I wasn’t very good with numbers in high school. I hated math, flunked algebra (twice) and my parents hired a tutor just to get me through with a 6.0 GPA. When my aptitude test revealed I should go into marketing and advertising, my left side of the brain started doing pirouettes and I knew I had hit gold. “I’ll get to be creative for a living” I thought. Fast forward about 15 years (did I just give up my age? shoot) and I find myself in love with numbers. “But I’m a content writer” you are thinking, right? Well, writing is all good and fuzzy, but writing marketing copy without setting goals and measuring results is nothing more than keeping a diary.
In order to make sure the marketing pieces we write for you (our client) are effective, well, you need to measure their ehem, effectiveness.
How do we do that? You need to measure engagement. The first thing you need to know is that no two companies are created equal and the rates that may be good for one may not be good for another. For example, a landing page with little text and a CTA (call to action) may have a high bounce rate, which is a good indication that the user took the desired action, however, a high bounce rate on a long blog post means that the user didn’t read the material.
First things first: before measuring engagement. You must define the goals. You need to have a clear idea of what you want your audience to do so that you can then track and measure the relevant metrics. Do you want to turn your readers into newsletter subscribers? Do you want to increase Facebook likes? Do you want your audience to read your blog posts? Download an e-book?
Some metrics require you to look beneath the surface and use your head to interpret them, but fortunately, Google does provide some good stats to help you get an idea of how much engagement and loyalty the content you are producing is generating. Let’s take a look:
Bounce rate. Bounce rate means that a user got to your page and bounced right back. Many people assume that a high bounce rate is good and a low bounce rate is bad. That is not necessarily true. Why people bounce out of your page is what’s important. While it is true that Google penalizes high bounce rates, this isn’t a clean cut matter. On a FAQ, the user may have quickly found what they were looking for and didn’t have a need to hang around your site. That’s a good thing.
Session duration. This means the time a user spends on your site. Just as in bounce rate, a low duration isn’t always a bad thing. If your content is long, then yes, a low duration means simply that the content didn’t engage, but if the content is short and to the point,k it may just mean that the user found what they were after and left.
Return visitors vs Unique visitors. Getting return visitors to your site is a great reflection of the quality of the content you are providing. To calculate the return visitors rate, simply divide the number of return visitors by the number of total visitors for a specified period of time. Every industry and type of content have a different benchmark, so check yours to see how you hold up.
Conversion. The holy grail. I am a firm believer that expecting content to convert a visitor into a client is not a fair expectation. Content should generate loyalty and increase brand awareness, but conversion, well, conversion isn’t a one man show. Conversion is a team effort of marketing and sales and expecting content to convert is like expecting the goalie to score a goal. Conversion of a visitor into a lead is a side effect of content, not the main goal. Having said that though, measuring conversion under various lights can be a useful indicator of the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign. You can measure conversion in number of subscribers to your newsletter for example, number of people who opened an account, how many filled out the contact form on your website, etc.
Social media. Your social media presence is an extension of your brand and a great way to keep a finger on the pulse of your company’s relationship with your audience. Social media engagement is measured in number of likes, clicks, comments or favorites, as well as in amplification, also known as shares, retweets, repins, etc. Not all social media platforms have analytics available, but thankfully, Facebook and Twitter have great ones. Let’s say you published a post and your blog and spread the news on facebook to get your audience to read those wonderful words we wrote for you. Well, Facebook Insights and Twitter analytics let you analyze how well those updates performed. You can then take that data and compare it to your Google Analytics data under Social to see CTR, Conversion, Contact Us and the overall journey of the user across your site.
Tracking and measuring the performance of your content can help you determine what you are doing right and where you can improve. The key to a successful content marketing strategy is creating content that your audience deems valuable and the best way to know whether what you are delivering is valuable to them or not is by measuring the user's’ behavior when they interact with that content.