This is part nine of the long-standing “Content is King” series from Boston Web Marketing, which focuses on the importance of content marketing for SEO, conversions, and brand building.
Any digital marketing team or businesses that has created and scaled their content marketing efforts need to ensure that their efforts are leading to optimal results. Even though the main cornerstones of content marketing include copy quality, keywords, and the buyer’s journey, tracking these results helps to define if your efforts are leading to conversions and purchases on your website.
Most digital marketers should be familiar with the following marketing metrics, but it always helps to go back to basics when measuring marketing results. Additionally, we’ll also break down how these metrics apply to specific content pieces you create and how you could re-tailor content to generate more engagement:
Understand the types of sessions, users, and visitor behaviors of your content pieces
The number of sessions on your content page or piece is the simplest way to determine how many individuals have viewed said piece. A session is any visit from a user that lands on your page. But there are other types of visibility metrics that can help determine if your content is attracting new or consistent attention.
User counts are the number of unique individuals that visit your content piece. User counts are usually lower than sessions because one user could reload or revisit a page multiple times.
Additionally, identifying new and returning users are good metrics to see if your content is more likely to retain the attention of interested visitors or attract newer ones.
When a user lands on your content piece, you’ll also want to check if the content is retaining their information by measuring a page’s bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that immediately leave a page once they land on it. An abnormally high bounce rate (above 80%) usually means that visitors aren’t interested in the page’s content.
Additionally, a great way to measure your content, and website’s, engagement potential is to measure the number of pages per session. If your visitors are averaging above two pages per session, it usually means that they are interested in the pages and content you are creating.
Click-through-rate determines if your content leads to an actionable decision for your reader
A click-through-rate or CTR is the ratio of how many individuals that land on a page decides to click through to another page. For content pieces, it is important to understand the difference between CTR and a conversion rate.
A conversion rate on your website, or content piece, is the ratio of people that make a purchase or convert to a customer from a specific page. If you’re more interested in getting people to land on a certain page or direct conversions from content, you’ll want to ensure you’re measuring the right goal.
If you have a unique content piece that you designed to land on a new page, then you should focus on CTR. If the content you’re creating is intended to create more conversions, then the conversion rate is more appropriate.
Make sure you set up conversion tracking and frequently review your content metrics to re-strategize
If you’re not sure if your website and content are being properly monitored, then it helps to install the following Google marketing tools onto your website:
- Google Analytics: Helps to determine the visibility of your website and shows how certain content pieces are performing. GA is the simplest way to start tracking the basic performance of your content pieces.
- Google Tag Manager: Google Tag Manager is one of the most customization ways to track goals and conversions for your website and content pieces. Tag Manager allows users to set up specific conversion tracking for their entire website as well as for certain pages. Tag Manager also links with your Google Analytics account and creates a universal platform to see how your web marketing efforts perform.
- Google Search Console: Search Console is a free web platform service where website administrators and webmasters can review the pages indexed on their website, keywords, and the types of searches that show your website. Google Search Console is one of the most useful tools to detect potential website penalties and indexing issues.
If you already have these tools in place make sure to frequently review your content performance on your website. Looking at factors like conversion rate may help to determine if new content pieces, conversion placement, or page content should be updated. Other metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit, and sessions can determine if users are landing on your content and staying on the page long enough to make a decision.
If you are struggling to integrate these tools or your website or setting up performance tracking, please call us directly for a free SEO audit and help to understand KPIs for online marketing.