The most successful marketers have their content creation strategy down to a science: plan, create, promote, measure, rinse and repeat. This is how the best content marketing gets done. Each step is dependent upon the previous one, to achieve success.
Why then, do so many content creators disregard their analytics when measurement and analysis are so crucial to ongoing improvement?
If you want your content to succeed, it’s time to pay attention to the data. Here are seven simple ways to gauge your content’s success:
- Website Traffic – If you’re not regularly measuring this metric, you could be leaving money on the table. Use Google analytics to identify your content’s strengths, detect information gaps, and become aware of the areas that need improvement. It’s important to measure growth month over month, but you should also be comparing the current month’s data to the data from the same period, last year. This provides a frame of reference, to avoid misinterpreting the influence of seasonality.
- Search Rankings – The websites with the highest rankings show up on page-one, they’re the ones who get all the clicks. Subscription services such as Moz, Ahrefs or SEMRush continually monitor your site’s ranking by periodically crawling your website, then reporting any issues.
- Time on Site – According to Hubspot, more than half of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a given website. Use Google’s “Average Time on Page” feature to determine how specific pages on your site, perform. You’ll need to consider the content of each page individually. The user experience of a page with a 30 second video, versus a page with a 2,500 word article can cause time on site to vary significantly, from one page to another.
- Click-through Rate– One metric to rule them all! Your click-through rate is a key component to success.
- Links and Domain Authority – Google’s algorithm views inbound links (links from other domains that drive traffic to your site, also known as backlinks) as an indication that you are creating strong content. You may also find helpful insights and improvement opportunities by monitoring your domain authority with tools like the Moz, Open Site Explorer and the Mozbar Chrome extension.
- Social Followers – An ongoing, steady increase in the number of social medial followers you have is a clear indicator that the content you share across your social channels is resonating with your audience.
- Social Shares – Determine the content your audience finds valuable by examining what your followers are choosing to share with their network. In addition to overall social shares, you’ll want to have an understanding of the shares generated by individual pieces of content, shares by channel and the traffic your site is generating from those shares.
