Are Visitors Really The Right Metric To Measure In Content Marketing?

Are Visitors Really The Right Metric To Measure In Content Marketing?. That’s why many content marketers drill down to individual metrics, like site visitors, to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign. Every new visitor represents some degree of potential for conversion. Content marketing can draw visitors in from a number of different angles: Direct visits (from reputation and awareness) Social visits (from syndicated posts) Referral visits (from inbound links in external content) Organic visits (from search result visibility) However, each of these angles could draw in visitors from other means. For example, you might earn social visitors , or you might earn referral visits from a sponsored link you have on a partner’s site. For example, let’s say a reader sees your name attached to a piece of off-site content and thinks more highly of you as a result; they never visit your site, but they become more aware of your brand. Brand awareness, visibility, and reputation are notoriously difficult to quantify, but they’re all significant in the overall performance of your content campaign. Finally, knowing how many people are visiting your site doesn’t tell you anything about what those visitors actually think about your brand. Visitor counts are not a perfect metric, nor can they possibly tell you everything you need to know about a campaign. Instead of polarizing its importance one way or the other, include visitors as one of several metrics to measure as part of your overall “picture” of your content campaign.

Source: Forbes

Any marketer can tell you that it’s not enough to say you have a good campaign running; you have to prove it. The obvious place to look is your overall return on investment (ROI), but in content marketing, ROI is a complicated value that comprises , and some benefits that aren’t easily quantifiable, such as brand recognition. That’s why many content marketers drill down to individual metrics, like site visitors, to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign.

On the surface, visitor counts seem like a good point to measure—it tells you how many new people you’re attracting to your website, which is one of content marketing’s main goals—but is this really the metric we should be measuring?

Visitor numbers look pretty—big numbers are often appealing to marketers—but how much value do they really have? What are they worth?

An incoming visitor gets to see your brand fully—not just a blip or a mention of it—which means you’ll earn a higher reputation with that individual. Repeated enough times, the , whereby visitors feel a preference for something simply because it’s familiar.
Every new visitor represents some degree of potential for conversion. For example, if your average conversion rate is 5 percent, each new visitor you receive represents 1/20 of a transaction (if you choose to see value this way). This is the simplest way to quantify visitor value.
You should also count each new visitor as a potential long-term follower who could become loyal to your brand – some percentage of them will. There are many benefits to this, including increased opportunities for conversion and the .

Obviously, visitors are valuable, but how well do they reflect the results of your effort? Content marketing can draw visitors in from a number of different angles: