In marketing, return on investment is king – and it always will be. With pay-per-click advertising, establishing a return on investment should be pretty simple; provided your account is tracking conversions accurately, it’s easy to see how much you’re spending and how much revenue you’re generating in return.
Unfortunately, attributing an ROI to content marketing isn’t quite as simple. With content, the path from spend to conversion isn’t as clearly defined, making it much more difficult to work out just how much revenue your words, pictures and videos are actually generating.
Plus, there’s more to consider than just conversions and revenue. The impact of content can be far-reaching, transforming your brand’s reputation and elevating your market position. Even if a piece of content doesn’t directly generate sales or conversions, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an impact on your bottom line.
So, how do you measure the success of your content? If you can’t focus solely on revenue and conversions, what other metrics should you keep tabs on? We’ll be answering those questions right here, offering straightforward advice to help you demonstrate the effectiveness of your content.
Although calculating ROI is more challenging for content than it is for PPC, it’s certainly not impossible. Tools like Google Analytics and Semrush can offer valuable insights into the way users interact with your content, giving you a much clearer picture of how well it’s performing.
Plus, if you track the following metrics over a period of weeks, months or even years, you can then spot trends and begin to piece together the effect that new content has had on your business as a whole.
Tracking the performance of content can be as simple or as in-depth as you’d like it to be. You can easily spend hours on your SEO tool of choice analysing every piece of data available to you, but we’ve put together a list of some of the most insightful metrics below to help you get started.
The natural place to start for any piece of content is page views. How many visitors is the page or blog receiving, and how has this number changed over time? If you’ve recently optimised a landing page or updated a blog, have your changes resulted in an increase in page views? Analysing traffic is the perfect way to determine, at a glance, how a piece of content is doing.
Traffic can include visitors from a wide range of different sources, be it organic search, paid ads, social shares or backlinks from other sites. However, it doesn’t always tell the full story. Page view statistics are just that – a count of how many views a page has had. If the same person has visited the page multiple times, this will up your view count. So, if you’re more interested in learning how many unique users a page has had, check out the ‘Users’ column in Google Analytics instead.
Not every piece of content is written to rank well on the SERPs, but most are. So, analysing the keyword rankings of each piece is a great way to show just how effective your content is. If you’re outranking competitors for your target keywords, you must be doing something right.
Obviously, keyword rankings aren’t everything – but they do provide increased visibility and brand awareness, and should lead to more page views. If your content is ranking highly but isn’t getting the kind of traffic you’d like, you may be targeting the wrong keywords or your meta title and description might need a rethink.
A good way to determine which of these applies to your content is to take a look at the number of impressions it’s received using Google Search Console. The more impressions the piece has, the more people have seen it in the SERPs. So, if it has plenty of impressions but not enough clicks, your metadata might be the issue. If it doesn’t get many impressions, chances are you’re only ranking for low-volume keywords.
Closely related to impressions is CTR. Expressed as a percentage, CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks a piece of content has generated by the number of impressions it has received. The higher a piece of content’s CTR is, the better it is at grabbing users’ attention and pulling them in.
It’s no secret that our attention spans are, on average, extremely short. If we don’t get the answers we’re looking for when we visit a link for the first time, it’s unlikely that we’re going to hang around and explore the site some more.
Bounce rate measures the percentage of sessions that weren’t classed as ‘engaged’. An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has two or more page views. Generally speaking, the lower your bounce rate, the better – but it’s not always that simple. If you’re looking at the bounce rate of an informational article that’s been written to answer a common question, a high bounce rate might indicate that users are getting the answers they need and don’t have to explore the site further to find them.
However, a high bounce rate on a transactional piece of content (like a product or category page) could indicate that potential customers are leaving your site and shopping with your competitors instead.
As a general rule of thumb, the lower your bounce rate, the more engaging your content is likely to be – and the more likely it is to generate conversions.
If other humans are interacting with your content and sharing it with their friends, family or colleagues, that’s a surefire sign that you’ve done your job well. When you post content on your social accounts, keep an eye on the number of shares it receives. Alternatively, check out a page’s backlink profile using a tool like Ahrefs to find out how many other websites are linking to it and citing it as a valuable source of information.
The more shares and backlinks your page gets, the more likely it is to climb its way up the SERPs and rank ahead of the competition.
Looking to elevate your content marketing output to new heights? With more than 20 years of experience formulating and actioning content strategies for businesses in a vast array of industries, Brave Agency has just the kind of expertise you’re looking for. To find out more about what we do, get in touch with us today.
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