Metrics Spotlight: Matching Analytics Reporting to Content Marketing Strategy

Jay Baer (@JayBaer) in a recent issue of Chief Content Officer magazine made a terrific metrics explanation with respect to content marketing. He outlines four useful metrics to enhance a campaign. Here's his comment:

"There are four types of content marketing metrics: consumption, sharing, leads, and sales. Most marketers overvalue the first two (blog page views and retweets, for example) and undervalue the last two (email subscriptions from people who first read the blog and, ultimately, sales from among that group). If you focus your metrics on behavior, rather than on data aggregation, you’ll be measuring points of greater business value."

Baer offers his overview of the four metrics here.

Baer's points drives the users to consider ideas beyond "applause metrics". Applause metrics are just like "hits" to a site - just reporting tweets or likes is not that same as reporting metrics that are associated with sales. Even in more simple terms, reporting tweets and likes must tie to strategic purpose to be valuable.

So, let's take Baer's points and outline a few starting metrics that can be used to measure how well your business is deploying content marketing.

Grow Influence is usually reflected in metrics that support visitor activity or consumption. For content that can mean:

• page views (reading content)
• event tracking of expected visitor action (video plays, white paper downloads)
• referral visits from media containing URL tags (email, paid ads, banner)

Build Awareness occurs through sharing on social media. This means comparing the number of shares across networks and site activity that is driven by the traffic. Different analytic solutions offer different reporting solutions. Google Analytics records interaction through its social hub and social reports while Adobe offers a specific application called Adobe Social to measure social media behavior.

Drive Leads and Sales Let's combine these two points for convenience; the business objective is to gain conversions of leads into sales. So be it B2B or online commerce businesses, website conversions reflect online activity. Conversions are the percentage of visits that create a sale or a registration for a sales call. Thus consider percentages of site activity that produces leads or sales. This may require some detailed planning of content and tags that support an analytic solution. But the end result should connect metrics to the media used in marketing the content.

There are also more ways to refine reporting. Reports that cover multichannel sources and visitors flow through a website can further show what influenced visitors the most in making a conversion. Segmentation can permit a comparison of the intended site audience against the traffic quality being achieved from the content marketing strategy.

What metrics do you see for your content strategy? Share your thoughts below.

For another overview, check out the Zimana post:  "What Are Good Basic Marketing Objectives for paid search, social media, and content marketing"