Image source: Empower Network
The right metrics are essential to gain real insight into the impact of marketing programs, including website, email, social media, and content marketing. Sometimes, using only the common metrics for a given media can produce misleading results and fail to provide real understanding of the impact and the payoff of an organization’s marketing investments.
Marketing typically measures campaign success by the number of pageviews and unique visitors. So-called engagement, based on comments and likes, has become a popular metric in social media. However, attracting more eyeballs and getting a reaction doesn’t necessarily mean your content has achieved the desired impact.
Sales results – especially in direct marketing – are the bottom-line metric, but even that doesn’t tell the whole story. The direct sales metric often doesn’t account for revenue generated through other channels as a result of the promotion. Measuring only sales doesn’t account for increases in product awareness or improvements in brand reputation. Measuring by sales only may also overlook sales leads generated.
“The traditional ways of measuring the success or failure of content are broken. We can’t just rely on metrics like the number of pageviews/visits or bounce rate to determine whether what we’re creating has performed well,” writes Matthew Barby, HubSpot’s global head of growth and SEO.
The following are overlooked metrics that can better measure content marketing.
Total time reading (TTR) is a cumulative metric that counts the total number of minutes spent reading a piece of content. If 10 visitors read a blog post for one minute each, the total reading time would be 10 minutes. Advocates claim this is a better measure of reader interest than pageviews.
Average time on page, which is available in Google Analytics, provides a general indication of how long visitors stay.
Scroll depth reports how far visitors scroll down the page. It helps reveal how much of the content visitors actually read and if producing longer content is worthwhile. “Having the answers to these questions is really important when it comes to determining which types of content are resonating more with your visitors,” Barby says.
Retention rates report how many viewers return to your blog or website. It’s obtainable in Google Analytics under Behavior, Content Drilldown and view new versus return visitors.
Social media drivers. Understanding which social media channels drive traffic can help your choose which platforms to invest more time on. In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition, All Traffic, Channels and choose Social. Examine the quality of traffic, not merely the volume. Some channels may drive less traffic but generate lower bounce rates, higher pagers per session, and longer sessions.
Sales value of emails. To determine the sales or average value on an email address divide the total revenue generated from email marketing for a year or other time period by average list size (# of subscribers). “By paying close attention to the amount of revenue resulting from each email, you’ll learn which types of emails are best for sales,” explains digital marketing expert Brooke B. Sellas in a Business 2 Community article.
Audience growth over time across all channels. Marketers may sometimes become narrowly focused on one social media network and miss the overall picture. A side-by-side comparison of audience growth in different channels could reveal surprises, such as unexpected growth in a network.
Sentiment. In social media, sentiment analysis ranks brand mentions on a negative to positive scale. It’s especially valuable to ascertain public perception of a company and its products and to analyze the effectiveness of PR and marketing campaigns. Automated sentiment analysis can be more affordable and faster although less accurate than trained human analysts.
Share of voice. Share of voice compares the amount of your brand’s presence in news and social media to that of your competitors. As you might expect, a larger share of voice means your strategy is working, while a small or declining share of voice could mean you need to re-evaluate your tactics.
Bottom Line: Effective measurement requires marketing pros to step back and re-evaluate their metrics and determine if they fulfill their underlying business goals. Companies invest substantial sums in content production and measurement; but they may squander much of their investments if they rely on inadequate metrics. Although some metrics are available in Google Analytics, others require a social media monitoring and measurement service or specialized measurement software.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
