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.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.

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

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.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.

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.

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

Seth Godin

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

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

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

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