How to measure content performance

Discover how to effectively measure the performance of your content

Guide: How to measure content performance

From setting objectives <br>to scoring results

Step 1: Set content objectives

From business goals to content goals

Where does your content fit into the bigger picture?

The first step in determining how to measure the success of your content is identifying what success looks like

To measure content success, you need to know what that success looks like – to your business, your team and yourself. This is fundamentally the 'why' of every piece of content.

If your business is mature enough in its content practices to have a documented content strategy, this should outline the objectives you need to focus on. Every piece of content should connect back to one of them.

If you don't have a documented strategy, you'll need to do more of the groundwork.

No two marketers’ objectives are exactly alike. What matters is aligning against business goals, not all the abstract things you can measure.

Rebecca Lieb, content strategy specialist

These are the kinds of questions you need to answer:

What is your business trying to achieve over the next year or two?
Which of these objectives is your division responsible for?
How will you know when those objectives are achieved?
What needs to change/happen to get there?
How will you know when each of those things is occurring?

For example:

1. What is your business trying to achieve over the next year or two?

The email automation company Laura works for is trying to exponentially grow its customer base in the SME market, improve customer retention among its US customers and achieve more diversity in its senior team.

2. Which of these objectives is your division responsible for?

Laura's team has been set the objective of growing the company's share of the SME market.

3. How will you know when those objectives are achieved?

The business wants a 100% increase in SME customers over the next 12 months, and 200% the year after that.

4. What needs to change/happen to get there?

To get there, Laura's division needs to increase awareness of its software in the SME community, keep the SME audience interested in the brand and product and ultimately increase the number of SMEs who become customers.

5. How will you know when each of those things is occurring?

More SME visitors viewing and returning to the website, engaging with Laura's content, trialing the product and purchasing a plan.

To achieve these goals, different content is needed for the different stages of the audience's buyer journey,

For Laura, this means, creating content that will grab the attention of SME marketers, content that will keep them coming back for more, and content that persuades them to submit their card details.

Larua's content needs to cater to the entire and pretty complex B2B buyer journey of the SME decision-maker.

Source: Forrester

Step 2: Measure the right metrics

Example metrics for across the journey

What to measure
& how to do it

There is no single metric out there with which to measure the success of your content. Identify which metrics are relevant to your specific objectives

Every single piece of content should have its own purpose under the umbrella of the team's objectives. For marketers, purpose will typically relate to the behavior and feelings they want to drive on the road to purchase and beyond.

Awareness: Discover and notice the brand/product

Consideration: Like and trust the brand/product

Conversion: Prefer and purchase the brand/product

Retention: Value and reuse the brand/product

Advocacy: Recommend the brand/product

Measuring how your audiences interact with your assets and what pushes them to dive deeper into specific pieces at each stage can help you to both prove and improve the performance of your content.

Does each piece of content you create have a clear and specified purpose?

Yes, every piece
Most of it
Some of it
Not really

Choosing your metrics

The particular metrics available to you will depend on the content that you offer at these different stages, how you distribute that content and the technology powering that distribution.

Don't measure anything unless the data helps you make a better decision or change your actions

Seth Godin

Broadly speaking, you want to identify the metrics available to you that reveal the most about how engaged someone has been with your content, and what they did next.

Example metrics

Awareness	Consideration	Conversion	Retention	Advocacy
Awareness	Consideration	Conversion	Retention	Advocacy
New visitors	Returning visitors	Interactions per conversion	Content visits & engagement	Referrals
Content readers	Sales leads	Total transactions	Email open rate	Case study performance
Media coverage	Form completions	Avg. revenue per customer	Customer lifetime value	Star ratings
Organic rankings	Direct inquiries	Subscriptions/sign ups	Visit frequency	Cross-sells
Followers	Time spent engaged	Demo requests	Avg. spend per transaction	Testimonials

Where's the value?

For instance, if you're running an email campaign, it doesn't really matter how many people click through to your content piece if none of them end up reading it. So the important metric here isn't clicks, but something more revealing, such as time spent with content, or number of form completions.

Benchmark your content performance

Once you've identified relevant performance metrics, determine how your content efforts have historically performed.

This will give you two things:

The performance status quo of your company's content –and what you need to improve on, or at the very least match
An understanding of what kind of content has worked well in the past

Armed with this insight you will have a benchmark from which to devise your content KPIs and improvement targets.

Step 3: Analyze your data

Scoring performance against objectives

Making sense of your data

Data is a fickle friend. Establish methodologies for applying your data in the most constructive way to see real value from it.

The data-driven content marketer's holy grail is a single tool or dashboard that presents data on the performance and results of the entire content ecosystem of their businesses.

One piece of content might do terribly on social but pull in tons of organic traffic. Only five people might have read one report, but they read it for 30mins, interacted with 4 features and happen to be senior decision-makers.

The integrated stack

CRMs and forward-thinking tools are working on presenting the bigger picture through integrations, but there is still a way to go when it comes to connecting the entire martech stack.

Integrate what you can, but expect, for the time being, to have to combine data from different sources manually to get the fullest picture of how your content strategy is performing.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything

Ronald Coase, British economist

Brace yourself

The most important thing to keep in mind when analyzing data is to be honest with yourself and your colleagues. If you've only just started measuring content performance, you may be in for a fright when the results come in.

Measuring results –even shocking ones– is your first step towards building a content machine that genuinely delivers results for your business. Don't try to twist the data into saying what you want it to say

Content scorecards

One way to evaluate your data against objectives and get a clear view of how each piece is performing is to create objective-specific scorecards.Essentially, this means agreeing the proportional value of different types of metrics.

For instance, you could decide that one link to your content piece from an established media source is worth 1000 impressions on LinkedIn. You can then calculate the combined 'score' to achieve a single data point for comparison with other pieces.

Awareness

If you're looking to drive awareness of your brand through content, you'll need to combine awareness metrics like the below to get the whole picture of how well this is being accomplished:

New visitors/readers/viewers
Media coverage and links
Content reach on social
Event audiences

Engagement

Understand how well your content is contributing to people's trust and consideration of the brand by looking at how each piece is doing when it comes to things like:

How many repeat visitors you have
How long they spend with your content
Whether they actively share your content
Whether they decide to sign up to your newsletter after reading or watching something
Whether they get in touch with your brand directly - on any channel - after seeing a piece of content
How often they read your newsletter

Conversion

The role online touchpoints play in a conversion varies by industry but is significant in all of them.

To track and demonstrate which pieces of content have been part of a customer's journey, you need to leverage CRM cookies across as much of your content as possible.

Your CRM will then keep track of the customer's touchpoints and show which content pieces have been most influential in the building of interest, trust, and persuasion.

Of course, depending on the nature of your business, you may be able to understand the role of a content piece without this technology setup. For instance, you may have created a tailored report for an audience subset that is used by a salesperson to further conversations with a prospect.

To keep track of these use cases, you need open channels between your team and the people on the front line with prospects. You can then document anecdotal performance alongside the analytical, adding further nuance to your performance insight.

Wrapping up

A quick recap, and then you're ready.

Understand the business objectives of your organization
Know what success for your content strategy looks like
Look at how your content has performed historically
Determine your KPIs
Determine specifics of how you will measure
Combine metrics by objectives into a clear content score for each piece of content