Why You’re Measuring Your Content Marketing Wrong

The conventional system to measure the effectiveness of content is highly fragmented. The process to measure pieces of content is in pieces, and it’s high-time we piece it together into a cohesive whole. The metrics of page views or bounce rate to measure the performance of the content needs a complete overhaul.

The primary element of any content is the impact it creates, and not the traffic it generates. The automation tool used to measure a story must track its potential reach and understand the shares and traffic. The achievement of your story need not be based on the eyeballs it gets on it, and in that case, everyone shifts to sites that make glorified claims of getting you paid traffic.

Even if you achieve a monumental growth in your traffic, it’s unlikely that you may achieve your business goals. Also, an important concern would be whether the content is well suited to the tastes and preferences of the web visitor or not.

The marketing team can complain that it’s an arduous task to gauge the performance of different pieces of content. However, in reality, it’s not that difficult as it may seem to be.

It’s just that you have to decide to measure your content marketing campaigns on a micro level.

Engagement Does Matter

In any marketing campaign, the content measurement has to be aligned with your business goals. Which means its success is dependent on the realization of your core objectives.

For example, if you aim to generate 500 leads every day from your published content, you have to place a proper system in place to gather and track the leads.

On an elementary level, the parameters of tracking and engagement help you achieve your business goals. So all the content-driven campaigns should encompass a strong reporting system.

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Total Time Reading

Another metric that adds more insights than page views is Total Time Reading. This is used by the online publishing platform, Medium. This metric cumulates the total number of minutes spent on reading an article. To illustrate, if you have 30 visitors to your blog post and everyone has spent close to 5 minutes on it, then the total reading time would be 150 minutes.

They measure all the user interactions with a particular post. This measure is more powerful than page views as it gives accurate user footprints on your articles and blogs. An article with 100 page views can have a greater Total Time Reading than one with 300 page views.

Scroll Depth and Time on Page

The metric that’s next in line is a simpler one that checks the average time on a page. This is present within Google Analytics. The average time spent is an indication of how engaging your content is and how the visitors are making the most of it. Adding to this is scroll depth, which gives you to what extent the visitor has scrolled down the page. Both time on page and scroll depth give a better picture of the engagement levels of your visitors and understand what type of content is bringing more visitors to the website.

Social Lift

Any great piece of content doesn’t make waves unless it becomes viral. The Social Lift metric of BuzzFeed helps you understand the virality of your post. It measures through social views that come from outside such as referral & affiliate traffic and social media, and seed views that are inclusive of traffic coming from within the BuzzFeed platform. This metric enables you to determine the viral potential of your content.

Finally, it all boils down to how engaging your content is and how it’s instrumental in bringing more visitors to the website. There might be many traditional ways to track the content and the ones listed above can take your content marketing and measurement to a different altitude.