Measuring and Analyzing Content Marketing Efforts

You’ve just about closed the loop on your content marketing strategy. The only thing left to do is measure and analyze how your content is performing. There are many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be used to determine how your efforts are faring, I’ve paired it down to just thirteen metrics that will give you a full picture of your efforts.

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Website Performance
1. General Activity
   a. Sessions - is the activity increasing?
   b. Bounce rate - are you attracting the right audience?
   c. Pageviews - is your audience reading more than one page?
   d Average Session Duration - are they spending time or are they bored and leaving?
2. Engagement through Channels
   a. Organic - is your audience finding on search engines?
   b. Direct - or are they going directly to your site from a link?
   c. Social - are they coming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.?
   d. E-mail - are they clicking on an e-mail link from a campaign or your e-mail signature?
   e. Affiliates - are you involved in an affiliates program?
   f. Referral - is your audience coming from another website?
   g. Paid Search - are you running a PPC campaign? Is it working? Any bounces?
   h. Other Advertising - are you running any other campaigns?
   i. Display - are you running display advertisements?
3. Popular and Problematic Content
   a. Top landing and Exit - what are your most popular pages? Any that you wish would perform better?

Search Engine Ranks - Your SEO (search Engine Optimization) key words and phrases on your website make it possible for your target audience to find your site through search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You need to understand how people are searching and finding you, otherwise they’ll find someone else like your direct competitor.

4. Key Words and Phrases - do you need help with certain words?

Decide what key words and phrases are the most relevant to your potential customers and optimize them by first understanding how they rank then compare against your competitors.

Customer Conversions and Sales
5. Leads created - are the leads you add to the marketing/sales funnel adequate?
6. Qualified opportunities - are those leads adequate enough to be converted?
7. Hit Rate - is your sales team able to close the leads? Do they need help persuading?

E-mail Campaign Activity - campaign software will calculate these automatically
8. E-mail open rate - are the recipients intrigued with the title?
9. E-mail click through rate - are they even more intrigued to take action?
10. Bounce rate - how good is your mailing list?

Social Media Activity - see how your content appeals to social media audience
11. Followers - does your audience want to interact with you?
12. Likes - is your audience enjoying your posts?
13. Shares - does your audience enjoy it enough to share it with others?

Your efforts are driving the needle on sales, be sure to discover insights and determine where to go next. Use these metrics to help you document and report on progress for future use cases. You won’t always hit the mark on your first go around but with careful planning, good content creation, thoughtful promotions, and analyzing the data to make necessary adjustments, you’ll see your efforts come to fruition.

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