Marketing analytics 101

How to track and measure your digital marketing channels

If you own a business, measuring the success of your marketing efforts is a must. Working out how your marketing program has impacted on your revenue and profits is often the first thing people tend to focus on. As a result, perhaps the most common question marketers ask is: "did this campaign deliver a return on our investment?"

Let's say you own a driving school you want to drum up leads. You've decided to make the most of the network of digital marketing channels available to business owners these days.

You can spend a few hundred dollars on Google Adwords to push people to your website through search advertising. You might decide to invest in local SEO to help customers find you through organic search. Facebook and Twitter of you the chance to promote posts and expand your reach beyond the people already following you.

While each of the channels offers distinct advantages, the problem with digital marketing, in general, is the gap in knowledge on how much your advertising or content marketing effort has helped with your business goals.

For example: if the plan was to drive new customers to your business, has ramped up your social media posts helped make that happen? Have those customers submitted their contact information or made an appointment for lessons, or have they just liked and moved on?

The first port of call is to evaluate the ROI on any paid advertising campaign like search, social, or display.

For example, let's say you spent 20 dollars on pay per click (PPC) ads last month. Sales linked to the PPC amounted to $200. In this case, your base ROI was 200% — that's a pretty tidy amount! This a clear example of how you can measure the benefit of investing in this type of marketing.

The problem for many business owners isn't ROI on paid advertising, that's pretty clear cut: money out becomes money in. You can total your advertising expenses and compare them to the money earned and understand how well you invested.

But what about the SEO audit you outsourced, or the guest blog writers you employ ad hoc, have they delivered on your marketing objectives?

When it comes to measuring their marketing efforts' success, it's common to think of ROI first. This makes sense because it's directly tied to profit. Let's be clear; money is by no means the only indicator of how well your marketing strategy works. If nobody views, shares or responds to your content, it's unlikely you'd rate that success and even less likely to earn any revenue for you.

You won't often find actual figures when looking at content marketing metrics. For example, your objective with a blog article is to increase engagement with your visitors while improving your brand perception. How do we measure that?

Every form of marketing requires different metrics and analysis to see how useful they are. Your content marketing efforts' success requires a bit more outreach and more work, but it's also the type of marketing that can prove itself best over the long term, even if you can't analyze your ROI as cleanly.

In this article, we're going to cover how you can make sense of the different types of metrics useful for the various types of marketing channels. There are just three crucial pieces to measure marketing channels; this guide includes the three steps you need to track and measure your digital marketing efforts, including:

Figuring out what to track.
Tracking and analyzing the data.
Creating actionable insights from what you've learned.

What is ROI, and why is it important?

ROI (Return On Investment) is a ratio businesses use to measure whether an investment in their company was profitable. In other words: it shows what you got back from every dollar that you put in.

The basic formula for ROI is:

As a basic example, imagine that you invest $500 on Adwords, and your total profits to date are $1,000. You can use ROI to check whether this investment was profitable or not.

It's as simple as that.

You can use ROI metrics to check your business's overall profitability, and just like the example above, you can use ROI to measure how well individual investments are doing.

Measuring your ROI

As we've shown, your ROI is simply the difference between what you've spent and the revenue earned. Measurement and optimization of your total ROI involve all of the costs associated with the marketing channels you've invested time and money in.

The following two steps are a guide to what you should include in your calculations:

In this step, you should include everything you spent on marketing. Did you hire a marketing agency? Are they on a fixed monthly billing, or does it vary based on hours worked?

What tools and platforms are you using? For example, you might be using a premium email subscription service to get out of your monthly newsletter. Even if it's only $20 a month, that's still over $200 per annum that you need to account for.

What did it cost to produce and maintain your work? Even if you have a one-page website with your businesses, contact details, that counts. Make sure you include any audio, video, images, or outsourced work that you paid for. Even if you produced all your content in-house, there's still a cost attached, because you're paying yourself, or another content creators' salary.

Add together any distribution costs. We are talking about any paid promotions, such as PPC and social advertising, and promotion through other media channels like Facebook ads.

Do you use any special tools or software to distribute your content? Perhaps you pay a monthly fee for your blog platform, or a professional Microsoft Office and Adobe package.

The sum of all these expenses is the true cost of producing your content.

This is how much you got back in return. How you calculate your conversions depends on how your business converts lead. For example, If you run an e-commerce site, you can measure your on-site sales. The basic idea is to figure out the number of conversions you've had, and how much profit you've made from them, this figure is your average conversion value.

Let's say you add up all the sales that resulted from a piece of content, this is the sum of how much you earned, which is your 'return'. Here's an example of how that works. If you spend $250 on creating a piece of content and getting leads worth $2500, your return rate is 1,000%.

If you earn more in sales than you spent producing content and paying for advertising, it's worth it.

Going beyond ROI

When it comes to digital marketing, using the only ROI to measure a successful campaign can fall short.

Sometimes, there's a clear link between a marketing push and revenue, such as when people read a piece of content, click on your call to action, then buy something. It's also pretty straightforward to assess whether your PPC campaign is working well - it'll generate leads that turn into sales.

Other times, that process takes a bit longer; the relationship between sales and how they were procured isn't as direct.

Let's say you invest in content designed to attract people to sign up for your newsletter. As email sign-ups rise, it's likely that a percentage of those new sign-ups will become customers. It may take two weeks; it may take two years. In a case like this, it's hard to judge whether certain campaigns are successful using the only ROI as a metric.

Marketing success isn't always about money. It can be about getting the word out.

This guide's remainder will help you identify how many of your marketing goals were impacted (or generated) via paid advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, etc.

If you've been posting on social media about a flash sale at your art supply store, the chances are that you want people to visit your website or come to your brick and mortar location. Thanks to social media advertising and targeting, you can make it, so your posts are seen by the right audience: artists, students, teachers, and parents.

But promotion isn't enough - you have to make sure that the content is engaging enough to share it and expand your reach. This is the sort of organic marketing metric that's separate from the initial investment, but still impacts overall success.

This means you need to set your marketing ROI in terms of your goals.

Setting goals and measuring success

Before you can begin tracking your marketing channels, you need to identify two things:

What are your objectives?

How will you measure success?

Are you defining your marketing objectives?

What do you want to achieve with your marketing efforts? Answering this question can help you get content analytics to focus on. The idea is to spend less time gathering data across the board and improve your performance according to your objectives. For example, if you hire a local internet marketing agency that specializes in organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (SEM & PPC), local search SEO, and more, you need to have clearly defined goals for each.

Your key metrics (or Key Performance Indicators, otherwise known as KPIs) should be directly related to your desired outcome. There should be some business value that you want to generate with your marketing strategy.

Ask yourself: What is the end goal of each piece of content you put on the line? Why are you advertising your product or service?

To get you in the right mindset, here are some common objectives:

I want to generate sales leads

I want to improve search visibility (SEO)

I want to increase trials/sign-ups.

I want to increase customer retention.

I want to increase my brand recognition.

Defining how you measure success

The metrics you use to measure your efforts' success should flow directly from the objectives that you have set forth. With a bit of practice, identifying which metric you need to look at will become second nature.

Look at the following marketing metrics; they can answer many of your most pressing content marketing strategy questions:

Consumption Metrics:

How many people are consuming your content?

Which channels are they using?

Social Sharing Metrics:

Which of your posts is being shared?

Who is sharing them?

How/where are they sharing?

How often are they being shared?

Engagement Metrics:

Do your consumption and sharing metrics translate into "engagement?"

Does your content inspire users to take some kind of action?

Sales Metrics:

How does your content influence your sales results?

Which ways does your content drive revenue?

Okay, you know your marketing goals (KPI's) and the general metrics you should be looking into.

Let's say your ultimate goal is to use content marketing as a way to generate sales leads. Your metrics should measure those results. These metrics will tell you, specifically, how well your content marketing efforts are helping you make those leads. It may look like this:

You've taken your primary objective and broken it down into specific measurements that you can monitor every day, week, or month to determine if you're getting the results you expect.

Ultimately, the plan is to define what you want to achieve for your business due to your online advertising, social media, and content creation.

Measuring advertising success

Let's begin by taking a look at the types of paid advertising methods you should be tracking.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

As with any other marketing initiative, launching a PPC campaign is not an end in itself. You need to devote time to track its performance. Let's dive into how to measure and analyze its effectiveness to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

The metrics we'll discuss are important, your goals will determine which you should focus on, so let's think back to your goals, what matters to you the most? These objectives are the primary determinant of your success in PPC.

We'll be using Google's PPC advertising program for the examples given here, but the metrics are universal.

Click-through rate

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) is one of the most closely monitored metrics by PPC experts. It's a measure of how many people see your ad and then click on it. You can calculate your CTR by dividing the number of individuals who click on your ad by the number of people who view it (clicks divided by impressions).

A higher CTR means that your target audience has found your ads helpful. This relevancy can help your Quality Score increase. Ads with higher quality scores have a much lower Cost Per Conversion.

If you're experiencing low click-through rates, it may be a sign that you should look at your keyword selection, your ad copy, and the landing page you're sending visitors to.

Cost Per Conversion

Cost Per Conversion (CPC) is important in determining how much you have to spend to gain a new client. This is the number that identifies whether or not a campaign is successful. If you have to pay more to gain a new customer than that customer is worth to your business, your campaign is failing; you haven't attained a return on investment.

If your campaign costs more than what you earn from a new lead, then you're not using your budget wisely. Keep track of your CPC to learn how to improve your campaign. Use the data from this metric to adjust your strategies and reinvest on what works.

Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate can show certain aspects of your campaign that need optimization. This metric is measured by the number of visitors who visited your site and left without responding to your call to action.

If your campaign has a high Bounce Rate, you're targeting too broad an audience, a good number of which are simply not interested in your offering.

Conversion rate

The Conversion Rate refers to the number of times a user clicked on your ad and completed a desired action within a certain window of time. Whether it was making a purchase, signing up for a free trial, or filling out some other kind of form. You have to keep in mind that the ultimate goal of any PPC campaign is conversion. By tracking this metric, you'll gauge if people are buying your product at an ideal rate.

Conversion rate is just as crucial as click-through rate – you don't want to pay for tons of clicks and traffic if none of that traffic ends up taking meaningful action.

Strong conversion rates mean that the money you spend per click is coming back to you in profits. That's what we call a good ROI.

Quality score

Last, but certainly not least is Google's Quality Score. Quality Score is the search engine's measure of the relevance of your keywords. They use it to ensure that searchers see the most relevant ads possible and have a positive experience.

The factors that determine your Quality Score include:

The click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and its corresponding ad

The relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query

The relevance of the keyword to its ad group

The CTR of the display URLs in the ad group

The quality of your landing page

It's important to maintain good Quality Scores because Google uses them to determine your ad rankings and how much you pay per click. Even if you think you've dotted your I's and crossed your t's to keyword research, campaign structure, and ad text optimization, you should keep a close eye on your Quality Scores.

Low-Quality Scores are an indication that you're missing some piece of the puzzle, and you're going to pay more to help your business grow.

Tools

Want a quick way to check your performance for key metrics like these? The AdWords Performance Grader is a free tool that performs an instant PPC audit on your AdWords account, comparing your performance in areas like Quality Score and wasteful spending to other advertisers in the same budget range.

Display Ads (banner ads)

Display ads, also known as banner ads, can be great for maximizing your potential reach and attracting more qualified leads. Let's cover how to define performance metrics for your display ads. We'll judge your display ads' success in terms of which goals you have set for your campaign.

From leaderboards and half-page sizes to rectangle ads large and small, display advertising relies heavily on creative visuals and bold graphics to get consumers' attention. Display campaigns have proven themselves rewarding marketing strategies when done effectively.

There are four primary Key Performance Indicators that you need to measure when evaluating your display ad campaign's success.

Impressions - How many times an ad appears.

Reach - How many people see an ad.

Engagement Rate - How many people interact with an ad.

Click-Through Rate - How many people click on an ad.

Each KPI is important on its own, but it's through their interaction that you get insight into how well your display campaign performs.

When your ad appears, it creates an impression. Impressions help you quantify how many times an ad appears on a web page. An impression is simply a view. Viewers don't have to click, hover, or engage with the ad for an impression to occur.

Recording a large number of impressions shows that your ad is reaching a broad audience. More views increase the chances of conversion. But if you find that other KPIs, such as engagement, don't grow along with your impression rate, you may want to rethink your display campaign strategy. Pay attention to your ad's placement, when it should be visible, and your target audience to increase your chances of conversion.

If your display ad appeared while I was browsing, its appearance marks as an impression. But its presence also provides another KPI metric: reach. Reach measures how many people see an ad. For display advertising, this KPI quantifies the number of unique views a particular ad receives. A unique view means that a single person viewed your ad once. Having the same person view the same ad twice does not amount to two reaches.

Keeping an eye on reach metrics ensures that you're not wasting time or money by showing ads to the same person. Again, this may help with brand awareness, but if the wrong person keeps seeing your ad, you may miss out on the people who matter.

Usually expressed as a percentage, the engagement rate indicates how many people interact with a display ad. This could be a simple action like hovering over an ad or rich media, something more complex such as watching an embedded video clip or listening to audio.

Engagement, including time spent on your site, or a number of pages viewed, is a good indicator of new traffic quality to your site. Be sure to compare engagement on a product-by-product basis, too. If your new visitors' bounce rate is high or their site duration is low, you may need to adjust your strategy.

High percentages of engagement strongly correlate with higher conversion rates. If a person expresses interest by playing around with an ad, they might want to learn more about what's being offered. Having interactive elements in your display campaign can drive up engagement percentages and potentially increase consumer participation in the long run.

CTR lets you see how many people click on your ad after seeing it. Like engagement rates, CTR is recorded in percentages. It's calculated by taking an ad's total number of clicks and dividing it by the total number of impressions.

How to track your social media efforts

By now, you've got the know-how to analyze whether your paid advertising efforts are worth your while. We've touched on the fact that content marketing metrics work a bit differently. There's plenty of data we can look at to see how well your content can be great for maximizing your potential reach and attracting more (qualified ) leads.

To make the most out of the mass amount of data available, you need to take the metrics that directly tie your tactics to your objectives. They should help you answer questions like, is this content creating value for our business? This will be how you'll measure success and determine if your strategy is working or if you need to change your approach.

Measuring social media success

Your brand's post on social media should be considered an ad, even if it's not promoted. At the same time, you should separate promoted tweets and posts from your regular ones in order to find out which ones perform better within their respective segments.

For social media, you need to look at forms of "applause." These include the share rate, the volume of followers, and likes, or others. Track your growth, see the social media posts that garner you more reach and see what you did differently on those. Within a few months on social, you will get statistically valid data on what timing and what type of content works for your audience.

Before we begin looking at your social metrics, log in to your Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest insights. Analytics lets you examine just how many comments or mentions you're pulling in per post. If we wanted to drive that metric up, we'd want to look at which kinds of posts are pulling in the most mentions.

Audience Growth

The number of followers you've gained over the last month, week, or even day is an obvious metric to keep an eye on.

Why is audience growth important?

 It's important to pay attention to the rate at which your follower account grows. If you see a slow and unreliable trickle of people following your accounts, you may want to increase your posting speed. If you're losing followers, you should examine what has been shared or posted recently and question whether you need to adjust your strategy.

 The takeaway is that you should always be earning new followers, not losing or holding steady at your current follower count.

How do you track audience growth and follower count?

 This metric relies on the easiest number to find on social media—no matter the platform. You can easily see how many followers (or Likes, if you're running a Facebook page).

 You could also use a third-party tool that keeps track of this for you and provides regular reporting. There are a number of tools out there that can track your audience across multiple social media accounts over time.

Audience engagement

Audience engagement counts whether your content is resonating with your online audience is the amount of quality social interactions each piece of content garners.

How to measure:

 Track your growth, see the social media posts that garner you more reach and see what you did differently on those. Monitor the gross amount of tweets, retweets, likes, shares, comments, mentions.

Tools:

 Knowing how to read your social media data is a significant first step towards measuring your engagement and ultimately knowing your ROI. You can start by checking Insights directly from your social sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Additionally, this post from Sprout Social has more tools you can use.

Clicks Per Post

When sharing blog posts or third-party content, it is important to measure the number of times that users have clicked on the links you've included.

Why is it important?

 Your social posts may get a great deal of attention, likes, shares, RePins, etc.—but ideally, that engagement will carry over to some of your non-social properties, too.

 When people click through the links on your content, they're not just saying, "I like this." They're saying, "I want more." Measuring clicks per post also helps you estimate incoming traffic from your social media efforts.

Click-through rates

Sharing and commenting are solid metrics, but when your content prompts a reader to click, you can find out more about how and why they are engaging.

Why is it important?

 By tracking the number of people who click and what kinds of content they're clicking to see, you can learn even more about your audience members and engage them.

Likes per post

When we talk about likes, we use the term as a catch-all for types of Likes, favorites, etc. Any way people can "upvote" posts they enjoy. This metric involves tallying all the ways people have affirmed your post over a given amount of time and then dividing that number by the number of posts you published.

Why is it important?

 You want to nurture an engaged community, so it helps to look at which posts are getting that thumbs-up from your followers. Watching this metric helps you keep track of how your average post is resonating with these folks.

Shares per post

This encompasses sharing, including videos on Youtube, posts on Facebook, Retweets, and Repins. Your total shares per post will include any channel-specific social share metric that demonstrates your content's reach. Look beyond the number of social shares and carefully examine who is sharing your content.

Why is it important?

 It's great when a piece of content goes viral or earns lots of shares, but if no one in your target audience or no one who influences your audience is engaging, those numbers aren't as meaningful.

Comments per post

It takes more effort for a reader to post a comment on a blog post than it does for them to like it, so this is often a reliable gauge of how engaged your community is. For Twitter, this could include both Mentions and Tweets linking to you. Identify the individuals who contribute to your content and who care about your industry, and look for the types of content that engage them most.

Why is it important?

 "The one metric I look at comments per post. It tells me how engaged my audience is. No matter how much traffic you have, if you can't cultivate an engaged audience, you won't be able to convert those visitors into customers." –Neil Patel, founder of Quick Sprout and co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics.

 To better understand your audience, take Neil's advice, and monitor your comments.

Understanding email marketing metrics

According to a study by iContact, customers who receive email newsletters typically spend 82% more money. This makes a compelling argument for measuring your email content marketing's effectiveness and discovering the key email metrics.

Compared to other channels, email has an enormous advantage- it's perfectly traceable in every aspect. It is always possible to track how many users open messages, how many have clicked within them, which emails brought more conversions, etc. The success of email could be measured by the open or conversion rate. It could also be tied to the number of opt-outs you receive after the email blast.

First, we're going to look at on-mail KPIs: these refer to the user's interaction with the message itself, then off-mail KPIs. These measures everything that originates in the email and goes elsewhere, such as an embedded link to an e-commerce site, website, or blog.

On-mail KPIs

These metrics are tracked directly by the email marketing platform, making them automatically available and easy to read. This category includes openings, clicks, unsubscriptions, bounces, and so on.

Open Rate

What It Is:

 The open rate (OR) indicates the number of emails opened compared to the total amount delivered among email metrics.

How to Calculate It:

 (Emails opened / Emails delivered) * 100 = % open rate

Why?

 Email headlines are content too! Don't forget to A/B test them to increase the likelihood of a high open-rate. The elements that affect opening rates most are the subject and preheader: carry out tests frequently and pay extreme attention when drafting interesting copy that arouses curiosity and urges recipients to open the message.

Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

What It Is:

 The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a "share this" button to post email content to a social network, and/or clicked on a "forward to a friend" button.

How to Calculate It:

 Number of clicks on a share and/or forward button ÷ Number of total delivered emails * 100 = % email sharing/forwarding rate

Why?

 The rate at which your email recipients forward or share your email with others may not seem all that significant, but it's arguably one of the most important metrics you should be tracking. Because this is how you generate new contacts, the folks on your email list are already in your database.

 Conversion is still a primary focus, but this doesn't help you attract new leads. Encourage your readers to pass along your email to a friend or colleague if they found the content useful, and start tracking how many new people you can add to your database this way. Keep a careful eye on your sharing rates to discover which types of articles and offers tend to get shared the most, and use that insight when you plan email campaigns.

Click rate

What It Is:

 The percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in a given email.

How to Calculate It:

 Total emails clicked OR unique clicks ÷ number of delivered emails * 100. (Example: If you receive 500 clicks in total and deliver 10,000 emails, your click-through rate is 5%.)

Why?

 If a good open rate is indicative of a good subject, the click-through rate is determined by the email's content – images, copy, and especially calls-to-action. To improve this crucial email KPI, it is important to carry out frequent A/B tests on the wording and the style of CTAs and the content layout and images used. This is especially useful if your email newsletter contains links to different blog posts or products to ascertain, which are most attractive to your subscribers.

Conversion rate

What It Is:

 Every email has (or should have) a clear objective that corresponds to the action you would like users to carry out. Some examples of objectives are making a purchase, reading an article on your blog, filling out a subscription form, requesting a quote, or signing up for an event or webinar.

How to measure your conversion rate:

 A number of users who have completed the action / Emails delivered) * 100.

Why?

 The conversion rate is the metric that measures how effective your message is in relation to your objective. It is important to be constantly aware of this metric on both a general level and type of campaign or message, studying its history and averages at different levels.

 Conversions are intertwined with a call-to-action quality: this is why experimenting with and frequently testing CTAs is fundamental for guaranteeing maximum effectiveness. If your email marketing goal is lead gen, you should be tracking how many leads you're capturing every day and every month.

Bounce rate

What It Is:

 The percentage of your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered to the recipient's inbox.

How to measure our bounce rate:

 (Total number of bounced emails ÷ Number of emails sent) * 100 = % bounce rate.

Why?

 Internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender's reputation. Having too many hard bounces can make your company look like a spammer in an ISP's eyes.

Off-mail KPIs

These metrics analyze various aspects relative to the email channel, such as the volume of traffic attracted, the average purchase amount, the conversion rate, etc. These are typically provided by analytics systems outside of the email platform, such as Google Analytics. The following KPIs can be monitored by taking data from your email platform data with data from external analytical systems like Google Analytics.

List growth rate

What It Is:

 The rate at which your email list is growing.

How to Calculate the growth rate of your email list:

 This is by no means as complicated as it looks. For example, you might have 500 new subscribers - 100 unsubscribes and email/spam complaints) ÷ 10,000 email addresses on the list * 100 = 4% list growth rate in a given period.

Why?

 If your focus is on attracting more visitors to your site, signing up more blog subscribers, your goal will probably be growing your subscriber list. Besides the call-to-action metrics (CTR, conversion rates), you'll also want to keep tabs on your list growth and loss.

 While you should be aiming to grow your list to extend your reach, expand your audience, and position yourself as an industry thought leader. It's common for an email marketing list to naturally decline by 22.5% every year, which means that it's more important than ever to pay attention to growing your subscriber list and keeping it healthy.

Unsubscribes/ opt-outs

What It Is:

 Your opt-out rate shows how many people received an email from your business and made the decision to unsubscribe.

How to Calculate your opt-outs:

 Unsubscribed users (this information is available from your email server) / the number of emails sent * 100.

Why?

 Keeping track of subscription trends is important, but knowing how many users unsubscribe is equally important. Having a few opt-outs per email shouldn't trigger any red flags. In fact, by giving those readers the opportunity to opt-out, you'll likely be improving other metrics because you'll be removing less engaged contacts from your list.

 A spike in opt-outs, on the other hand, should be more closely examined. This is typically the result of a change that did not go over well with your readers. Remember that the top reasons people unsubscribe are related to frequency, content, and subscriber expectations. Are you bombarding your readers_ Re-evaluate your sending frequency or your messages' content and run several tests to identify – and correct – whatever may be the cause.

Content marketing

Pageviews:

 This metric shows you which and how many pages are viewed on a site. Any time a page is loaded (or refreshed) that counts as a page view. This is a basic KPI, but it's oh-so-important in monitoring specific content performance, particularly for key landing pages.

Unique visitors (UV):

 This metric shows you how many individual people visit your site. It is determined by a user's IP address and cookie on the browser they are using, so any repeat visits from that same user won't be counted. UV's help you understand the size of your target audience.

Demographics?

 Google Analytics gives insight into your audiences' ages, genders, and general interests. You should keep an eye on these stats to ensure that your brand's appropriate audience consumes your content.

Geography:

 Now that you know who is viewing your work (and how many times), find out where they are coming from. By determining audience geography, you can decide to allocate resources to a specific location and, if needed, adjust your budget and targeting strategy to market to a certain geographic area.

Average time on page:

 This metric provides insight into the engagement of your audience. If you post a 5,000-word essay and the average time on page is 20 seconds, you can assume your audience is skimming or not reading. The longer the time spent on a page, the more likely it is that the reader is truly consuming your work. Heads up: Google Analytics doesn't account for when users accidentally leave your site open for hours. That's a distraction, not engagement. In general, this is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your content.

Bounce rate:

 This metric tells you the percentage of visitors who came to your website, viewed one page, and left. Unlike 'time-on-page,' a high bounce rate signifies that your website is not user-friendly, meaning people left the site after the initial encounter instead of exploring other pages. To set an appropriate "bounce rate baseline," consider user intent and content purpose. For specific information like movie times, the rate will be higher. The rate will likely be on the lower side for online shopping or newspapers, as users are likely to browse around for a while.

Finally, keep in mind that, rather than placing so much emphasis on individual numbers, track the progression over time to gauge which topics—and even days of the week—are of interest to your audience.

How to keep track of your metrics

Once you've created content that you think will drive the desired actions, you can start measuring your content program's efficacy. We suggest measuring your monthly.

Monthly Reporting

Create a spreadsheet that documents and tracks:

Your marketing goals (prioritize if more than one)

KPI's you'll be measuring

Changes per month (sales per sources, engagement per sources, changes by month, etc.)

Track your marketing channels efficiently

Begin small - don't measure everything all at once!

Go broad before you go deep - Get a complete picture before you dive into the minutiae.

Consistency counts - Generate metrics for your content over a period of time (also to identify which older content is evergreen + what should be reworked or retired)

Monitor your metrics - it is important to measure your goals frequently, for instance, website traffic could be on a daily or weekly basis, not on a monthly basis, as this tends to draw a straight line graph in Google Analytics. You'll need to see what causes fluctuations in your numbers and make note. Holidays and weekends are associated with less traffic, while Thursdays may be the week's busiest day. Learning how your traffic works and adjusting your strategy to meet it helps you hit your goals.

Gather data - Create graphs to understand what channels deliver the most leads and, more importantly, what channels are providing customers. Remember, channels that drive sales and business for your company are the effective ones -- where you want to invest more of your limited marketing dollars.

Report on performance - Reporting on how you've hit or missed your targets and goals should be done regularly. Monthly is ideal for the big picture, weekly is likely better for things like email campaigns and PPC advertising.

Use your data wisely

Take advantage of your metrics to refine and fix your campaigns. The secret of a successful business lies in the ability to learn and optimize continuously. A smart approach to your content marketing metrics will help you stay focused on your desired outcomes. For pulling off a successful strategy, this focus is paramount.

Start with fewer metrics, such as the core metrics that fit with your core business objectives and a small number that laser focus on your one or two top content goals. This allows you to use your metrics to improve your content better. Then, expand from there once you master a small number of parameters. When you can see right away the impact a piece of content is having or how a specific type of content is directly affecting your bottom line, you can then go back and continually refine your content strategy. Remember: smarter metrics mean smarter content marketing decisions – and better outcomes.

Conclusion

No two companies are alike, and how you spend money is unique to your goals, business, and industry. However, every small business can benefit from tracking the ROI associated with every significant expense. Doing so will help you prioritize where to spend now and determine how to invest wisely.

Performance measurement for new content initiatives can be overwhelming, and admittedly, we've covered a lot in this guide. There's no need to cover all bases, remember to focus on your goals, and measure the metrics that indicate whether you've met your business objectives.

Many digital marketing blogs can guide you beyond the scope of this article. To have long-lasting digital marketing campaigns, you may want to stay up-to-date through marketing blogs are proven essential for business owners. Not all marketing blogs remain current, so it is essential to know how to distinguish relevant blogs from outdated content. Check out 6 Digital Marketing Blogs Your Company Should Follow to get you started.

By making it a habit of monitoring your marketing, you can create a system that will help you fundamentally transform your advertising and content strategy and performance, maximizing your direct impact on revenue. Remember: Start your measurement of digital marketing success with business goals in mind.