When it comes to the marketing tools used to analyze how well your work is performing, there are many options, including both analytics and metrics tools. Both data-driven and metrics-focused marketing efforts can be used by any company if that company keeps in mind a few simple rules. Below are some tactics, measures, and tools you can use to see how well your marketing efforts are working:
1. The Importance of Sales Numbers
With any marketing campaign, the basic goal is to increase your bottom line, so determining how your content performs against the objective is crucial. This is simpler when your company has a lot of customers, as it makes it easier to develop an order value average. You can even look at the amount of money you are making per content piece by multiplying the average order value by the number of sales.
2. Generating Leads
Content marketing doesn’t just mean lead generation, but it is a very important factor of successful content marketing campaigns. It can sometimes be difficult to measure your leads generated with a specific content. However, it is a great way to find out the ROI on your content, and return on investment is an important aspect of any marketing program.
3. Time on Page
When readers enjoy what you write, they will remain on your site longer—when it comes to Google, this is significant because it means a better ranking position. One search engine ranking factor that isn’t given much attention, but is important, is average visit duration. With Google Analytics, you can actually scroll down and look at the time, on average, that a particular reader spent on a specific content piece. This will help you with any future marketing efforts.
4. Bounce Rate
This is yet another ranking factor that some marketers overlook. It basically measures the amount of visits to individual pages as related to the visit totals. If your bounce rate is low, this is a good thing. Simply put, this means the content you’ve used will attract visitors to your site. If you want to see the bounce rate for any of your site’s pages, you can use Google Analytics. If you want to lower your bounce rate, you should aim for numerous internal links and information that is high-quality and easily devoured by users.
5. Metrics for Social Media
Measures such as reach, engagement, and share of voice make social outlets some of the largest data sources in the world. Social signals are increasingly tied to SEO, so you have to pay attention to these numbers when measuring how well your readers receive your content.
6. Generating Backlinks
One of the most important search engine algorithm aspects is the backlinks. When backlinks are high in quality and attract readers from blogs and websites in your industry, your rankings will be higher and you’ll get more traffic. Your content will continue to attract backlinks if it is useful and informative, so working to make your content a good resource for your readers is especially important.
7. Blog Post Comments
The more comments contained on blog posts, Facebook posts, etc., the higher the number of users on your post. When you determine the usefulness of your content as it relates to your readers, this is related directly to the number of comments found on your site. You can establish the topics that your readers liked by analyzing which comments are drawn in by a specific section of released content.
8. Subscriptions to Mailing Lists
Subscribers to your mailing list are extremely important. Having a menu of readers who are interested means an increase in repeat visits, and also in these readers becoming community members. When your list of subscribers starts to stagnate or shrink, this may be because your value, depth, or quality is diminishing. Naturally, subscribers aren’t the only measure of the success of your content, but they are an extremely important one. Therefore, it is imperative that you continually work on the quality of your content and keep the subscribers list increasing.
Improving your content marketing efforts means not only evaluating your efforts so far, but also doing things to improve your marketing program’s results in the future. Only by constantly reviewing the results will you learn how to improve your efforts from that point forward, which includes some of the suggestions described so far.
