How to Measure Your Content Marketing Effectiveness

How to Measure Your Content Marketing Effectiveness

We know how important it is for content marketers to tie their results to marketing and business goals, so we’ve updated it with new suggestions and resources. How to track basic KPIs When putting your measurement program in place, start by deciding how frequently you’ll collect your data. Your plan for gathering this performance information. I can’t stress enough that everyone working on content marketing needs to know the core KPIs for measuring the marketing effectiveness of your content. This post from Michele Linn outlines some critical data points you can collect and immediately put to good use: 4 Google Analytics Reports Every Content Marketer Should Use. However, we’ve found it’s more important to track conversions to email subscription, topics of interest, and registrations for a CMI activity such as Content Marketing World. After a year of looking at these KPIs, the CMI team re-evaluated these metrics and made one significant change: We now only track our most actionable metrics, such as email subscribers, email engagement rate, time on site, and event registrations. Talk to and learn from industry peers Early in our efforts to measure content performance, we had been looking at growth in particular areas – social followers, email subscribers, and the like. What analytics tips and tools do you have that help you track and measure your content performance? Don’t miss your opportunity to learn from industry peers.

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Editor’s note: You may have missed the original post when we published it several years ago. We know how important it is for content marketers to tie their results to marketing and business goals, so we’ve updated it with new suggestions and resources.

What does it mean that your content marketing is “working?” In general, this means it’s supporting your marketing and business goals.

Here’s a simple way to track your content marketing program and, more importantly, how to communicate this to your team and management.

How to track basic KPIs

When putting your measurement program in place, start by deciding how frequently you’ll collect your data. A good schedule to start with is measuring marketing effectiveness on a monthly basis. This has worked well for CMI, though we watch some metrics weekly to make sure monthly goals stay on track — especially those we can address quickly.

Then, create a spreadsheet that documents and tracks the following:

  • Your marketing goals. If you have several, it may help to put them in order of priority. (By this point, you should have agreed on goals with your management team; if you haven’t, now is the time to get on the same page.)
  • The key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure the marketing effectiveness of your content.
  • Your plan for gathering this performance information.
  • Who will be responsible for collecting and reporting this data.

Here’s a simple spreadsheet you can use based on our experience at CMI. If your metrics spreadsheet is something you plan to share with others across your enterprise (which we highly recommend), consider using Google Sheets or another shared platform so everyone can view and make changes when necessary.

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

I can’t stress enough that everyone working on content marketing needs to know the core KPIs for measuring the marketing effectiveness of your content. Whether or not they’re directly involved with your content analytics, it’s critical that content creators understand how their work impacts overarching company goals.

Here are some examples of KPIs you may want to track:

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Getting started

Measuring content marketing effectiveness can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. Don’t measure simply for the sake of having some numbers to present to your management. If you aren’t certain what you should be measuring, ask yourself these two questions:

  • Do these metrics support my key goals?
  • Can I act on these metrics (i.e., will they provide insight into how I can improve my program)?

Unless you can answer “yes” to the questions above, you likely don’t need to be collecting the data — at least at first. This post from Michele Linn outlines some critical data points you can collect and immediately put to good use: 4 Google Analytics Reports Every Content Marketer Should Use.

At CMI, one of our primary goals is getting new email subscribers, as this goal is a key to our business model. We track how many subscribers we have, but we also delve into data such as:

  • Where subscribers…

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