How Metrics Tell You It’s Time to Repurpose Your Content

If you can’t already tell, I’m a big fan of content marketing.

I’ve written extensively on the marketing industry, and use all these techniques myself to help businesses succeed in their marketing efforts.

Without metrics, however, content marketing is a wasted effort. If you’re not careful, you can quickly find yourself throwing money into a black hole.

Your content should be valuable, informative, and guide people through your sales funnel.

But how do you know if it’s working? How can you figure out whether you’re throwing money in the toilet, or getting serious ROI?

Bottom line revenue numbers will clue you in, obviously. But what about the more granular aspects of marketing? How do you know if your content is getting through to your readers, sustaining their interest, engaging their minds, and earning their attention?

It’s all about the metrics. Numbers! Analytics!

If you’re not a “numbers person,” don’t worry. None of this stuff is complicated. It is, however, very important.

In this article I’m going to discuss some of these important content marketing metrics and how they can help guide your content marketing efforts.

Bounce Rates

Your site’s bounce rate is a quick and easy way to see how well your content is connecting with people.

Although you may get a lot of traffic, if that traffic is just reading one page and leaving, it’s not doing you much good.

Readers may not retain who you are nor any other information you’ve provided, even if you are providing a great answer.

Here’s how Google Analytics calculates bounce rates:

What’s considered a good or bad bounce rate depends on the type of site you’re running.

Anil Batra surveyed over 80 sites and came up with this chart showing the average bounce rate by website type.

Now keep in mind, these are just averages within a large range, but the fact remains, lowering your bounce rate increases lead generation and ROI.

But before you can lower it, you’ll need to understand what your bounce rate is for each landing page.

You can find this in Google Analytics by selecting Behavior Flow → Site Content →  Landing Pages.

By checking the bounce rate of each landing page individually, you can identify any problem pages that can be fixed.

However, as Will Fleiss points out, bounce rates can be deceptive. Even if your content is fully consumed and answers the reader’s question, they still may leave without clicking through to other pages.

You not only want to keep them on the page, but you also want them to look at other pages on the site.

Improving Your Bounce Rate

There are several ways to repurpose content to improve bounce rates. One of the most effective is by adding interactive content.

I’ve explained in detail on Quick Sprout how to incorporate interactive content such as social media feeds, quizzes, videos, and polls.

This type of interactive content can entice a person to click another internal link and continue consuming your content.

You’ll also want related content that can be displayed to entice readers to continue reading. If your WordPress theme doesn’t already display related content, the following code can be copied and pasted into the page you want to show related content on:

<?php
//for use in the loop, list 5 post titles related to first tag on current post
$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
if ($tags) {
echo 'Related Posts';
$first_tag = $tags[0]->term_id;
$args=array(
'tag__in' => array($first_tag),
'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
'posts_per_page'=>5,
'caller_get_posts'=>1
);
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);
if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php
endwhile;
}
wp_reset_query();
}
?>

This will display any posts with content related to the current page. This way, if someone doesn’t find the answer they’re looking for, they may continue browsing your site instead of looking elsewhere.

Organic Search Traffic

We all know organic search traffic is the holy grail of Internet traffic. It’s a great way to measure how well your content marketing efforts are working.

Valuable content for contextual keywords is vital in raising search engine visibility. These keywords should be the foundation of your content marketing efforts.

Here are 10 steps to driving SEO success through content marketing from the Content Marketing Institute.

As you can see, SEO and content marketing go hand in hand.

Despite all those Google algorithm updates you’ve heard about, SEO hasn’t really changed much  in its essence.. The goal is still the same:  Give users the best, most relevant, and highest quality stuff you possibly can.

Improving Your Organic Search Traffic

There are actually two places you want to check for keyword rankings. The first is in Google Analytics by selecting Acquisition → Search Console → Queries.

This will list all of the search terms your site is being displayed for. You can see how many impressions your site gets and how many times it’s clicked for each search term.

If a search term has a low clickthrough rate, you can improve it by adding images, and A/B testing different titles and snippets.

The other place to check is SEMRush, which will not only display your keyword traffic, but also detailed information on your competitors.

With this information, you can scout the competition to learn how they’re gaining traffic that should be yours.

Google’s Keyword Planner is a great tool to see what kind of traffic you can attract by creating similar content. It’s meant for pay-per-click ad campaigns, but is also useful in generating content.

By repurposing your content around high-traffic, low-competition keywords, you greatly increase your odds of moving up the SERP rankings.

Subscribers

Whether on social media, video platforms, or your own blog, you should always have a way for people to subscribe.

Subscribers will continue returning to your site and often provide contact information allowing you to email them whenever you post new content.

Pew Research found return visitors are more likely to browse directly to your site instead of needing to discover it through search engines and social media.

The more subscribers you have, the more guaranteed traffic you’ll receive each month.

It’s also a sign that your brand story is solid and your content marketing efforts are working. A subscriber is a warm lead.

Improving Your Subscribers

Email has by far the best ROI of any marketing channel. This makes gaining email subscribers a must-do.

Much like the metrics mentioned above, the key to gaining subscribers is by providing killer content. You also need to focus on creating a solid brand story.

Even with great content, you still need a great call-to-action, like the one Bryan Harris uses in his post about lead magnets.

In reading the article, you’ll see a light blue box that stands out to his readers, offering a free download of content upgrade examples. Anyone who is new to lead magnets would be interested in examples to help understand them better.

When readers click the link, they must enter their email addresses into a pop-up to get the download.

These tactics entice readers to subscribe, which gives you a larger subscription base to spread your message to.

Engagement

Brand loyalty and engagement are important metrics in content marketing. If people aren’t engaged with your content, your efforts are being wasted.

Gartner recently polled customers on what they expect from a company to remain loyal. Although this information is mostly meant for customer service reps, it’s relevant to your content as well.

The vast majority of customers want to be treated with respect and have their issues resolved. Keep this in mind when creating content.

Your content needs to explain the information readers want without talking down to them. If your content is too preachy, condescending, or just plain boring, people will disengage and you’ll lose them forever.

Improve Engagement

Engagement and bounce rate are codependent on each other. An engaged reader doesn’t bounce.

Aside from interactive content explained above, site navigation and speed are the keys to keeping engagement high.

Kathryn Aragon provides a great list of ways to increase site speed, which includes optimizing images, minimizing server requests, enabling site caching, and reducing plugins.

Mohita Nagpal also smartly points out that disabling autoplay on your on-page media increases both site speed and engagement. Your page loads quicker, and visitors will need to press play to view your video content.

Acquisition Cost

Perhaps the most important marketing metric is customer acquisition cost. You need to know how much you’re spending to acquire a new customer.

Here’s a great infographic from the Content Marketing Institute showing how content marketing fits into your sales process.

While content marketing is a great way to create evangelistic customers, if the cost outweighs the customer’s lifetime value, it needs to be lowered.

To calculate acquisition cost, tally up sales and marketing cost (including overhead expenses, like employees) for one month. Divide the resulting number by the number of customers you obtained during that same period.

If you spent $10,000 on marketing and obtained 1,000 new customers during a month, your customer acquisition cost is $10.

Improving Customer Acquisition Cost

Obviously improving this figure can be accomplished by either lowering marketing costs or raising the amount of customers acquired.

Resolving this problem is pretty much the purpose of this article - to locate and repurpose content that’s not performing well. This is content you already paid for and isn’t drawing in enough quality traffic.

Repurposing this content to attract a new audience and reposting can go a long way in lowering acquisition costs.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a valuable part of any marketing initiative. It helps draw in a steady stream of organic and repeat traffic that produces more quality leads.

Not all content you create will be a hit, however.

By closely and regularly monitoring metrics, you can identify problems with your content and repurpose it to generate a better ROI.

What are the telltale metrics that you use to analyze your content’s effectiveness?