Knowing what to track and measure when you’re trying to test out a new content strategy can be tricky. What is the best measure of content marketing effectiveness? It’s a loaded question!
With so many resources across the web sharing different best practices—including long lists that hardly describe what the jargon they are dropping means, let alone how you can use them—it’s no wonder people are left scratching their heads.
However, you don’t want to create content blindly and without any well-defined goals. While different businesses have different selling points and purposes, there are several key performance indicators (KPIs) that will enable you to complete a full content performance analysis.
To better understand your traffic, you need to break down the different types you’re getting. Unique visitors are first-time visitors to your page. These visitors are only counted once, even if they’ve visited your page multiple times. Tracking these visits can help you better understand who is coming to your site and if they’re the audience you’re trying to target or not.
Analyzing content metrics like spikes and lags in unique visitors can help pinpoint what content is working and what’s not. If you’ve launched a new page or are selling a new product, you might notice an increase in unique page visitors, which shows you that you’re attracting the right audience—and reaching more of them.
In contrast, lags in unique visitors can indicate that the content you’ve added or are trying to measure isn’t fulfilling your ROI goals. Changes in unique visitor traffic are a clear indicator of what kind of content is, or isn’t, working.
One of the main purposes of content is to engage with visitors and build their trust. Once they know you’re a reliable resource for whatever it is they’re looking for, they’re more likely to convert. When creating a content funnel of any type, there’s usually an end-action in mind that you want the visitor to take. In terms of user conversion, that action can be something like:
These content performance analytics are examples of micro-conversions, and when they’re on your radar, you can better understand what action needs to happen next to turn them into macro-conversions, which bring revenue into your business. When you track any type of conversion, you’re able to understand the user journey with more clarity and execute the next steps with tailored content.
How can you measure content quality? One way is through tracking the session time, or the time a visitor spends on your site or in your app. Attracting visitors is a great starting point, but what good is it if those visitors click out of your site or microapp altogether within seconds of the page loading?
Tracking session time on different pages helps you distinguish strong content that connects with your target audience from weak content that misses the mark. The longer visitors are staying, the more content they’re taking in. If your pages are properly backlinked, you’re encouraging visitors to interact with different pages that might be useful to them, increasing their session time.
Short session times can highlight poor content quality. If a user clicks a certain link and they’re not getting what they expected due to lack of clarity or misleading copy, it increases the chance they’ll click out. It might even mean that the page’s organization is hard to follow.
When you’re sending out email correspondence of any kind, such as weekly newsletters or product tips, you’ll want to track the open rate. Investing time and money into crafting beautiful newsletters full of insightful content is a wasted effort if the emails:
Conducting a content performance analysis of email marketing messaging can highlight areas of concern, whether it comes down to the subject line, the length of the copy embedded within the email, or confusion on their end as to who the sender is. Tracking this metric can help you isolate the problems leading to low open rates, allowing you to make any necessary adjustments.
Establishing how your keywords are ranking can help you identify what pages are driving the most traffic and the most conversions. You can also identify how your keywords are ranking on any given day across search engines and against competitors.
In a perfect world, you would rank first in each of your keywords, but the reality is that rankings fluctuate on a daily basis, and a steep drop in ranking can signify an issue with your content or on the backend of your microapp or website.
Sometimes keywords that used to rank highly are no longer effective and need to be removed and replaced. Being able to locate these changes and swap them out quickly will ensure you don’t miss any opportunities that competitors could be capitalizing on.
Understanding the meaning and purpose of tracking different content performance analytics is critical if you want to increase your content’s effectiveness and turn page visitors into potential leads that you can convert at the right part of their visitor journey. When you know what type of messaging speaks to your target audience and the best time to contact them, you can establish a marketing cadence that’s effective at communicating.
Measuring content performance helps you ensure the content you provide on-site is answering any questions visitors might be looking for, keeping them engaged with what they’re consuming.
With Tiled, you can create an interactive microapp experience with customizable widgets and actions that can be triggered how and when you want.
No idea is too big for Tiled, and we’d like to show you just how expansive we can be. Request a live demo today, and see how Tiled can help bring your vision to life.
