Content key performance indicators (KPIs): they will make or break your content marketing efforts. Why? Because when you do not consider the content KPIs that will go into your ongoing reporting – and ultimately your overall content strategy – you can make errors in judgment that ultimately will doom your content marketing efforts and those of your B2B copywriter.
When you consider or communicate incorrect key performance indicators, you also run into making decisions based on a result that may or may not be true. When these results are reported, uncertainties can creep into your content strategy, and can ultimately derail your success. Let’s take a look at the most common content KPIs and what they can do to help you become a more successful online marketer.
KPI Bucket 1: SEO Metrics
An SEO typically uses these metrics to report on increases in performance in the search results, usually reporting these to their client, shareholders of their company, or their boss.
These KPIs are valuable because they can track things like how a site is performing in the search results, its organic reach (or how much of a market share it is gaining in terms of keyword phrases), how many people are viewing the site, how much time people are spending on the site, and other useful metrics.
When these metrics are reported incorrectly, the result can be bad judgment calls and lousy strategic decisions. This is not good for the SEO implementation as a whole.
Say that you found a user spent so much time on the site because they were looking at certain content one month, but then the next month, they were not. While many things can cause this issue, it is important to rule out technical errors and related specific issues that can cause it.
This is because a situation like this can also be seasonal, depending on the type of website we’re dealing with. If you make a change based on one month’s worth of metrics without considering the entire 12 months (or even a few years’ worth of data) you could make a judgment call that does not consider the seasonal aspect, and this can be bad for the future.
KPI Bucket 2: Business & Conversion Metrics
These types of metrics are extremely useful for calculating the business side of things. They help ensure that website metrics are translating to the most important business metric that determines whether a company keeps running: ROI, or return on investment.
Let’s not kid ourselves. SEO, content marketing, or social media marketing, while creative endeavors, are also business endeavors. These efforts need to be reported on accurately, succinctly, and in such a way that communicates the proper ROI to those in the know and in charge. This will allow a business to keep its doors open, so that it can continue running for the foreseeable future.
The key is to always make sure that you can track the performance of these keyword phrases in some way. If there is no search volume, but there are other metrics associated with positive increases in performance (such as CPC – Cost Per Click on the PPC side – or market competition), this could be an indicator that the keyword phrase is competitive enough that it has some viability as an SEO keyword.
Another business conversion metric to keep an eye on includes conversion rates. Conversion rates tell you the other side of how your content is really performing for you. If you have content on your site that has low conversion rates, and people barely sign up for your services, it may be time to consider A/B testing to identify where improvements can be made to ensure that the content improves in a positive direction.
Yet one more important metric to keep reporting tabs on includes reviews. This is an important reputation management tactic that can make or break your website’s performance. Reviews form a perception of your business to potential clients. This perception can make clients want to do business with you, or drive you away.
KPI Bucket 3: Social Engagement Metrics
When we think of social engagement metrics, we usually think about metrics involved with social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And the former are correct in terms of how to think about these metrics. But did you know that social engagement metrics can also make or break an online marketing strategy?
Think about it: social engagement is a major method of increasing a brand’s reach towards real consumers online for a reason: because this is where real people go online to hang out, chat, and get involved with their favorite brands, celebrities, friends, and discussions.
It’s more than just a social platform – it’s a conversational social outreach explosion. Making sure that you tally the right social engagement metrics is an important part in the reporting of the effectiveness of your content KPI wins.
KPI Bucket 4: User Engagement Metrics
These metrics are important to a website’s performance KPIs because they tell us how effective content is and how effectively it is gathering traffic and drawing people to your website. Things like conversion rates, time on page, bounce rate, and page views can all be skewed or otherwise erroneously reported on, leading to errors in judgment about where to go next in the overall website content strategy.
This is where errors in judgment and furthering your content strategy can be tricky, because if you don’t take into account that additional dimension, you could potentially see that 2,500 sales of a service were completed, but not that they were completed by one person. This is where things like goals in Google Analytics or UTM parameters can come into play.
By tying social conversion metrics into the goal completions in Google Analytics, you can drill down more effectively into how someone ultimately completed the sale of those services through user engagement metrics. User engagement metrics are also useful for finding out what people are physically doing on your site.