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.
If you want to know how well your content marketing efforts are working, 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 do. You can’t really determine your content marketing ROI until you know what returns you are after.
We can assess content performance across a wide range of measurable, quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs). These include total page views, bounce rate, conversion rates, revenue, and other metrics.
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 long times spent on a page.
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?
“Better customer 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.
Let’s say you’re investing a lot of resources in content marketing related to optimized content and higher SERP 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 or not your social media channels or email marketing campaigns are engaging your audience.
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 in your data analytics.
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 use to evaluate your content marketing strategy.
- 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. What’s your overall website traffic? How many people are coming to your page?
- Impressions. How often do potential customers see content from your company?
- Total page views. How invested are viewers in learning more about your website?
- Time on page. How much time are they spending engaging with your content (their average session duration)? This indicates the page value.
- Bounce rate. Do people head out after hitting the landing page, or do they stick around? How many pages do they visit on your site?
- Click-through rate. How often are viewers clicking on your internal and external links?
- Cost per click. How much are you spending to bring someone to your site?
- Cost per acquisition. How much do you spend to gain a new customer?
- Comments, likes, shares. Are people so moved by your content they want to let you know? Comments, likes, and shares are great engagement metrics and can help you tailor future content.
- Links. Do other sites like your content, too? Having a brand presence in other domains is helpful.
- Conversion rate. Are people responding to your call-to-action? How many sales are you making? Are they signing up for your emails or downloading the white paper?
- Organic search/paid search. How many people are organically coming to your content through search engines? Have you noticed if or how your ranking changes? How many people see a paid ad for your content and then click-through?
- Revenue. How much are you making from your digital marketing efforts?
What tools measure content performance?
Here are a few tools that can help you monitor how your content performs.
Google Analytics
Just one click on the dashboard, and you have a wealth of information. This ranges from real-time locations of people reading your webpage to how they’re finding your content. Not all your traffic comes from people merely googling your company. Most website visitors will get to your site via optimized content with relevant keywords. Google also offers helpful comparison tools to visualize how you’re doing compared to the previous year. Google Analytics is an excellent option if you’re just using one tool.
Sistrix
Another helpful content marketing program, Sistrix lets you know how your content and that of your competitors is doing. It also can provide keyword suggestions or a particular keyword phrase to help shape your next content efforts based on your existing content.
SimilarWeb
If you need help with digital marketing, eCommerce, investment ideation, and more, SimilarWeb offers fantastic insights and action items to help you achieve your goals.
Did we miss your favorite? Here are a few more.
What tools can improve content performance?
Having clear, quantifiable digital marketing objectives can vastly improve your performance. But just seeing the numbers isn’t always enough. Sometimes you want the help of experienced content marketers or tools to help you refine your future content marketing strategy.
rellify
With a growing number of satisfied customers, rellify is an excellent solution to improve and analyze your content performance. It uses an innovative process of combining artificial intelligence with an expert team of writers and analysts to ensure that you have relevant content that ranks and performs well on SERPs. Want to optimize your older content or create quality new content? rellify is the top content performance optimization tool. Contact them today to learn more.
rellify not only helps improve your performance but also helps you to measure your successes.
Canva
If you’re looking for a content creation tool to shape and beautify your content, Canva is an excellent choice. It’s compatible with other tools like HubSpot, so you can collaborate with your content teams and use it in conjunction with others for superior results. You won’t get analysis here. But when your product looks good, you’ll make a great impression on those interacting with your content. And that’s an enormous part of the customer journey.
Semrush
With various tools, including SEO, social marketing, content marketing, and competitor analysis, SEMRush provides a great mix of sophisticated data analysis and strategic SEO performance insights for great results.
Experience significant gains in your content marketing performance
With all the fantastic tools and resources at your disposal, you don’t have to tackle content marketing challenges alone. Call the team at rellify to talk with digital marketing experts who can give your content the boost it needs to see significant gains in your KPIs. Many of our clients have already noticed significant gains in traffic, conversions, and leads since implementing the rellify process. And our team looks forward to bringing you similar results as you meet and exceed your corporate goals.
