There’s no point in doing the hours and effort of content marketing if you’re not going to do the proper measurement. Measuring for its own sake is pointless – you need to integrate your content marketing in your overall business goals. In this post I will focus on website content creation, but there is of course different KPIs for other social channels. Let’s get started:

First off, you always need to see to see content as an actual value. To create good value, you need a clear purpose. Why are you creating this piece of content in the first place? Recognising this is the first step to find the metrics you need to create content that actually converts.

You shouldn’t create any content without having at least one of these objectives in mind: increasing brand awareness, lead generation, customer retention or direct sales. Try to put these metrics to value in line with your other marketing efforts. What is the average order value? What is your percentage of new vs returning customers, and which one generate the most revenue? Does it differ from organic and paid channels? The more of these things you have in place, the easier it gets to start analyzing the data. For OnPage metrics, I usually navigate in Google Analytics Landing Page reports using pre-defined and custom segment. But you should also use unique campaign tracking for all your content to be able to compare the results to one another.

For reports, I set up dashboards for the following metrics:

• Consumption metrics including how many people are viewing your content, in which channels, how frequently and how in-depth. KPIs: page views, unique visitors, and average time on page. You can also narrow this down on source/medium, location, mobile users etc and compare the data.
• Engagement and sharing metrics looking at how your audience is interacting with your content, what pieces of your content that is shared in other channels, who is sharing them, where and how often. KPIs include: Avg Time on Page, Pages/Session, New vs Returning. You should also try GA’s Content Grouping to segment your content with regard to the kind of content users are engaging with.
• Sales metrics looking at how your content drive revenue for your business. KPIs are Transactions, Time to Purchase and Assisted Conversion. If you have proper Goals set up in your account, you can ccess the funnel visualization report to review where your customers dropped off. More cost oriented, there is one ROI model that I like, one that I’ve borrowed from the Content Management forum Curata: “For each piece of content x in Campaign C, take the $ amount of Revenue generated (a sales metric) by Content x and divide it by the ($ product cost). If the ratio is greater than 1, your content was profitable from a sales perspective.”