Must Be the Money: Content Marketing Metrics You Should Bank on
Today’s cutting-edge analytics enable marketers to track ROI from content offerings, justify spending, and even hold content providers to a higher standard. Here are the metrics you need to match analytics to your own, unique marketing goals.
No offense to your local, promotional-sign-wielding taco or hot dog costume guy, but when it comes to marketers’ return on investment (ROI), recent findings reflect that value-driven content generates three times as many qualified leads, yet still costs 62% less than “traditional,” or “outbound” marketing methods.
Superior performance, however, is only part of what makes content such a powerful and practical marketing tool.
If you ask us, another indispensable advantage is that content is entirely trackable. And that means you can tell by certain measures alone whether or not your content is producing optimal return for your all-important marketing dollars…that is, as long as you understand which data points and metrics tell the real story.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, many marketers are still too singularly focused on tracking individual and/or “vanity metrics,” stuff like email opens and clicks, or social media likes, shares, and follows. And while social media footprint, and online profile and reputation are important outcomes, vanity metrics aren’t—or at least shouldn’t be—worthwhile performance results for ROI-driven marketers because they result in no financial return.
So here’s the point, before we even go any further: When tracking the ROI from your content offerings, consider your core marketing objectives, and isolate key performance indicators (KPIs) like the ones below, which accurately measure your content’s success. In all, this is how to discern an honest answer to the question, “Are your content marketing efforts really paying you back?”
If Improved SEO Performance Is Your Objective…
In addition to educating consumers and helping to empower their purchase decisions, value-driven content creates pathways across the internet that help users find your website, learn about your products, and develop a perception about your brand.
In fact, to illustrate the SEO power of content, consider that websites that publish blog content have 434% more search-engine-indexed pages and 97% more indexed links than those without blogs.
Translation: Content, when developed and executed well by an organization, can help your brand and website(s) create a stronger online presence and ascend to the top of local or even industry-wide search rankings.
So with that, if SEO performance happens to be among your core marketing objectives, you should establish KPIs accordingly, and (probably) analyze and track metrics including:
Keyword rankings
Organic sessions
Search traffic
Backlinks/Referrals
Now, the above list isn’t all-encompassing, of course. There’s a ton of factors—right up to and including page load times—that ultimately impact SEO performance, but you get the picture; that targeted content marketing objectives call for specific, ROI-focused metrics to accurately track them.
If Content Helps Power Your Lead-Generation Efforts…
Nowadays, content is the preferred method by which consumers learn about products and companies, with 70% of consumers favoring content over ads. Moreover, about 80% say content helps establish trust and promote positive brand perceptions—both qualities that make content marketing an indispensable lead-generation tool as well.
Here again, though, if qualified, opt-in leads are what you’re after from your content, then tracking singular metrics like clicks, or even other, desired actions like direct phone calls, may be of little consequence. Instead, try analyzing the success of your content using lead-gen-focused metrics like:
Website traffic
Bounce rate
Duration or pages per session
Leads (duh!)
Bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page, coupled with metrics like duration or pages per session, speak rather well to the degree of interest and engagement, and the potential quality of the lead. And the others show that you’re converting visitors into leads, which reflects well on your website’s design, copy, and functionality.
Together, these measures give a clear and accurate picture of your content’s ROI, and this is why it pays to take a little bit deeper and more personalized dive into analytics.
If Sales & New Customer Acquisition Are What You’re After…
Selling products may very well be your website’s primary reason for being…especially if your company is involved in e-commerce. Quite naturally, then, that makes driving sales and new customer acquisition the ultimate goals for your content, too.
Fortunately, value-driven content works, and in what just may illustrate the power of content marketing better than anything, consider this: 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase after reading a recommendation on a blog.
Now that’s encouraging to say the least, but unfortunately, more article views and website traffic doesn’t automatically translate into more sales and new customers. And that’s why you need the below analytics (and perhaps others) to see whether your content is really attracting meaningful sales dollars from both new and repeat customers:
1) Total & incremental sales
2) New customer vs. returning sales
3) Conversion rate
4) Abandon rate
By analyzing annual and period sales, conversions, and the mix of old versus new customers, you can trace where, when, how, and for whom your content marketing produces desired outcomes. And by comparing the abandon rate, or how many customers exit the sales funnel at the point of purchase, to an established benchmark, you can either validate your current user experience or opt for changes designed to up your conversion rates.
So here’s the bottom line: The use of more targeted, ROI-focused metrics will better portray the success of your content marketing efforts, whether your unique objective is to boost SEO and improve your online profile, generate leads, promote sales, or even achieve all three in unison.
