Measure Content Performance in 7 Steps

How do you know if the content you create has a measurable impact? In this post, we break the content performance measurement process into seven simple steps.

Your content strategy has kicked into gear and you’re regularly creating and posting according to your schedule. Great! Now, take a step back to measure whether your content meets specific business goals and your target audiences’ needs. In this post, we show you how.

Our Content Performance Measurement Process

Here are seven steps to follow to learn whether your content is effective at helping you meet key goals.

1. Revisit Your Content Goals

What was the reason you created a content strategy in the first place? Was it to generate sales leads for a new service offering? To provide material for donors to share via social networks? To educate stakeholders on processes or practices in your industry?

Think back to the initial reason you created a content strategy and focus on those objectives.

• Are they still relevant?
• Do they need to be updated or revised in any way?
• Are there any gaps that can be filled with new goals?

Create or revise the goals from your content strategy. Use these goals to guide the type of content you create and how it’ll be measured.

2. Which Performance Metrics Best Measure Your Goals?

Now that you’re clear about the goals of your content, decide which key metrics will help you best determine whether your content is meeting your goals. You may have more than one goal and that’s okay. Just remember to focus on metrics that matter for your organization. This is crucial for a successful digital marketing strategy.

Examples include:

• If you’re trying to generate leads for a new product or service, tracking landing page traffic and page conversions. This will give you an idea of how many potential customers are finding your content and taking the desired actions after they visit your site.
• If you’re trying to provide material for donors or other stakeholders to share via social networks, you might track the number of shares each piece of content gets. Tracking overall content traffic or email signups might also be helpful.

These performance metrics are known as your key performance indicators (KPIs). Prioritize them in ongoing meetings and reporting moving forward. This will help you learn as you go.

3. Set a Baseline Tracking Metric

Given the data you’ve decided to track, set a baseline metric either from current time forward or from a time before you started implementing your content strategy. This helps you understand where you are to get a better idea of where you want to go.

Once this is done, track KPIs at regular intervals moving forward. This will be your go-to reference whenever you need to check content performance.

4. Don’t Try to Track Everything

In digital, tools enable you to track almost anything. Because of this, it can be tempting to track everything. However, this muddies your marketing efforts and can cause confusion.

Once you’ve established content goals and you know what KPI’s to track in order to effectively measure those goals, ignore metrics that don’t serve these goals. Instead, choose only the metrics that matter to your business.

For instance, you might be interested in how your overall site traffic increases after you boost content volume on your blog, but perhaps the number of comments on individual blog posts won’t matter to you.

Don’t weigh yourself down trying to track everything that’s trackable; focus on your KPIs.

5. Are Your Goals Realistic?

Do some research to determine what a realistic goal is, given the content you’re creating. For instance, it’s not likely you’ll see a 50% conversion rate on a landing page when industry averages are typically 3-6%. If you’re trying to measure up to impossible standards you might think your content underperforms when actually you’re doing quite well.

To figure out if your content stacks up, do a Google search on terms like “typical landing page conversion rates” or “B2B blog bounce rate average”. That should yield interesting insights.

6. Compare or Test Similar Content Types

If you’re running an article series, it might help you to compare several blog posts on the same or similar topics to see which one performed best. Or if you’re sending out a weekly email, figure out which subject lines get the highest open rate.

Either way, pay attention to patterns and trends that will indicate, over time, what resonates best with your audience.

You can also run an A/B test to serve up small variations in content that will give you an idea what versions of your content perform better with your target audience.

7. Make Adjustments to Move the Needle

Good governance is key to long-term content performance success. Use the information you gather by comparing content or analyzing the results of your A/B test to make small hypotheses.

For example:

• The forms with fewer fields get more submissions.
• Bog posts with charts, graphs, or original research get shared more often.
• And so on…

Once you have defined these hypotheses, tweak existing and new content to maximize performance. Test your assumptions to see if the altered content better meets your goals.

Finding Your Own Content Performance Metrics

We didn’t write this post with specific metrics in mind because everyone’s content and business goals are different. However, by following the process above, you can devise and implement a plan that will support your long-term digital marketing goals over time.