Content plays a crucial role in any business. Businesses compete to create engaging content to attract leads. Even if the content is creative and popular it is ultimately judged by the impact it makes on the business. Content is marketed through social media networks and for digital marketing. Under the current circumstances, the market and customer behavior are changing rapidly which affects the marketing strategies. Hence, every phase of digital marketing requires the marketers to evaluate the content and the effectiveness of its marketing strategy at every phase. So, it’s a good idea to keep some measurement practices from the start of the process. This enables in tracking, analyzing and optimizing the content’s performance on a regular basis. Below are a few content marketing metrics for tracking the campaign performance:
Social Share
The number of social shares is an important metric to track for every content which is produced as a part of the content marketing strategy. It is an indicator of the type of audience, its relevance and popularity. For viral content, collecting social share metrics can prove to be critical to ensure that more viral content can be generated repeatedly.
Time on Page
This is a good metric to track the success or effectiveness of the content as it measures how long the content is capturing the audience’s attention. This brings in clarity for the marketers as they will know the audience who are engaged. There could be cases wherein a person opens a page and then leaves the desk for a while which cannot be considered as time on page. Your web design services provider will include small code snippets in your website which help in tracking the browser for time on page.
Leads Generated
Sales lead also provide good metrics to track the performance. The leads generated are important for the business and the primary reason for content marketing. This is tracked by checking the form submissions such as offer options, signups, subscription and enquiry. The leads can be tracked from the source to the point of closure.
Retention Metrics
Retention shows how you are holding on to the attention of the audience. This can be measured by the number of visitors returning to the site as it shows how the audience perceives your content. The user’s browser cache and cookies help to identify the returning users.
Direct Post Involvement
Sometimes the web design and development teams have to stop their dependence on the analytics and check the posts directly to see what kind of response is generated. Qualitative metrics help the team understand what the audience dislikes and what they like, and which is the apt content.
Cost Metrics
An important one as always ROI (return on investment) should be calculated for content marketing. Cost of production and distribution should be calculated so that the revenue can also be distributed between the contents.
Content Traffic
If high-quality content is not read by anyone then it’s a waste of time and effort. The number of visitors to the site should be measured in real-time. This confirms if the content strategy is working. More than the raw traffic data, it is more important to know what the audience does once they get to the page. Quality responsive website development will help in measuring whether the audience is actually going through the post and which elements embedded in the content engage them more.
These important metrics, when tracked continuously, provide detailed insights into how your content marketing is performing. Periodically, the strategy should be analyzed and necessary changes should be made.