10 MINUTE READ
Please raise your hand if you’re doing content marketing. Wow, that’s basically everyone here. Awesome.
Now, please keep your hand up if you’re measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing. Ut-oh, why did so many hands go down?
Actually, I believe I know. You’re of the opinion it’s difficult to measure your content marketing efforts. It can be. But it doesn’t have to.
You may have read about various ways to calculate ROI and found them
complex, and perhaps, overwhelming. Yeah, me too.
However, avoiding any and all content marketing metrics isn’t wise. You’re essentially denying yourself opportunities to improve—or even, justify—the efforts you’re pouring so much time into.
I can’t accept that. Nor should you. Let’s stick the calculators in the desk drawer and look at ten easy ways to detect if your content is cutting it.
Data collected in our annual survey of bloggers indicates 44% of bloggers don’t consistently check their analytics.
1. Website traffic
While website traffic doesn’t necessarily feed the family, you starve at the digital marketing table without it.
Use Google Analytics to gauge your past website traffic and up-to-date averages. Select any timeframe you like: years, quarters, months or weeks. Make website traffic a measure you examine often. Monitoring website traffic is a smart and simple way to hold your marketing team or outside vendors accountable.
While website traffic doesn’t necessarily feed the family, you starve at the digital marketing table without it.
Use Google Analytics to gauge your past website traffic and up-to-date averages. Select any timeframe you like: years, quarters, months or weeks. Make website traffic a measure you examine often. Monitoring website traffic is a smart and simple way to hold your marketing team or outside vendors accountable.
Choose “compare to previous year” to remove seasonality as a factor.
Of course you can dig deeper. A few clicks into your analytics is all it takes to stratify your traffic by its source or investigate which pages visitors actually visit, but the point of this post is to practice content marketing analytics with the most basic KISS approaches. So observe how much website traffic you get and aim to increase it.
2. Subscriber growth
It’s a rare digital marketing strategy that doesn’t include email marketing. At the risk of sounding like a word nerd, I want to introduce the term disintermediation—because the power of email marketing comes from establishing a direct line of communications with audience members—and without intermediary, er, media.
Like most of the topics we’ll address here, email marketing can be complex or simple. Most marketers now embrace more advanced email techniques and tactics that may be better described as marketing automation. Equipped with a marketing automation platform, you can segment audiences in a variety of ways and measure many variables relative to your content and email marketing.
Never mind all that for now. Your email marketing is likely your most important play for staying top-of mind with prospects, delivering content, and earning trust.
So again, forgo the long list of email marketing metrics you might embrace as you mature and focus first on the growth of your list. Start by recording at least one subscriber headcount (probably total subscribers) and focus on accelerating its growth.
Did your quarter over quarter email subscriber growth measure 3%? What kind of content marketing efforts might it take to double the number?
Whether you’re publishing articles, videos, podcasts, graphics or some combination, in the interest of growing your business, you want to see the number of people who get your newsletters and different types of email announcements get steadily bigger.
3. Search rankings
Content marketers certainly want to drive traffic, leads and sales by way of search, which means search rankings is key. The patterns of search engine users (a.k.a. everybody) clearly demonstrate all glory goes to the brands that achieve page one rankings.
To be atop page one for a search relevant to your business is gold. And sure, some silver and bronze is awarded to the pages listed on the bottom half of the coveted page one. No medals are handed out to the rest of the field that appears on pages 2 to 2,000,000. Such is the cold reality of search.
You can subscribe to tools such as Moz, SEMRush and Ahrefs to continually monitor your rankings, however your best bet for tracking your rankings on the cheap is Google Analytics.
Look at your Acquisition > Search Console > Queries report. The report only shows data for the last three months. Export the data if you want to manually check rank fluctuations over time.
If you’re game for checking your rankings one phrase at a time, this tool from SEOCentro will get the job done.