By Dan Duke -Content performance doesn’t hinge on how much time, money, and resources you have. Spend them all in abundance, but you’ll get results only if you create compelling content that resonates with your target audience.

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If you want to know how well your content marketing efforts are working — in other words, your content performance — keep two things in focus: your goals for the content and the KPIs for those goals. And in this article, we will show you how to maintain that focus.

How do you measure content performance?

To gauge how well your content performs, develop a clear picture of precisely what you want it to accomplish. You can’t really determine your content marketing ROI until you know what returns you are after.

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In the context of digital marketing, we can assess content performance across a wide range of measurable, quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs). These include things like total page views, bounce rate, conversion rates, and revenue.

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The key is to prioritize the KPIs and content marketing metrics that matter most to your specific company. If you want to increase brand awareness, measurements relating to total Google impressions might be a good place to start. Are you trying to captivate your audience so they spend hours on your page? Then focus your content strategy on high search traffic, low bounce rate, and average session duration.

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It feels great when your content checks all the boxes. But that actually could be a sign that you are wasting resources. Ideally, you want to exert only enough to achieve or surpass your business goals.

How to use KPIs to boost content performance

To maximize your online content efforts, you must measure the right metrics. But how do you pick the right ones?

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“Better user experience” and “increased brand awareness” are hard to pin down, so attempts to measure them aren’t likely to provide actionable insights. When you’re measuring content performance, stick with categories that quantify content engagement and give reliable performance data.

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Let’s say you’re investing a lot of resources in content marketing related to content optimization and higher search rankings. If so, it could take up to six months or even a year in a competitive topic before seeing traction. Alternatively, you could know right away whether your social media channels or email marketing campaigns are engaging your audience.

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That said, your company should evaluate several digital marketing KPIs. Remember, even after implementing a new marketing campaign, it could take at least a few months to get the insights you’re looking for from your audience analytics.

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The good news is that if you are creating quality, relevant content, most of these marketing metrics will reflect that. If your digital marketing efforts aren’t great, your KPIs will show you how to improve it. Here are a few performance metrics to choose from for evaluating your content marketing strategy.

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• Search engine rankings. How well are your pages performing compared with your competitors in search engine results? Many factors are involved here, but domain authority and SEO optimization are crucial.
• Unique page visits. This is the number of different visitors who come to your page from an external site within a certain period. Repeat visits don't count.
• Impressions. Every time a person sees a link to an ad, video, or search result online, it counts as an impression. The user doesn't need to actually click on something or interact with it for it to count.
• Total page views. This shows that your pages are establishing authority and pulling in visitors. Here's a tip: Use Google Analytics to learn how those visitors find you and what they do on your site.
• Time on page. The more time people spend on your pages (measured as the average session duration), the more value those pages provide. Visual content is an important factor here.
• Bounce rate. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site altogether rather than progressing to other pages. You want a low bounce rate, with people going from a blog post to a product page or to a page where they can sign up for a demo.
• Click-through rate. This compares the number of times a visitor clicks on a link on a page (or email or online ad) to the total number of people who saw the link. If 100 readers call up a blog post and 6 of them click on a video on that page, that's a 6% click-through rate.
• Cost per click. This is a way of measuring the cost of advertising. It shows how much you pay per click for an ad.
• Cost per acquisition. This reflects how much you spend to gain a new customer.
• Comments, likes, social shares. These are great engagement metrics, because they show that your content compelled users to react. It can help you tailor future content. This is how viral content gets its start.
• Links. You can guide people to other pages on your site with internal links. External links send people to you from other sites. An external link from a high-traffic, trusted website is quite valuable. It pays to have a good backlink strategy for building up external links.
• Conversion rate. Divide the total number of visitors by the number of people who take the desired action (click on an ad or download a white paper, for example) to get the conversion rate. And conversion is the ultimate form of user engagement.
• Organic search/paid search. When people come to you through search engine results, it's organic search. Paid search comes to you through ads.
• Revenue. This is the money you bring in from your digital marketing efforts.

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How to improve content performance

Having clear, quantifiable digital marketing objectives makes it easier to improve your performance. Traffic growth alone is not enough; you need to reach the right people — the ones likely to become customers. You may need the help of experienced content marketers with the right tools to help you refine your future content marketing strategy.

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To give you an example of how that can work in your favor, let's look at what Rellify can do to help you improve content performance.

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We develop AI-driven content strategy to deliver measurable results. We can create a Relliverse™ for each client — a custom-AI subject-matter expert trained on your relevant focus topics. Using deep machine learning, we'll crawl and analyze your website and those of your competitors. It's like a content audit on steroids, and we can use the data to identify your best content opportunities.

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In a few minutes, you can accomplish the kind of competitive analysis, topic modeling and keyword research that otherwise can take days or weeks. With a few clicks, you can have a content calendar filled with relevant material.

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Use our generative AI tools and the expertise of your own writers and editors in any combination you wish to develop briefs and content at scale. And after our platform helps to make content creation efficient and effective, our performance tracking tools will help you monitor the results of the work.

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In addition to creating new content for your target audience, Rellify can help you update blog posts, white papers and FAQs to reflect content trends, improve your company image and boost search engine rankings. We'll also guide you on content repurposing.

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‍Contact Rellify today to discover how to revolutionize your content strategy and create meaningful content that engages your target audience.