As the Marketing/Sales Director, you are tasked with driving sales and growth for the company (or maybe you’re the business owner).
And one of the most important tools in your toolbox is content marketing to engage website visitors and attract more buyers from Google. But how do you know if your content marketing efforts are actually paying off?
You can imagine that measuring success can get quite complex, but to begin with let’s find out the four key metrics you can use to measure the success of your content marketing.
You need to start somewhere with tracking your content marketing, so let this be the start. After that we’ll look at ways to track the true ROI of your content, so you can get more accuracy about progress and success.
1. Engagement Rate
One of the best ways to measure the success of your content marketing is to look at engagement rate, a measure of how often users interact with your website content. There are a number of different ways to calculate site engagement rate.
Analytics platforms like Google Analytics (GA) are now giving you more accurate insight with a specific user engagement metric which your web specialist should be able to get into an easy-to-consume report for you.
Google says: “If your engagement rate is low, then consider using reports and explorations in Analytics to dig deeper to see whether it’s uniformly low or whether it’s the result of certain channels, source/medium pairs, pages or screens, or something else.”
[Tech tip:] Ask your web specialist to get this engagement data into a dashboard or report for you, from the relevant software, like Hubspot or Google Analytics. If you’re using Hubspot CRM software, it provides you with lots of engagement metrics to help, you can add these to your Report Dashboards. If you’re using Google Analytics, Google provides engagement data throughout, including engagement rate/session.
2. Conversion Rate
Another important metric to look at when measuring the success of your content marketing is conversion rate.
Conversion rate measures how often users take a desired action after interacting with your content.
For example, if you’re measuring conversion rate for a blog post, you would look at how many people read the blog post and then went on to sign up for your email list, or get in touch or make a purchase.
Conversion tracking is such an important element of measuring your content marketing as it helps you to determine the quality of your content and the quality of traffic.
[Tech tip:] Ask your web specialist/team to absolutely make sure that your conversions are being correctly tracked. You need to see proof that it’s all working, don’t just take someone’s word for it, otherwise when you really need the data, it won’t be there. Ask for a list of all events on the website that are being tracked for conversions (eg. specific button clicks, form fills etc, as well as the accompanying data to show that conversions are being tracked correctly. Also, if conversion tracking isn’t set up correctly it can be an admission that your specialist/agency hasn’t collected months/years of important conversion data, which they might try to cover up, so it will be a sensible move to get a second set of eyes to check your setup. This could be multiple members of your team, or an external consultant.
3. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is another engagement metric that can be helpful in measuring the success of your content marketing. Bounce rate measures the percentage of users who leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that users didn’t find what they were looking for on your site and likely won’t be back
4. Time on Page
Time on page is a measure of how long users spend viewing a particular piece of content. The longer users spend on a page, the more engaged they are with your content. Time on page can be a good indicator of whether or not users are actually reading and digesting your content or if they’re just skimming it.
How do we create easy-to-read content marketing reports for our website?
Many companies produce website progress reports in Google’s Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) which can pull across data from Google Analytics into more manageable reports, cutting out all the complex stuff you don’t need to see.
If you’re using Hubspot’s CRM, depending on which plan you have, you can create a dashboard with the metrics above. This is something either you can do, or you can get your web specialist to help.
Content marketing is an important tool in any Marketing/Sales Director’s toolbox. But how do you know if your content marketing efforts are actually paying off? The answer lies in data. By looking at metrics such as engagement rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and time on page, you can get a clearer picture of which pieces of content are performing well and which ones need improvement.
So what are you waiting for? Start measuring today.