content?abilities.
Do we need User behavior and engagement metrics?
Numerous digital marketers offer?different metrics ?for content and content marketing evaluation. Some of them include behavioral metrics into content marketing strategy analysis.
I have separated user behavior metrics because, in general, we don’t know how these metrics are related to content goals achievement. For example, we don’t know if there is any correlation between time on a page, time on a website, page depth with a goal conversion. It is hard to identify and highly depends on the content itself and specified goals.
Most of behavioral metrics are entire website-related. It means they are useless to evaluate a single article.
Nevertheless, we could keep them in mind. Such metrics description could be a good topic for a digital marketing article. Here we just briefly describe them.
Bounce rate?– very interesting metric that highly depends on calculation methods. Google Analytics identifies a?bounced session ?when there was no other event within a session since a person has visited a page. Let me explain. Imagine a visitor who entered to a page with an interesting and long article. The visitor has read the article very carefully making notes, watching a video in the article. But! If in a 30 minutes’ period the visitor hasn’t done any action such as a link click, Google shows 100% bounced session, or pages viewed, or time on the page.
In comparison, Yandex search engine identifies a session as non-bounced after 15 seconds presence on the page.
Anyway, we may compare bounce rate within different categories such as case studies category, Frequently Asked Question category etc.
Pageviews?– a basic metric that shows a number of page loads disregarding all other factors
Unique visitors –?shows a number of visitors viewed a page. This user-level metrics is much more important than?Unique Pageview.
New Users?– our future client and customers. Now they are cold but we have a chance to “warm” them.
Returning Users –?these users are warmer than new users and closer to conversion.
Both of these metrics are website-based metrics. They cannot be applied to a single page or group of pages.
Page Depth (pages per session)?are good metrics to compare different but very similar websites, but it is useless on page level pages.
Active Time on Page?–?could be good metrics for different articles comparison if it is?set properly .
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What is the primary metric for content strategy analysis?
?All above-mentioned behavioral metrics could be useful but all of them are just additional metrics for a very simple reason.
We should have any data to make a comparison. It means pages should have traffic, visitors whose behavior we are able to analyze. No users – no behavior.
We can say the same things about a number of comments and social shares number.
No traffic – no comments, no social shares.
Now I will suggest you one principle that helps me to identify the right direction in my marketing work.
This is kind of??Ockham’s Razor ?for marketing.
Ask yourself:
What managerial decision can be made on the base of (an experiment) data?
I can say even simpler.?What are we going to do with these numbers?
Very often this principle helped me to avoid a lot of useless work. Then, try to evaluate all metrics that are offered for content strategy measurement. Doing this, you probably come with the same solutions as me.
There is only one primary metric that identifies and evaluates content effectiveness. This is traffic attracted by content.
Choosing the main traffic source for the content analysis
In most cases, you will see in Google analytic that?Search, Direct and Referral traffic are top 3 free traffic sources.
One or all of them could be the primary sources of traffic.
Usually, social traffic is very small. So, we can ignore it. Of course, if a piece of content is placed on social media with high social traffic, we will see a different picture.?But in this research, we consider content analysis within a regular website, not social media as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.
One more notice.?Of course, we can make a post on an influencer Instagram account and get a huge amount of traffic. If we pay for this post, we will not be able to talk about content effectiveness.?This is just advertising.
Effective content should inspire popular blogs or social accounts owners to share it without any payments or negotiations.
That is why in most cases we may ignore Social traffic because being natural it is much lower than traffic from other sources. Referral traffic is higher but small too and can be ignored in most of the circumstances.
If social or referral traffic is a primary or one of the primary sources of traffic we should analyze them.
Direct traffic is a mixture of branded traffic and unidentified traffic by Google Analytics. So, it is not applicable to a part of a website.
A number of comments and social shares directly depends on the number of people who visited a page and saw a content. It means that these metrics strictly depends on traffic.
We can conclude that most of the metrics depend on the volume of traffic from the primary source.
Now, we have one sustainable metric left for effective content and effective content marketing.
A piece of content effectiveness can be evaluated by its ability to attract traffic from an appropriate channel.
In most cases, the primary traffic came from Search engines.
More effective content attracts a higher amount of organic (social) traffic.
Now it is clear why content marketing and SEO?go along with ?each other.
Now I make one more clarification in terms:
Effective content?is content that able to attract traffic and achieve goals it has been written for.
Effective content marketing?strategy?is a set of activities for content creation, publishing and distribution to achieve specified goals successfully.
Next Part 5