Measuring your content marketing success is easy, digital marketer Barry Feldman says. Just apply these 10 metrics:
Website traffic. Use Google Analytics to determine how many people visited your site, where they came from, and which pages they went to.
Subscriber growth. Monitor your headcount, because email is "your most important play for staying top-of mind with prospects," Feldman says.
Search rankings. Gauge your rankings with Google Analytics, with the goal of reaching Page 1 for any relevant search.
Time. Digital channels are unique, because they allow you to monitor "engagement" without fancy studies. You want visitors to dwell on a page for as long as it takes the average person to read the content there.
Social media followers. Far from being a “vanity metric,” audience size indicates whether the content you publish has appeal.
Social media shares. Social sharing is often automated, and people routinely share content without reading it, so shares don't mean much. But they do loosely correlate to website traffic and search rankings, so are worth your attention.
Links. "Measuring links will help you to gauge the traction your content is gaining," Feldman says. Inbound links indicate your content's cool. To measure them, set up a Talkwalker Alert.
Click-through rate. Click-through rate (CRT) is the be-all, end-all, because "marketers who earn high CTR will win regardless of the channel." CTR proves you've won the competition for people's attention.
Leads. Leads are paramount; but, remember, a lead's more than a subscriber. A lead has to "raise her hand" by registering for an event, requesting a demo, downloading a brochure, or taking some similar step.
Feedback. Comments come in many forms: social media updates, shares and direct messages; blog comments; emails and phone calls; form submissions; and reviews. Taking comments into account helps you improve your content.
