As the good old’ saying goes—content is the king! Hence, content marketing is indispensable when promoting your business on the internet. And just like any other marketing program, it is also important to have an effective system for measuring the success of your online content. While there can be a number of ways to do so, we have curated a list of the best 5 ways to do so.
Your content lies at the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. It is through this that you communicate with your audience. Hence, optimizing your content is one of the basic requirements of marketing.
How much effort you put into the creation of quality content is one thing but tracking its performance is another. Effective performance measurement is one of the crucial duties of a marketer. It allows you to:
- Rectify errors and fix them
- Spot potency and improve
- Avoid mistakes in future
These are some of the key advantages of tracking the performance of online content. Hence, it is important to have the right metrics to track your content’s success.
Okay, but how do I do that?
The good news is, there is a number of ways to do that. And out of those, we have curated a list of…
Best 5 to measure the success of your online content
1. Online traffic
I already know it, duh!
And well you may. However, just looking at the number of your visitors/readers/viewers can’t tell you much about the success of your content. At best, it may give you a vague idea. Remember, growth is an important aspect of a business.
The point is to observe the traffic on your online content in relation to time and not in isolation. You should focus on how your online traffic is increasing (or decreasing) over a period of time. However, there is no set percentage by which your traffic should be increasing. Different businesses vary in different ways and so do their content promotion strategies. Some can invest more in paid reach while others may be better at SEO. For how long a business has been around can also play a great role in it.
Hence, it is as simple as that. If you see the graph of your online traffic going upwards in relation to time, you’re headed on the right path. Similarly, if the graph is flat or going down, you need to re-strategize your content marketing program. It is possible to do it effectively and easily with the help of tools like Google Analytics.
2. Engagement
How your audience engages with your content tells volumes about the success of your content. And after all, the whole point of content creation is audience engagement.
One way of doing that is to observe your website’s dwell time and bounce rate over a certain period of time. It tells whether your audience is finding enough value in your content to engage further with your business or not. Increasing dwell time over a certain period of time signifies your online content is doing great. The same of bounce rate signifies vice versa. This again can be easily ascertained using Google Analytics.
Another way of determining the engagement level of your content is to look at the likes and comments it receives. It is specifically useful for social media marketing. Here, both the qualitative and quantitative aspects come into play. A high number of comments may be quantitatively good. However, it is also important to note the nature of the comments. If there are a high number of negative comments, it’s apparently a bad thing.
Hence, it is important to take both quantitative and qualitative aspects into consideration when measuring the performance of online content in terms of engagement.
3. Search engine ranking
Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand. The success of one signifies the success of another. You can retain a high ranking on search engines if you don’t produce quality content.
Hence, how well you do in the SERPs is another important way of measuring the success of your online content. A higher search engine ranking signifies your content is doing good and vice versa.
But again, vaguely looking at your ranking can’t help you determine the success of your content. It is so since search engine ranking is determined by a number of things and not content alone. To properly measure the success of your content in relation to search engine optimization, you should do the following:
- See how well your content ranks when your target keywords are used.
- Make sure your domain authority is high.
- How many inbound links you earn over a period of time also tells about the success of your content
- Try to make sure your content appears in the answer box when relevant terms are searched.
By taking care of these things, you will be able to determine your content’s success in terms of search engine rankings.
4. Conversion
Conversion is one of the core objectives of digital marketing. Businesses try to convert their audience into something or the other with the help of content marketing. It can either be buyers, leads, subscribers, event attendees, social media followers, and the likes.
Hence, it is important to make sure that your online content helps you fulfill your conversion goals. Depending upon your conversion objectives, there can be a number of ways to determine the success of your online content:
- The number of sales made
- Amount of subscribers/followers gained on social media
- Checking the turnout of the event marketed using content
- Addition in the email list
These are some of the ways you can ascertain your online content’s performance. However, it is important to make sure that these metrics be used in relation to a set period of time.
5. Don’t focus too much on bounce rate
Well, this isn’t exactly a metric for examining the performance of your online content. It’s more like a tip.
Consider—a visitor landed on your website, read an article till the end, and exited. Now since he has read the article till the end, he should be a qualified visitor. However, it’ll still be counted against your bounce rate. That’s why it is important not to get distracted by the bounce rate when measuring the performance of your content.
Firstly, you need to understand that bounce rate is not just affected by the quality of your content. There can be various reasons. Some of such reasons can be:
- Unresponsive web design
- Slow page speed and website loading
- Website not optimized for mobile phones
- Unclear navigation
- Poor UX
- The searcher isn’t able to use the right keywords for his/her query
- Visitor is searching for something that is not there
- They are not sure what they are looking for
These are some of the many factors that can contribute to the bounce rate. Therefore, make sure that you use only those metrics for measuring the performance of your content that actually are affected by your content. It is important to not be distracted by unnecessary metrics.
Bottom line
It is possible that you may already be aware of these metrics to measure the success of online content. However, one important thing many miss is to read these metrics in relation to time. Moreover, comparison is another important aspect of it. You need to record your performance for a certain period of time and compare it with the previous records to actually understand your growth. By following these simple rules, you will be able to maintain an effective content marketing campaign.
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