Justifying marketing spend has been a challenge since the beginning of time. Do you know whether you're leaving money on the table with your content marketing plan, hemorrhaging your budget, or missing potential revenue?

More than 50% of marketers are unsure of how effective their content marketing is, despite the overwhelming amount of tools and metrics at our disposal that can help us analyze the success of marketing campaigns.

So what is the big challenge with measuring content effectiveness? Relying on metrics alone — social shares, impression, comments, or even a spike in your Google Analytics — will not give you the full story. A large social media following does not always translate into a greater quantity of sales, the same way an overly clever email will not always lead to more newsletter sign-ups.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a degree in statistics to leverage the benefits of analytics to improve your marketing performance. In this article, we’ll explore the basics of testing your content performance — from setting objectives to identifying key metrics for analyzing your content.

First Things First: Seeing ROI Takes Time

The biggest challenge marketers face with content marketing is that the payoff is not immediate. That’s because content marketing is an asset-focused investment that provides value over time. Unlike traditional advertising where you see results quickly, it typically takes at least 18 months before you see bottom-line results from your content marketing efforts.

So after sending out one email, social post, or blog post, don’t be alarmed if your number of followers doesn’t immediately skyrocket. Tremendous ROI comes from consistently creating and distributing high-quality content that meets your audience’s needs.

And another thing to remember: revenue is important, but content marketing has far more benefits than delivering a high ROI.

Content Measurement Starts With Goals

Are you looking for a greater share of voice among your competitors? Or maybe you’re looking to garner positive brand perception among potential customers?

When planning to measure your content, it’s likely you want your content program to pay off in specific ways. The plethora of metrics out there may seem overwhelming, but chances are, your business equates success with one goal above all others.

Here are some common marketing goals:

Brand Awareness
Better Engagement
Higher Sales
Customer Retention/Loyalty
Subscription Growth

Popular Metrics ≠ Useful Metrics

Are you still clinging to vanity metrics? With the rise of content marketing and influencers, it’s easy to be wooed by a large number of page views and equating that to a large audience.

Many marketers begin by analyzing basic metrics that deal with consumption, or how many people have viewed or accessed your content. Like the name implies, these metrics refer to how often and for how long your readers are consuming your content — whether that be by viewing, following, or reading. Consumption metrics include the following:

Clicks
Likes
Page views
Follower count

The problem with these metrics is that a higher consumption doesn’t always correlate to more sales. Rather than focusing on how much of your content gets consumed, look into how this consumption influences the action your audience takes.

Collect Actionable Metrics

The success of your marketing campaign depends on the right efforts put in the right direction, and analyzing actionable metrics is the key to doing so. Deeper metrics explore engagement and retention, painting a much more accurate picture of your true audience. Let’s dive into eight of the most important metrics in gauging an effective content marketing strategy.

1. Subscriber Growth

Look at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, or The New York Times. What do they all have in common?

None of them can function without subscribers.

That’s because their main asset is their audience, not their content (although their content is top-notch). Subscription goals go deeper than vanity metrics, like clicks, views, and likes. When someone subscribes to your content, they are voluntarily saying, “Yes, I like this content and I want to see more of it.” It’s much easier to convert subscribers into paying customers.

Notice we said subscriber growth, not just quantity of subscribers. To gauge your audience investment in your content, you’ll want to monitor the rate of your subscriber growth over time and track what pieces of content are attracting the most subscribers.

2. Time on a Page

You may have a high level of website traffic, but are your viewers sticking around to peruse your content?

Dwell time is the amount of time people spend on your webpage. This metric is important for gauging if your consumers respond well to your content. The longer people stay, the more content they are consuming. Note that in Google Analytics, this metric is called session duration.

3. Percentage of Conversions and Sales

You finally press send on a campaign email you spent hours drafting, and poof — it disappears into thin air. Does this sound familiar to you?

It’s important to track conversions from email subscriptions, topics of interest, and registrations to gauge what type of content is meeting your readers’ interests and expectations. While your click through rate (CTR) measures how many people clicked your link, your conversion rate reflects the percentage of your subscribers that completed a specific action.

Your goal is not to have people simply see your content, but for the content to convert them. Similarly, a spike in sales will tell you that your content is performing well. And if you can prove your content is impacting the bottom line, you will have no problem justifying an increase in budget for your marketing efforts.

4. Customer Retention and Loyalty

You’ll always want new visitors finding your site, but a strong content marketing strategy has never been built upon attracting one-and-done visitors.

According to a sample campaign conducted by Harvard Business Review, content marketers who focused their efforts on retaining existing customers witnessed an ROI growth of more than 15 times. The reason for this is simple: it’s much easier and more cost-efficient to keep an existing customer than to find a new one.

Customers you retain over time are your true loyal brand advocates. To see how well your content is retaining customers, you’ll want to look at the ratio of returning visitors to total visitors.

5. Traffic

Website traffic is fundamental to building a business — without traffic, there is no revenue.

Traffic in itself is not a clear indicator of your content performance. You should rather analyze your increase in traffic over time. A sharp increase in traffic is good news — unless your bounce rate is high. This is the percentage of viewers that navigate away from your page after only viewing one page.

You’ll also want to track what audiences compose the bulk of your traffic. Specifically, how many of them are first-time visitors? Performing well in this area is a great indicator of success — it tells you you’re gaining traction from visitors who found you from outside sources. These sources include:

Social traffic
Organic search traffic
Direct traffic
Email traffic
Referral traffic
Paid traffic

6. Shares

There are few stronger indicators of quality content than a personal endorsement from someone you’ve never met who shares your content with their audience.

Not only is a share a sign of your content’s quality, but it’s also a sign of consumer trust of your content. There are a variety of underlying motivations that drive people to share, from adding value to their social circles to establishing who they are as a person.

Analyzing which types of content receive the most shares will also help you better plan your future content marketing efforts. For instance, one study showed that articles with an image every 75 to 100 words received double the social shares than those that didn’t.

7. Downloads

Say you release anything downloadable, like a white paper, video, or infographic. Sometimes, large pieces of content like these can be so valuable that customers may want them for future reference. This is where the value of downloads comes into play. When you offer downloadable content, you can track how many people have used it to gauge its quality and popularity.

Pro Tip: You can best use downloads to your advantage by placing them behind a “gate,” requiring users to enter their names and email addresses before downloading. Now that you have their contact info, you can follow up with them on the topic of their interest — and hopefully turn them into paying customers.

8. Inbound Links

Acquiring inbound links is a true measurement of your content quality — it means other content creators trust you enough to reference your content as a link in their content.

Inbound links are a form of off-page SEO where you earn links from other websites directing readers to your site. When you create content that appeals to other industry players, they might link it to their own content in the form of inbound links.

Not only do inbound links drive traffic to your website, but they are also a valuable component in enhancing your SEO strategy. These links tell search engines that your website is an authority on certain topics, so the more inbound links you have, the higher you will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Finally, Automate Data Collection

Content marketing analytics tools provide you with access to specific metrics and show you the overall performance of your content marketing. Google Analytics is arguably the most popular analytic tool, allowing you to analyze metrics like page views, organic traffic, and bounce rate. Here are some other top tools you can use:

Survey Monkey to help people measure unaided awareness
Google Trends can provide brand search volume over time
Buzzsumo to collect social metric data
Google Tag Manager to analyze average reader scroll depth
CoSchedule to organize, schedule, and test your social media posts
Hootsuite, perhaps the most popular social media management tool
Buffer, a chrome extension that allows you to share content anywhere

What are you Doing to Measure Content Performance Now?

The single most important question a content marketer can ask themselves is, “Why am I creating this content?” Every piece of content should have a strategic business goal tied to it, whether it’s directly driving revenue or simply increasing your brand engagement. Understanding these intricate metrics we’ve discussed is a vital step in evaluating how well your content resonates with your target audience.

Measuring The Success of Your Content Marketing Campaigns