There is plenty of content online on every conceivable topic. However, if you want to assert yourself these days, you need to Market content effectively. From conception to creation to distribution, delivering innovative content consumes many resources. 
One topic that often ends up falling by the wayside is the content marketing Success measurement.
You've invested a lot of time in presenting your content and now you want to know, was it worth the effort? Or you have exhausted your budget for paid advertisements and want to get the Cost-benefit ratio check?
In content marketing, you can use a number of different Key Performance Indicators - or key performance indicators. With the help of a thorough analysis of the KPIs, you are able to optimize your measures and improve your Marketing goals to reach.
Identify core characteristics: Key Performance Indicators
For the measurement of success in the Content Marketing it is important to first provide clear Set goals. Do you want to promote your brand with your content? Or do you want to generate sales? A higher reach or more engagement are also possible marketing goals.
To measure your metrics, you can use tools such as. Google Analytics, Google Alerts, Serpstat and Matomo use
In content marketing, KPIs describe both quantitative as well as qualitative key figures. If the measured key figures are linked to the achievement of a specific target, they become meaningful indicators. For example, 300 new newsletter subscribers are to be reached by the end of the month.
Of course, you don't have to measure all potential KPIs. It makes more sense to focus on focus on some specific points. Based on your objective, you can then determine exactly which of the following variables you want to examine.
Traffic and visitors
The Website traffic is a possible indicator of the success of your content marketing. The more visitors has one side, the higher is apparently the Reach and content quality.
You have the possibility to subdivide your visitors. Depending on the way they found your offer:
- Search: Search for example via Google
- Social media: Visitors coming to their page from Instagram, Facebook or Twitter
- Paid Traffic: Visitors through paid ads (Paid Traffic should be considered separately from other variables).
However, this is not enough to evaluate traffic in purely quantitative terms. Rather, you should focus on what you can learn from the traffic metrics for the overall Customer Journey can derive.
A more precise Viewing the page visits can provide new insights here. Which subpages do your potential customers visit?
Consequently, look at what information your visitors are most interested in and what pages get few clicks.
In this context, above all the Bounce rate as an indicator for measuring the success of the Content Marketing interesting. The question can be asked, how many pages were visited before the person left your site or when exactly do most visitors bounce? In this regard, if your page is abandoned after a few seconds in the majority of cases, you should act.
A longer dwell time, in turn, could also mean that the visitor takes too long to find the information they are looking for. In most cases, this is related to the bounce rate. So a possible marketing goal could be to increase the Reduce bounce rateFor example, by improving the customer journey.
Page views
The more visits to different pages you measure, the higher seems to be the Interest of potential customers to your offer. Here it is instructive to compare the new and returning visitors. If many visitors come back to your offer, your content is obviously interesting enough to be read more often. If you have a relatively large number of new visitors, then your Range very high.
Also the number of Access via mobile devices versus the number of desktop devices is an interesting variable. Because if there are far more mobile visitors on a page in the long run, you can design the content accordingly.
In this context, there are elements that can distort your metrics. For example, a too-small "close" button on a mobile pop-up can cause click-through numbers to be over-interpreted because customers are just clicking on your ad by mistake.
Conversion rate and turnover
One of the key KPIs for the ROI (return on investment) in online marketing campaigns and in the Content Marketing is the Conversion rate. In principle, a conversion is only a change in the status of a visitor, for example, the conversion of a prospect into a paying customer.
Conversions don't have to be purchases though, it can also be the decision to subscribe to a newsletter, register as a user or click on a banner.
In this area, the KPIs overlap each other. At this point, a precise analysis is therefore of great importance. You should not judge pages that are visited little prematurely as not performing well. Often, a page with minimal visits can show a high conversion rate. In this case it is worthwhile to Increase range. At this step could Social media postings be switched.
At paid ads it is recommended to take a closer look at the number of conversions per ad. This will help you calculate how much you need to pay for each conversion and if the cost-benefit ratio is not right, you can do without unprofitable ads.
Engagement
Innovative and likeable content automatically makes your visitors want to interact with you. Be it through shares, likes or personal comments. Therefore the Engagement Rate an excellent qualitative criterion to get one step closer to measuring success in content marketing.
However, comments do not necessarily have to be posted on the blog to generate engagement. Often the discussion shifts to the social networks, which in most cases generates many new visitors.
KPIs - never look at them in isolation
The key to measuring success, then, is to look at equal at the beginning to consider, What goals you would like to achieve. It is advantageous to focus on a few specific KPIs. Above all, keep the interactions between the various KPIs in mind. Viewed in isolation, most KPIs otherwise quickly lead to fallacies. Depending on the objective, you should also Interpret KPIs at regular intervals. Thus, by measuring success, you can take timely action to improve your Content Marketing to optimize.
