Measure LinkedIn article's success using these Product metrics

This will be a light read compared to my previous articles. In this article I will discuss how we can measure an article's success using Product Metrics.

Before that, how did I arrive here ?

To be honest, I was tracking the the number of likes, comments, new followers, shares of my recent article on 'Product Management for IoT'. In parallel, I was also reading up on how to use product metrics to measure if a new product or a new feature launch was successful. Then it struck me, we can correlate product launch to article launches and may be use the same metrics to track the article's success.

For folks who haven't published articles on LinkedIn, below is a screenshot of the statistics LinkedIn provides to track your article's progress.

With that primer, here's a quick article which discusses how tracking the success of an article is similar to tracking the success of a product launch. 

1. Decide the metrics to be tracked before the product launch or in this case, before publishing the article. Below are the metrics.

2. Acquisition = Number of visits to the article.

3. Engagement = Number of 'likes', comments and shares of the article.

3a. Engagement rate = (Number of likes + comments + shares + direct messages) / Total number of visits.

4. Conversion = Number of new followers, leads and new LinkedIn connection requests generated.

4a. Conversion rate = (Number of new followers + connections) / Total number of visits to the article.

5. Referrals generated = Number of shares of the article by visitors.

6. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) = Since there is no actual revenue, let's use 'time' for measurement instead of $$$$. Amount of time spent in writing an article and gaining new visitors ( posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc ) DIVIDED by total number of visits to the article. = 'X' minutes spent / visitor acquired. For example, let's say that we spent 2 hours in writing an article, publishing and marketing it. We gained 1200 visitors to the article, in this case the CAC would be 2 hours/1200 visitors = 2*60/1200 = 0.1 minute spent/visitor .

7. Lifetime value of customer (LTV) = Once again since there is no revenue, Let's use 'time' as a metric to calculate LTV. Total time spent in viewing and engaging with articles (present + future) by a visitor over the lifetime of the visitor.

8. LTV / CAC = Total lifetime value of visitor (LTV) in comparison to the amount of time spent by us in acquiring the visitor (CAC). This means that if we end up spending more time in acquiring a visitor compared to the lifetime value of the visitor, then may be the article was not a success?. If we end up spending 20 minutes in writing a blog and acquiring a visitor and the lifetime value of visitor is just 5 minutes, then the returns don't look great. This is because we are spending more time in getting a customer than the lifetime value of the customer.

That's about it, these are some of the metrics which bloggers can use from the product world.

Which metric did I personally end up using the most?

Due to the ease of tracking, I eventually ended up tracking the engagement rate and the conversion rate for my recent blog on " Product Management for IoT" and compared it with my previous launches on " Screw Multi-tasking, try Timeboxing" and also with " How to find "THE" Mentor".

Having set a timeline of a week for comparison of 'conversion rate' and 'engagement rate'. Based on these 2 metrics, I can say that my recent LinkedIn post has been a good article launch compared to the previous ones.

But I do have some questions.

• How do we measure personal satisfaction of the launch ? Is that even a real thing to do or do bloggers and product managers stick to pure business metrics to determine the success of a launch and not try to quantify personal satisfaction by comparing it with previous product/article launches?
• To other product folks and bloggers out there, any other product metrics I can relate to and track here ?
• What is the most important metric you usually use to measure your product/feature's launch success or your article's success ?

Would love to hear more from folks who use product metrics more actively.

Cheers to more successful articles published and products launched.

- Prasanna Naik

PS: Initially published on Medium.