Content is the backbone of all digital marketing. From attracting and engaging audiences, driving leads and conversions, to building brand loyalty, effective content is crucial for digital marketing success.
But how do you know if your content is effective? What content metrics should you track to assess your content strategy, make data-driven adjustments, and experiment with different approaches to find out what works best for your audience?
We often come across client marketing teams struggling to understand why their pages are not getting traffic or why a specific page is not converting.
While these questions may be valid, they signal a core issue –a lack of understanding of the expectations and goals for your content strategy.
For example, have you defined what “performance” for a page would be before you question if the page works? Is the page aligned with the user’s “happy path” on your website? Is the page expected to (and built to) drive conversions to begin with? How do you measure your content’s performance?
It all starts with internalizing one core principle. As iQuanti’s Wayne Cichanski (VP of Search and Site Experience) so aptly put it in his recent webinar:
Your content should always have an identity and a role, meaning that not all content is created equal.
You need to know what your content is about and what its purpose is. It’s important for you to be able to characterize and level set expectations within your organization because every one of these pages is going to have a different role. You need to write with a purpose, and need to know what to write, and why you’re writing it. Stand behind your belief. Commit to that purpose and then know the identity of your assets and understand the role of those assets.
Now that we have this level setting, ask the question, how do you know if the content is really working?
Seven key content measurement metrics content marketers need to track in 2024
Across industries and organizations small and large, we’ve seen brands use four standard metrics to measure their content effectiveness:
- Traffic to website/pages
- Search engine page ranking
- Conversions from website/pages
- Share of voice in comparison to competitors
These are all valid and important metrics. But these are only by-products of high-performing content. For example, your page may have useful, well-written, valuable content, but you may fail to rank in Google because your page lacks authority. This in turn means that you are not getting any organic traffic to the page, and hence no conversions. Does this mean the content was not good? Not necessarily. Yes, they give a clear picture of the impact of the content on your bottom line, but by themselves, they fail to help you measure the effectiveness or usefulness of the content itself, especially from a user’s perspective.
Any assessment of the performance of your content measured against these content metrics alone would be incomplete.
Here are seven additional KPIs we would recommend you measure to get a comprehensive understanding of why (and how) your content is performing.
1. Consumer demand and search volume:
Does your content match the consumer demand?
Measuring consumer demand is about understanding what people are searching for. For example, your users may be searching for fanny packs (avg. monthly search volume – 14800) vs. waist packs (avg. monthly search volume -590). Ask yourself if you are matching consumer demand. If not, it may be time to get back to basics and do more keyword research to identify the right language, keywords/themes that represent what your consumers are looking for and build the right content assets that you can measure against this demand.
2. Topical journey coverage:
Do you have content across each stage of the user journey?
Your content strategy needs to address the “happy path” that you want your users to take on your website. You need to understand the most common user journeys across different stages of the purchase funnel and ensure you have content matching their needs at each stage. Additionally, ensure these are connected to enable the consumer to move through this funnel with ease.
This allows you to:
a. Fix broken user journeys that hinder user experience and conversions
b. Identify new opportunities and points of entry to accommodate the varied needs of users entering your website at different stages of need/purchase.
Let’s look at an example. For a content cluster around “mutual funds,” missing assets along the journey can quickly result in the user going back to search and completing purchase from a different brand, even if you have the first attribution.
When you do content planning right, every page on your website becomes a home page. It’s your job to connect the dots and make sure users can move from one milestone or one content page to the next, enhancing overall user experience.
3. Content depth:
Do you have enough relevant content assets? Do you know what your content gaps are?
Search engines always ideally want to match each user intent to a page on your website. This means that as you set out to cover the topical journey, you will be able to list down topics that you want to cover, match them to journey stages, and map where your current content assets stand in terms of content depth at each stage and where you need to build more. For example, if you identified 87 topics/intents across your user’s “happy path” and you only have 41% of those covered, your content strategy should solve for covering the gap in topical depth.
Another way of looking at this is in terms of search volumes. You want your content assets to cover all the keyword themes/clusters across the user journey, and a good rule of thumb is to follow the 80:20 rule – can you get 80% of the volume covered by 20% of the overall assets needed? The objective is to measure your gaps, how effective you are compared to the demand, and how effective you are compared to the overall depth of the topic.
4. Content relevancy:
How relevant is your content to the intent of a page?
Notice how we said the intent of a page, not a keyword/phrase. Keywords are a representation of the overall topical search intent. What content marketers need to do is define an intent/objective for every page, which is a factor of both what is the user’s search intent or need as well as what is your business goal for that particular page.
How do you measure content relevancy? At iQuanti, we use our proprietary AI-driven enterprise SEO tool ALPS, to measure:
a. Topic cluster relevancy: How relevant are you across all the pages under a specific topic cluster?
b. Page relevancy: How relevant is this individual page for the intent of the page?
Mapping your performance on these content metrics against competitors can be a great starting point for building a robust content plan for 2024.
5. Tonality and voice:
How well do you know your audience? Are you communicating in a way that they understand/like?
Matching content elements to the audience and the persona that you are trying to reach is vital to connecting with your audience. This could include the language, diversity & and inclusivity, or even the imagery you use.
6. Engagement metrics:
Are you holistically connecting your engagement metrics to understand what needs to change on your content pages?
Engagement metrics – scroll depth, bounce rate, time spent on a page – give you a sense of how engaged a user is with your page. Does your above-the-fold content give enough meaningful information to make the user want to scroll and read more? Are they engaged on the page? Are they spending time reading the infographics? Are they clicking on the links? These are all important metrics.
Combine them with sessions per user, the path to acquisition, and return vs. new to match the user journey to page performance and measure engagement across the website.
7. Direct and influenced conversions:
How do you assign ROI value to content pages?
Direct conversions are the content metric that is most universally tracked and reported. While it is an important KPI, content marketers often miss out on measuring another related KPI which is also very critical – influenced conversions.
Recognize that the value of pages in a user journey funnel is spilling over from one stage to the other. So, while most pages do not have a direct CTA or are not lead-gen or conversion pages, they still influence a user’s decision to ultimately purchase or engage with your brand. This contribution needs to be accounted for when you are assessing the value of individual pages, prioritizing building new ones, or even planning to decommission a few.
The digital marketing landscape is evolving faster than ever before. Digital marketers must stay agile and responsive to these changes and relearn measurement beyond just clicks. We recommend you add these seven key KPIs to your measurement matrix and get a more holistic view of the effectiveness of your content as it relates to your users and your business goals in 2024.
If you need help assessing your 2024 content marketing strategy or simply have any questions, reach out to us at marketing@iquanti.com.
