How to Measure Content Marketing Performance [advanced]
Measuring the performance of your content marketing efforts is essential for understanding what works and what doesn't and for making informed decisions about how to improve your strategy.
Every content marketer asks themselves this question at some point. Whether a client or a manager commences the topic, or it naturally manifests because of your strategy's maturity, as a content marketer, you have to learn to tackle this challenge sooner or later.
Multiple different cases may push you to seriously look for valid measurement methods. Everything comes down to what you are asked to measure. The ultimate question is, what is the goal?
Why do you need to measure your content performance?
I have heard many reasons why the content needs precise measurement and reporting, and here are a few commonalities.
Understanding the influence of content on brand awareness
Measuring the direct impact of content on leads
Understanding ROI by tracking KPIs that focus on revenue
Direct influence on retention
If you pay close attention to these common goals that some businesses share, you will see that they construct the customer journey funnel when they are together. Content teams may have the task to focus on one or two stages of the funnel depending on the business type, but they are going to have a direct or indirect impact on all stages of the funnel if they create high-quality content that resonates with their customers.
For example, if your team is tasked to create support content, your goal may be to reduce the number of calls and tickets submitted. Your KPI would be the ratio or correlation between support article pageviews and the number of calls/tickets.
In another example, when the team's goal is to maximize conversions through content, they will need to check the content influence on MRR (monthly recurring revenue) or ARR (annual recurring revenue).
From the content team's point of view, you measure all these to navigate through optimizations, reporting, and decision-making. From the leadership point of view, they need precise measurement and reporting to understand your team's performance and overall ROI (return on investments) by comparing all the content expenses with revenue influenced by content.
How to decide which metrics you should use to build your report?
There are so many metrics that content marketers need to pay attention to that it's almost guaranteed you will get lost in the weeds if you try to look at all of them.
Let's break them down into funnel stages to make it more straightforward to decide which ones you need to focus on.
The decision on which group of metrics should be the basis of your measurement and reporting depends on a few factors:
Marketing team goals - as part of a bigger marketing team, the content team must align and support the central team goals.
Nature of the business and KPIs that communicate its growth.
Metrics that help you optimize your team's performance.
In a classic SaaS trial-to-paid situation, your goal is to influence a few actions your users take, including
Awareness: finding your brand through various channels, including search
Lead: opening a trial account, signing up for a demo call, or downloading content
Conversion: signing up for a paid account
For this type of business model, you will need to set up a report that measures the impact of content on the decision-making for each primary and secondary KPI. Of course, the essential organic traffic, time on the page, and bounce rate should also be part of the report, but those will hardly be interesting for your leadership team.
The necessity of tracking and calculating conversion rates between the KPIs mentioned above depends on your content team's business type and goals.
For example, if your blog generates most of its traffic via organic search, invites users to download templates, and follows up with emails and calls to convert, you will need the following KPIs tracked and reported.
Organic search CTR
organic sessions/downloads
MQLs / downloads
conversions / MQLs
total $ spent for the time window/conversions (and MQLs)
A report built based on the combination of these metrics will help you to:
understand the relevance of your content vs search intent
your content effectiveness for turning the visitor into a lead
quality of leads
ROI of all your content efforts
The example above is based on a simple hypothetical scenario. In the real world, we have multiple lead-generating methods, MQL to conversion tactics, revenue-generating streams, etc. Creating a report to track all this is a challenging task.
Tracking all this is essential, but the content is much more than that. We also support the rest of the funnel by creating PDF one-pagers for sales, support articles for the support team, and content for existing customers to reduce churn. This requires close collaboration with each department to set relevant KPIs and identify owners for each.
Identifying the correct KPIs is just the beginning. Once you decide what to track, a bunch of questions come to the surface:
What should be my attribution window?
Do we track last-click conversions or first-click conversions?
What's the suitable attribution model?
How do I attribute revenue to content sessions?
To understand the correct attribution, you need to define what each of them means for your business.
For example:
Last click - Conversion happened right after consuming content. This usually happens when the search is combined with relevant bottom funnel content served.
First click - The company and the brand were introduced to the client through content, resulting in conversion in a defined attribution window.
A visit somewhere in the middle - content influenced the decision, but it’s neither the only decision driver nor it introduced the brand to the client.
If you think about the meaning and purpose of each touchpoint, it becomes clear that using just one attribution model won't work. Interaction with your content happens for different reasons in different stages of the customer journey and going down that rabbit hole and trying to break it down is a dangerous adventure. Therefore you will need a tool that helps to combine 3-5 attribution models and provides a holistic performance report.
How will attribution help?
It will combine attribution models and will give you a summary of attributed conversions.
The tool will help connect your report content sections (resources, tools, courses, articles, PDFs, podcasts, etc.)
You will be able to attribute revenue to content.
What should the report look like?
Based on some KPIs, examples and attribution information above, your report may look something like this:
Content sessions
Unique visitors
Content influenced MQLs
Content influenced conversions
Content influenced MRR
Conversion rate
Additional Information:
Top 10 performing content pieces on search
Top 10 conversion and MQLs influencing content pieces
How does this help me in more role of a content lead?
Building your team and setting expectations
As a manager, it is important to provide your team with direction and context to help them succeed. This includes properly measuring and reporting on their performance, as it allows you to identify what is and isn't working. By tracking the right metrics and presenting this information clearly, you can help your team understand their successes and areas for improvement. As the saying goes, "You can't improve what you don't measure," and this is especially true in the world of content marketing.
Communicating with leadership
One of content marketers' biggest challenges is communicating effectively with company leadership, especially at the executive level. These individuals are not interested in detailed or supplementary measures of your team's performance; they want clear, concise information demonstrating how your content contributes to revenue. To effectively convey this information, it is important to use a robust attribution tool, create well-organized reports, and have the necessary technology to support these efforts.
Making decisions on hiring, budgets, and processes
As a leader, you will need to expand the team, optimize processes, and manage the budgets (including requesting more if required). With proper performance measurement, you will be able to make effective data-driven decisions. Accurate analytics and reporting will help to:
Understand where to double down
What efforts are not working, and where to direct the resources
How to expand the team for better performance
Where and how much to increase the spend
