The Content Metrics You Need to be Measuring

content-marketing, online-marketing

/
Dec 10, 2018

by Rob L

[views]

No Comment

What’s the goal of any piece of content? To get it in front of human eyes, engaged with, loved and shared, ultimately with the aim that this beautiful little piece of content is going to bring your client some serious ROI. Fellow content marketers will all agree that creating winning content that successfully elevates a brand and provokes action is no simple task. It takes a powerful strategy, a huge amount of creativity, commitment... and it also helps to have super talented staff on your team.

So, let’s say you’ve got the perfect formula, and your campaign is well underway being seen, engaged with, loved and shared by your target audience. Is that enough to call it a win and pat yourself on the back? Not exactly.

Without sinking your teeth into the nitty gritty performance metrics of your campaigns, you can’t possibly know how well it’s REALLY doing. Sure, likes and shares are great, but to really paint a picture of how a campaign is performing, businesses need to look beyond the “fluff” or vanity metrics and heed the content metrics that are genuinely affecting the client’s bottom line.

There are hundreds of different marketing metrics your business can measure, and while we’re believers that all data is useful when it comes to measuring ROI in our campaigns, we’ve picked our top five key metrics that you need to be keeping an eye on to track the performance of your work. The good news is, all of these metrics can be broken down into simple measurable stats, all of which can be tracked through a basic Google Analytics account and by diving a bit deeper into the platform analytics that you are publishing on. Let’s dive in.  

 

Views

This may seem like a no-brainer, but knowing how many times a piece of content has been viewed is a great insight in determining which videos/ posts really resonate with your audience and which ones miss the mark. Other useful metrics in evaluating the popularity of your content is to compare total views with unique views (this lets you know how many times the content was reloaded). We also like to look at completed views and when viewers dropped off in films.

 

Sources of Traffic

All your traffic comes from somewhere, and knowing where your audience is coming from is key when strategising how best to amplify your content. The three primary traffic sources you’ll see in your metrics report are direct (when visitors type your URL into the search bar), referral (when visitors find your site through clicking a link on another site), and search (when visitors find your content through searching certain keywords on a search engine like Google), although you’ll likely also have traffic from banner ads and paid search if you’re investing in SEO and ads. To harness this metric for improved ROI, take a look at which sources are providing the most traffic, then adjust your strategy accordingly to put more resources into this area. For example, if Facebook is your top source of traffic, it might be beneficial to invest in more promoted Facebook content, and increase your posting frequency.

 

Bounce Rate

In plain English, bounce rate refers to the number of people who leave your site after only visiting one page. If your bounce rate is high, it could be worth looking at the layout of the page and how the content is presented – are there links to other products, videos and posts, and are the links obvious and easy to navigate? Are your call to actions presented in an enticing way? You want to give your audience every reason to continue to engage in your content, which in turn keeps them on your site for longer.

 

Time Spent on Your Site

One way to really measure the quality of your content is by measuring how long people are actually looking at it. It’s fair to say, the longer someone spends on the site, the more content they’re consuming, whereas if your metrics are telling you that no one is watching your video content to the end, it might be time to revisit your strategy.

 

Social Elevation

This is one that we use to track brand sentiment and involvement with the brand on social platforms, where we are looking at how often in comments the brand is getting credit for the content through positive mentions and shares with mentions along with click-through-rate. It’s a metric that we have built a bespoke measurement tool for along with our content fit test... more about that another time.

 

Author

3rdspace acknowledges Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and to Elders past and present.
3rdspace 2022 © All rights reserved | Privacy
eyeuserbubble linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram