April 27, 2020

5 Metrics that should matter to you as a content expert

Metrics that matter to content experts

Developing valuable content is a goal that every digital content marketer strives to achieve. The success of a marketing strategy rests on the site’s content. No matter how novel, unique, or creative your content is, it’s the performance of your site that will be the ultimate game-changer. Therefore, is is critical to regularly evaluate the performance of your content in order to achieve your marketing goals. The perfect way to monitor the effectiveness of your online content is to focus on certain data that serves as metrics of measurement. These metrics can not only decipher and evaluate the performance of your site against that of your competitors, but also help put your content on the right track.

Here are a few metrics that are sure to put you on the path to success as a content expert.

1. Traffic

If there’s one metric that will set your website apart from your counterparts, it’s traffic. Let’s face it – site traffic is the essence of online content. Without a good number of people visiting your website, your content will be futile, no matter how remarkable it may be.

A reasonable way to get a clear picture of the traffic coming in is to categorize data into smaller metrics, such as the number of users who visit your page, the number of times visitors view your page, or even the unique page views by a single user.

Similarly, you can use Google Analytics to compare traffic results with the previous year to eliminate seasonality as a factor. By deconstructing raw data into specific categories, you can accurately trace the source of the traffic – which you may find vital in developing your future content strategy.

2. Conversion

If you’re looking for tangible outcomes from your website, it’s not sufficient to have a large number of visitors land on your page. What matters is the follow-up action of those who visit your page.

Whether your content causes audiences to read a blog post, sign up for a newsletter, or make an actual purchase, conversions will enable you to connect with more leads and customers. Especially for those B2B brands that primarily depend on their websites as a sales tool, conversions are optimal indicators of the sales made and revenue generated.

To track your conversions in Google Analytics, you can avail of landing page conversion rates or resort to marketing automation platforms to get lead metrics.

3. Engagement

It may come as a surprise that the key to making your website stand out lies not so much in the quality of its content but in the way people engage with it. Your goal is to ensure that viewers spend as much time on your website as possible. It is for this reason that engagement metrics play a crucial role in making your content effective.

Audiences engage with online content in different ways. Whether it involves sharing a link or video, posting a comment, or resorting to a ‘like’ or ‘thumbs up’, engagement metrics can help you track the effectiveness of your content and make it more appealing. Traffic on social media platforms is also factored in as measure of engagement.

In Google Analytics, there are metrics that can look at the number of pages viewed per session, the duration per session, and the average bounce rate of viewers. Similarly, you can rely on BuzzSumo as a tool that reveals social media share counts and the number of links.

4. SEO performance

Information available on the internet is constantly increasing. To ensure the prominence of your website while maximizing user satisfaction, it is of utmost importance to monitor your SEO performance. This will not only boost incoming traffic but also improve your leads and conversions.

Some of the metrics that you can use to track your SEO performance are keyword distribution, domain authority and page load speeds. You can also track the position of your search engine results via the click-through rate (CTR) in the Google Analytics Queries report.

5. Authority

Just as a high reputation boosts brand loyalty, high authority increases search traffic and brand awareness. Tracking your domain authority will enable you to provide highly valued content and secure brand loyalty. There are many tools to measure a site’s domain authority. Free tools from Moz, such as Mozbar Chrome Extension and Open Site Explorer allow you to monitor the domain authority of the site.

Last words

Successful content experts will know that the key to an effective content marketing strategy lies in understanding the actions and reactions of the consumers. But there’s a catch to this. As easy as creating content may sound, ensuring that consumers access it can be quite a task. This is primarily because consumer behavior is erratic, and dependent on several factors.

This is where the metrics of monitoring online content can come in useful. By focusing on these metrics, content experts can understand viewers’ needs and capitalize on this to accomplish their marketing goals.