So, you’ve developed a content strategy and started publishing your copywriting, but how do you know if it’s actually working?
Measuring your strategy’s success is just as crucial as the strategy itself, allowing you to see your content’s strengths and weaknesses and make changes accordingly.
In this article, we’ve gathered the top 9 metrics of success to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your content strategy.
What is a content strategy?
First of all, it’s important to establish what exactly a content strategy is and why it’s important. Having a well thought out and structured approach to creating content, whether that’s copy for blog posts, email marketing or social media, can really drive your success.
It starts with having a well-rounded understanding of your audience, their interests and their pain points, so that you can tailor your content to appeal to them. Some in-depth research is required here to gain a clear perspective of your ideal audience.
Once you have a good idea of your target audience, you can plan out different types of content to continuously create which are engaging and relevant to them and devise a posting schedule.
You can learn more about making an effective content strategy here.
Measuring Success
Now that you’ve got your content strategy developed, it’s time to publish your content. However, the research process is far from over. You should constantly review your strategy by looking at Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to see what’s working and what’s not. Here are 9 performance metrics which allow you to measure the success of your content plan:
Click-through Rate
The CTR of your content measures the percentage of viewers who click on a link or advertisement in your content. This can often reveal the effectiveness of a call-to-action by seeing if your content engages viewers enough to want to learn more or purchase something, for example.
Traffic
Whilst most of us don’t like the idea of traffic, a high volume of website traffic can actually be a good indicator of success. It shows that people are clicking on links to your page, which can help to generate more leads.
You can use Google Analytics to take a look at your web traffic.
Conversions
A conversion rate indicates how many of your audience carried out a desired action, converting visitors to leads. This can include making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter or downloading an app. Ultimately, your content should have an end-goal that you wish to achieve, which in most cases is a conversion of some sort.
Engagement
Another KPI is the engagement that your content receives. This is measured in various forms, such as the like, comment or share amounts, as well as your follower amount after publishing content and any mentions of your content made by members of your online community.
Creating a sense of community is a great way to keep audiences returning to your content, overall boosting engagement and helping to establish your voice as authoritative.
Search Engine Ranking
If you’re publishing content on a website, like an article or blog post, the search engine ranking of that page can be a good indicator to its success. You can use tools like Surfer SEO or Google Search Console to assess your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) and optimise your content’s position on SERPs.
Time Spent on Your Page
If audience members spend a decent amount of time viewing your content, that’s a pretty good sign. The longer time spent on your webpage suggests that they find its content engaging, useful and worthy of their attention.
Whilst this is purely a quantitative metric, it can still be a useful measurement of success, especially when considered alongside the bounce rate of your content.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate of a website highlights the amount of people who leave after viewing a page. If audience members spend a short amount of time reading the page’s content and then leave (or bounce) swiftly afterwards, it implies that the content is not relevant or appealing to them.
Google Analytics tools can be utilised to monitor the bounce rate and the time users spend on your website.
Backlinks
When another website links your content, that’s a backlink. Having other reputable sources reference your work is a great indicator of its success, as it means that others have found it insightful. This can also drive traffic to your page if people click on the link on the original post, boosting your website traffic.
Having backlinks can help with Search Engine Ranking, as Google perceives backlinks as a positive endorsement and subsequently rank your content higher on SERPs.
Email Open Rate
If you’re writing copy for emails, a simple way to see whether your content is successful is by looking at its open rate.
The effectiveness of your subject line and the opening sentence are the most crucial aspects of encouraging the recipient to actually open and read your email. You can also consider the CTR of emails by seeing what percentage of your audience click on embedded links, for example.
Conclusion
Revising your content strategy after assessing these metrics is absolutely essential, allowing you to publish content that actually engages your target audience. After all, your audience should be at the centre of all the content that you publish, so it is essential to gain insight into how they are receiving your work!
