Content analytics and measuring success right

De­vel­op­ing the perfect content marketing strategy is an art in itself. You need relevant, high-quality content, the right channels, a suitable promotion strategy, and of course you need to aim it at the ap­pro­pri­ate target audience. Anyone who meets all this criteria is on the path to success. Content marketing will help not only to promote customer con­fid­ence in a way that is rarely possible through push marketing channels, it can also have a positive effect on sales figures as well as enorm­ously in­creas­ing brand awareness.

But just how do you go about proving that there is a positive effect? Is a par­tic­u­lar strategy def­in­itely proving to be suc­cess­ful? And if not, is it the case that the overall goals need to be re­con­sidered or maybe it could just be the core aspects of a strategy need to be reset? Questions like these are being asked by marketers all the time, es­pe­cially given that the pro­fes­sion­al execution of a well-planned, well thought through strategy requires a lot of time and money. At the end of the day, this in­vest­ment must be worth it, i.e. the benefits must outweigh the costs – prof­it­ab­il­ity is and will always remain the driving factor behind online marketing. Below we outline how you can measure content marketing success, the best tools for content marketing analytics, as well as how to identify exactly what requires im­prove­ment and op­tim­isa­tion.

In order to begin measuring success you must first have well-defined goals. Measuring success is im­possible without a clear and well-defined list of ob­ject­ives. The aims of a content marketing strategy are in­trins­ic­ally linked with the primary marketing ob­ject­ives, which among others are:

• Awareness: this could also be called brand awareness. Content marketing is often used to strengthen the brand name of a company. Consumers should associate certain products and services with a specific company - and consider them to be experts in that field.

• Loyalty: content marketing is a useful means for building and securing consumer relations. Many online busi­nesses are in an ongoing battle with declining customer loyalty. Having said that, customers are attracted through the use of in­ter­est­ing and in­form­at­ive content that can coax them into becoming regular customers.

• En­gage­ment: social media, for most companies, is the found­a­tion of content seeding. But simply sharing content is usually not enough, which ensures that consumer en­gage­ment, i.e. actual in­ter­ac­tion between the customer and the company, is the name of the game.

• Leads: in marketing a lead is the suc­cess­ful es­tab­lish­ment of contact between companies and potential customers. With content marketing, gen­er­at­ing sub­stan­tial leads is one of the major aims.

• Turnover: this par­tic­u­lar aim is pretty self-ex­plan­at­ory. Ul­ti­mately, all new measures should con­trib­ute to the financial success of a company, and in most cases  that means an increase in sales figures.

Key Per­form­ance In­dic­at­ors (KPIs) are values used in order to assess the progress made in the context of overall aims. This allows for the iden­ti­fic­a­tion of suc­cess­ful com­pon­ents, the un­cov­er­ing of weak points, and sub­sequently the con­tinu­ous op­tim­isa­tion of a strategy. The most common content KPIs for marketing used as control measures are as follows:

• Awareness: visitor numbers, page im­pres­sions, video views, hits, downloads, social media activity

• Loyalty: news­let­ter sub­scrip­tions/un­sub­scrip­tions, opening rates, average length of stay, bounce rate

• En­gage­ment: social signals like Likes, Shares, Retweets, blog comments, com­pet­i­tion entries, inbound links/backlinks

• Leads: news­let­ter sub­scrip­tions, enquiries via online formulae or emails, con­ver­sion rate

• Turnover: sales, downloads, trans­ac­tions

In our digital guide you will find an overview of the most important online marketing KPIs. But bear in mind that just because something is meas­ur­able does not ne­ces­sar­ily mean it will help provide you with an overview of the prof­it­ab­il­ity of your content marketing activity. Below we have outlined some of the most important content marketing KPIs that often seem to be mis­in­ter­preted and should therefore be ap­proached with caution.

Visitors to your website, es­pe­cially unique visitors, are a very important figure. However you need to be careful with how you interpret this statistic, as the bare numbers actually provide very little in­form­a­tion regarding what the visitor has actually done on the page. Are they spending several minutes on one page? Are they down­load­ing something? Or have they maybe moved on very quickly from a certain article? Visitor numbers are a purely quant­it­at­ive figure and for that reason give do not give any kind of deep insight into the user’s in­ter­ac­tion with the site.

When a unique visitor clicks through your website or blog, they create what is known as page im­pres­sions. Similarly to the visitor numbers, this also refers to a purely quant­it­at­ive figure. Ul­ti­mately it provides no in­dic­a­tion of how a person has behaved on the page. A high number of page im­pres­sions, in some cir­cum­stances, will mean you have an in­ter­est­ing site. However it could also mean that the visitor has not found whatever it was that they were looking for, and as a result has just randomly clicked through the site. When viewed alongside figures like bounce rate and stay time (see below), page im­pres­sions can prove to be an important indicator for how at­tract­ive and in­ter­est­ing the content of a certain page is.

In terms of analytics, the bounce rate refers to users who leave the site im­me­di­ately after arrival. ‘Im­me­di­ately’ in this case means without having un­der­taken a single scroll or click.

The bounce rate provides a ratio of visitors who stayed for longer and engaged with the site, against those who departed again almost im­me­di­ately. This ratio can be seen as a parameter for further potential op­tim­isa­tion, and es­pe­cially with regards to search engine op­tim­isa­tion the bounce rate certainly plays a big role. A high bounce rate lets the search engine know that the quality of the content provided does not cor­res­pond with the ex­pect­a­tions of the visitors.

A further qual­it­at­ive factor that should be con­sidered is the average length of stay. The time spent by someone on the site provides an insight into how visitors interact with a site’s content, more spe­cific­ally whether they actually read what is written there. It is seen as a bad sign if the average length of stay comprises of just several seconds, and there is def­in­itely room for im­prove­ment and a need for op­tim­isa­tion – in certain cir­cum­stances this might be regarding the present­a­tion or visual layout of the site. On the other hand, a longer length of stay demon­strates that the content is in­ter­est­ing, and can certainly be seen as a positive sign.

This is an umbrella term that covers many in­di­vidu­al key figures and content marketing KPIs, including reach, likes, shares, etc. The level of in­ter­ac­tion on social media platforms is a major factor for many busi­nesses. But just like the figures mentioned above, these numbers should also be taken with a pinch of salt. In order to increase in­ter­ac­tion with Facebook statuses, etc., many editorial desks will use cheap tricks like so-called click­bait­ing. However when it comes to content marketing, the quality of the posts should always be the priority.

Once your goals have been outlined and the content marketing KPIs defined, now begins the constant su­per­vi­sion of the success of your content. Every pro­fes­sion­al content campaign should be in­ter­twined with a clear customer journey tracking. There are several tools spe­cific­ally for content marketing analytics that are there to help with observing and analysing of your online content.

Chartbeat has shown itself to be the ideal tool for content analytics. Not only does it analyse which articles, topics, and headings have gone down well, it also offers real time visitor data – visitor sources (i.e. where they came from), visitor behaviour, length of stay, and click paths are all easily viewable. Marketers have access to a dashboard that offers a clear overview of all relevant activ­it­ies in real time. This live success mon­it­or­ing of a website and its content allow busi­nesses to im­me­di­ately react and if needed, to quickly interact with website visitors.

A very simple tool to use, Like Explorer provides a quick overview of which content has been well received on social media. At one glance it shows how many people have liked, commented, and shared. Simply enter the URL, e.g. of a blog post, and the tool will show the in­ter­ac­tion stat­ist­ics for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon and Pinterest. This allows for an easy com­par­is­on of various articles and posts.

Google Analytics, seen as the standard tool for web-based analysis, is also useful when it comes to content marketing analytics and measuring the success of a campaign. Google Analytics allows you to assess the per­form­ance of in­di­vidu­al posts, e.g. a blog entry, and see how many people have read it, how they came across the post, and how long on average someone spent reading the article. A powerful tool, which offers a lot more than just content analytics and op­tim­isa­tion, Google Analytics gives you the op­por­tun­ity to assess and enhance your online project. Naturally there are al­tern­at­ives to Google Analytics, like for example the open source software from Piwik. As part of our digital guide, we have another article com­pletely dedicated to these al­tern­at­ives.

Marketers who are looking for an efficient social media man­age­ment and mon­it­or­ing tool should consider So­cial­bakers. This software makes it possible to read the likes and comments from your pages and accounts, as well as allowing you to directly compare your social media presence with that of your com­pet­it­ors. In order to analyse the success of a campaign, the tool also makes it possible to draw on relevant factors like retweets, likes, reach, comments, replies, etc. Ad­di­tion­ally it also available as an API interface in­teg­ra­tion for Google Analytics.

The free tool Social Mention is ideal for companies that tend to focus all of their com­mu­nic­a­tion on social media platforms. As a business, it’s possible to exactly plan and outline what you com­mu­nic­ate via your accounts and profiles, however the target audiences’ reaction to this content always remains an unknown factor until it is actually released. This means that to some extent social content will always remain in­cal­cul­able. For this reason companies should always keep an eye on what consumers are saying about them, their brand, and whether this discourse is mostly positive or negative. Social Mention can scan over 80 social media and provide real time eval­u­ations of the user-generated content. Among other things, marketers are able to view the ratio a.k.a. ‘sentiment’, of positive mentions to negative ones, as well as giving an overview of the most important keywords, users, hashtags and sources.

The analytics tool SumAll also offers a good overview of all social media channels. One glance gives the user a view of all relevant figures such as reach, likes, fans, etc. across all ap­pro­pri­ate social media websites. It’s possible to connect profiles and accounts from up to 30 platforms, which of course include the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. SumAll allows marketing teams to assess the per­form­ance of in­di­vidu­al profiles and then compare them with others.

No content strategy can succeed without diligent mon­it­or­ing and the use of content analytics. Only through analysing and un­der­stand­ing the successes and failures of a campaign, can you optimise it further. The tools and pro­grammes mentioned above can provide a huge amount of relevant figures; the sub­sequent eval­u­ation and in­ter­pret­a­tion of these figures is precisely what is essential to making progress. At this point it is also im­per­at­ive to recognise the correct cor­rel­a­tion of these figures, not to ignore un­com­fort­able or un­desir­able realities, and to crit­ic­ally scru­tin­ise all of the in­form­a­tion at hand. Anyone who does this, should be able to create target-ori­ent­ated content and as a result, offer consumers better content. This is the key to long-term success in content marketing.