Measuring The Success of a Content Marketing Campaign
Content marketing is a major part of digital marketing and search engine optimisation today, but without measuring its effect you won’t know how well it is working for your business. Today, we’ll look at the content marketing metrics that will allow you to monitor your KPIs.
Content marketing covers a wide range of activities, so naturally its measurement requires you to gather variety of analytics data. The below metrics will help businesses and agencies to understand how content marketing is improving business. Although the bottom line in increasing sales, we need to have solid data to prove that the strategy is working.
Unique Visitor Count
Arguably the most important metric is the number of unique visitors on your website. As your site content improves and becomes better ranking in Google search and more shared across social media, your site will become a more important source of business leads. While unique visitor count is not everything, it is a vital metric to view.
Bounce Rate
While getting unique visitors is a good sign, if it is accompanied with a high bounce rate, this indicates a problem with your campaign. Content marketing should be driving relevant customers to your website – this is the core principal of marketing, to introduce your product to your market.
If your site has a high bounce rate it could indicate that your marketing efforts are attracting the wrong sort of readers. A typical example of this is when people use humour to drive traffic to a website. You may get a lot of interest across social media, and many site visitors on the back of this, but the fact is these visitors are usually looking for another joke, not your product or service.
Location
If your product or service is only available to a specific geographic market, you must measure the location of your website visitors. Many unscrupulous overseas SEO companies will promise an increase in traffic, but what they won’t tell you is that your readers will all be from outside your geographic market. If you are running a UK business, 10 visitors from your target market area is far more valuable than 1000 visitors from the Far East.
Local SEO is the fastest growing area of digital marketing for a very good reason – it helps drive relevant visitors to your business, rather than taking a shotgun approach.
Device Usage
Monitoring device usage is a relative new metric to follow, but one that is becoming increasingly important. More people are now searching Google on mobile devices than desktop computers, and people are even more likely to search for local products and services on a mobile device.
If your web analytics show that a majority of your readers are on desktop, this may indicate that your website is not being ranked by Google for mobile. If this is the case, have a website health check carried out, as this will highlight potential problems – speak to our technical consultants for advice on this.
Also, when analysing bounce rates, filter down to device level – a significantly higher bounce rate on mobile would suggest that there are some mobile user experience problems that need fixing.
Email Clicks
While Google search and social media are the biggest draws of online traffic today, email marketing still plays an important role. You should have a regular newsletter that provides informative and engaging content for your market.
If people are opening your emails but not clicking through to your site, this indicates that your email marketing campaigns need to be updated.
How much your content is shared Facebook, or retweeted on Twitter, is a good indicator of how good its quality is. However, today comments and shares are the considered to be the best metrics to follow for Facebook. When people comment, or share content, they are truly engaged with that content. Clicking Like no longer carries the same weight as it did a few years ago.
Conversions
Of course, conversion rate is the most important metric for a website that is selling a product. You need to see an improvement in the percentage of visitors who purchase from you, otherwise your marketing efforts are being wasted. If your conversion rate is falling while visitor count increases, this indicates that your website is attracting people outside of your target audience. If you are paying for these visitors, it is money down the drain.
By measuring each of these metrics monthly you will be able to quickly identify campaign successes. Speak to one of our SEO marketing consultants to learn how to use these metrics in your campaigns.
