Get to know the most important metrics or KPIs to check the effectiveness of your content strategy
All commercial actions of a company can and should be measured to analyse their success through KPIs, and your content strategy is no exception.
The first requirement for developing a performance report on your campaign is to have set SMART objectives. You've probably heard these acronyms before, but let's remember what they refer to. This technique consists of setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and temporary objectives. Defining them in writing is essential to later be able to check whether or not you have fulfilled the purposes of your content marketing strategy with the appropriate metrics.
and what exactly do you have to measure? We will see it throughout the article, but some of the basic Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) to analyse the performance of your content are visits or views, bounce rate, times shared, leads obtained, etc. With this data, you can monitor the development of your content strategy and improve its results with new ideas that try to improve the weak points. Thus, you will increase the chances of reaching your revenue and sales goals, something that many companies do not take into account and end up losing profitability by not analysing their results.
Organic metrics
Look at organic metrics to check the performance of your non-paid content. They are also useful for finding good opportunities to launch promotional campaigns, so you can leverage your materials more effectively by increasing their impact through advertising.
Next, let's take a look at the most interesting metrics or KPIs to analyse the results of your content in different formats (web, social media and email), as well as your conversion results. Let's get started!
Web traffic
Use your web support tools or Google Analytics to measure the following KPI's. Visits and visitors:
- visits and visitors: This lets you know how many times your web content is accessed and the exact number of users visiting the page.
- traffic sources: This is used to find out where the visits come from: social networks, web searches, other pages, etc. It is a way of finding out which articles are better positioned in search engines or which of your dissemination platforms generate the most web traffic.
- bounce rate: This is a percentage that indicates the number of users who leave a page of your website without interacting with it by clicking on any link, i.e. those who enter the article and leave without browsing the rest of the site. A low bounce rate means that a large part of your audience finds the content interesting and decides to continue interacting with your page. On the other hand, a high rate shows that your content could improve its strategy to offer a more attractive experience to users.
- keyword ranking: This is useful to know how your articles are performing in search engines and to find new content ideas according to the most popular topics in your sector. To do this research, the most useful tools are SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console or the aforementioned Google Analytics.
Social media
To identify your best performing posts in comparison to the rest and your overall impact on social media, opt for the following KPIs: Impressions and Reach:
- impressions and Reach- the former lets you know how many times a post has been viewed, while the latter tracks the number of users who have accessed it.
- views: This is the number of all the views of a video. Each social network has its own rules for adding up the views depending on the time the user spends watching the video. For example, Facebook requires three seconds.
- interactions: Many metrics come into play here: likes, number of times the publication is shared, comments, retweets, citations, etc. In other words, all the parameters that demonstrate active interaction between the user and the social network content. This is an essential KPI that requires exhaustive work by the community manager to create a community and improve engagement with users.
- clickthrough rate is the percentage of profiles that click on a link included in a post. An example is sharing a link to your blog post in an Instagram story. Therefore, if you get a high rate, it means that your social media linking strategy is effective. Otherwise, try to make your links more attention-grabbing.
Email marketing
A mailing or email marketing strategy enriches your conversion goals, but to what level? Find out with these metrics:
- open rate- how many people open the emails you send, ideally between 15% and 20%.
- clickthrough rate: As in social networks, it shows the number of people who click on a link in the email to your content. Ideally, it should be around 2%.
- subscribers (active): This is the number of users who receive your emails because they have signed up to your newsletter or mailing strategy. Although the number is important, it is essential to keep this database updated with users who are truly interested in your brand. In this way, it is advisable to eliminate those who have been ignoring your emails for months so that they do not interfere with the two previous metrics and you can manage more realistic figures.
Conversion
is your content strategy being really useful? Does it generate leads that, later on, become customers? The process of analysing these elements is essential to check the effectiveness of your content. Therefore, keep in mind the following KPIs:
- leads- tracking the number of leads your content generates.
- conversion rate: Answer this question: out of all the visitors to a website, how many convert into leads?
- closure rate. Here we move up one stage in the funnel and ask ourselves: out of all the leads I have acquired, how many end up becoming customers after they have made a purchase?
Payment metrics
Promotion is an inseparable technique of marketing, and it can also be a useful tool to leverage your content for higher performance. In this sense, when making a monetary investment, it is more important than ever to review the impact it has generated in order to check its effectiveness. For this purpose, the following four metrics are very useful:
- quality Score: This is used to check the effectiveness of your promotion on Google Ads, whose algorithm is keyword-driven. It indicates that your ad and the linked landing page are relevant to the target audience, so the more descriptive and specific your campaign is, the better this metric will be.
- cost per click (CPC): With this type of promotion, you pay for the number of clicks users make, so with this metric you can calculate how much each click costs you. It is recommended to use this strategy if you are looking to increase your conversions and sales.
- cost per acquisition (CPA): In this case, you will pay for every thousand impressions generated. Thus, with this metric you can calculate how much each new lead costs you. It is recommended to use this strategy if you are looking to improve your brand recognition.
- closing rate: As we have already seen, this is used to check how many leads end up making a purchase. The difference with the organic metric is that, on this occasion, the rate is measured based on the leads generated thanks to the promotion.
Remember that if you analyse the results of your content strategy, it is already a success because you can make changes to improve, take advantage of what works best or abandon the campaign if you do not get what you expected. In this sense, be sure to communicate the results you get to the rest of the team of the company in an effective and simple way. In this way, everyone will know your role and the results generated by the content strategy of the business.
