What is one statistic content creators should monitor and measure?
To help content creators reach their insight targets, we asked marketing experts and content creators this question for their best advice. From peak audience activity to organic reach, there are several statistics to monitor that may help you boost your content insights.
Here are 13 KPIs content creators should monitor:
- Peak Audience Activity
- Traffic
- Repeat Visits
- Readability
- Overall Impressions
- Number of Unique Visitors
- Assisted Revenue
- Average Shares Per Post
- Time Accumulation
- Homepage Bounce Rate
- Engagement Response
- Conversion Rates
- Monitor Organic Reach
Peak Audience Activity
Audience active hours are an important statistic for content creators to monitor and measure. Content success depends not only on the quality of the material, but also on the time it goes live. For algorithm-based platforms like Instagram, the number of early engagements with the post can determine the total visibility and reach, and send time can affect email open rate. You can identify the times when your audience is most active, engaged, and receptive to content through a combination of software analytics and A/B testing. Keep in mind that as your audience grows and time passes, these statistics may also change, and be open to tweaking your go-live timings to maximize interaction.
Michael Alexis, TeamBuilding
Traffic
An important Key Performance Indicator is how much traffic our content generates. When we generate traffic, we get more eyes on our content and have the chance for more sales. Also, brands discover how much traffic we generate. Wanting more eyes on their content, they pay us for sponsored content. Most of our traffic comes from search engines instead of social networks. As you can see, our most important business statistic is monthly traffic.
Janice Wald, Mostly Blogging
Repeat Visits
Content creators are leaning more on narrative or content rich marketing which utilize themes or common threads, and is why repeat visitors should be the metric they use to measure effectiveness. Traffic can arrive at your website or place of business through all sets of circumstances, a promotion, a link, or even by happenstance, however, that in itself does not provide enough information to determine your content marketing effectiveness.A repeat visitor is most likely purposeful, and by monitoring your website, emails, blogs, and newsletters, and checking for repeat visits, you can gauge the effectiveness of your content and what better engages your customers. In looking at which themes and commonalities get the most traffic, content creators and marketers can design specific campaigns to reach their target audience and increase conversions.
Yuvi Alpert, Noémie
Readability
Content creators should measure their readability. Often, when writers are “in the flow,” they may get caught up in an idea, and not keep an eye on their sentence or paragraph lengths. To make content easy to scan, both sentences and paragraphs should be short. Also, do your best to avoid passive voice.If you upload your blog content via WordPress, be sure to install the Yoast plugin. It can help you monitor all of this and more. Then, you can easily create your own content strategy guide from your own learnings.
Lindsay McCormick, Bite
Monitor Overall Impressions
To make sure that your audience resonates with the content you publish, pick out a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor on a frequent basis. The KPIs you select should help you track the overall engagement of your content and give you the necessary insights to capitalize on trends.Some of the most impactful metrics include your content click-through rate, overall impressions, and qualified leads generated. These metrics illuminate how well your content is improving brand perception and overall market sentiment based on overarching engagement rates. If your KPIs enter a downtrend, this could indicate that it’s time to change the channel, format, or ideas you’re using to produce and publish content.KPIs are best used in tandem rather than independently. That way, you can easily discern the full scope and context behind your content’s success or failure. Over time, you can use these insights to determine what content works and what approaches should be discarded.
Mike Grossman, GoodHire
Number of Unique Visitors
Content creators should monitor and measure the number of unique visitors to their website or blog. This will give them an idea of how popular their content is and how many people are engaging with it. It will also help them track their progress over time.
Matthew Ramirez, Rephrasely
Assisted Revenue
Content is almost top of the funnel which can make it hard to map revenue back to a video, blog post, or email. However, if you track assisted revenue (Google Analytics makes this easy), then you can easily see how your channel or campaign contributed to your bottom line and better understand what’s working and what’s not.
Sylvia Kang, Mira
Average Shares Per Post
One statistic content creators should monitor and measure is their average number of shares per post. This will give you an idea of how well your content is resonating with your audience. If you find that your posts are not garnering a lot of attention, you may need to rethink your content strategy.
Claire Westbrook, LSAT Prep Hero
Time Accumulation
Getting people to visit your website does not provide a full picture of content effectiveness, as it only signifies your success in getting them there, keeping them there is a whole other story, and is why engagement rates are a critical statistic for content creators. Customers may visit a website based on a sentence in a search, the title of an article, a rating in a general query, or you successfully conducting an audience segmentation, but leaving quickly means the content could not hold their interest.Tracking engagement rates comes in two parts, accumulated time and response, and by looking at your visitations using these metrics, you can better assess whether your content is engaging enough, or whether people are losing interest. Using time and response rates as your guideline allows you to make adjustments, so you create value, create effective conversion funnels, and increase customer retention rates.
Woody Sears, Hearhere
Homepage Bounce Rate
Content creators need to be mindful of their homepage’s bounce rate. With a high bounce rate, you can assume the content or design of your website is not effective at retaining users.Your homepage is the first impression your business makes on new users. When it is difficult to navigate, when the content loads slowly or isn’t engaging, or when the page display is confusing or unappealing, users will quickly leave–and most do not return.To avoid this, track your bounce rate and measure what events and pixels new users to your site engage with. The more engagement or the better your homepage convinces users to click through to other pages, the better curated your content is.
Dylan Trussell, Culprit Underwear
Engagement Response
Although a potential customer may click through to your website, and you may be receiving considerable traffic, that in itself does not provide much information about customer interests or potential to purchase, so monitoring your post engagement response becomes the critical metric of measurement. People click on links for a multitude of reasons, from a passing interest, to an impression, to a mistake, however, that does not appear in data.However, a post engagement response, meaning a comment, or a question, can give you a strong indication of their reasons and interest level, and further show the effectiveness of your content. By monitoring close attention to your comment section, and more importantly, engaging promptly when needed, you can better gauge if your content is hitting the mark.
Zach Letter, Wonder Works
Conversion Rates
Most small businesses use content strategies to boost conversion rates. If this is your goal, then the percentage of conversion from content to sales will help determine how effective the content is. This can be by monitoring where the traffic comes from and how many users actually convert into sales to help analyze just how effective the content is. In our case, we use content to drive traffic to our website and encourage users to sign up to our personal training programs. We can help analyze the data and insights on our website to determine where the traffic is coming from to see how well our content is doing and whether it’s helping us reach our goals or not.
John Gardner, Kickoff
Monitor Organic Reach
To have a genuine sense of how your content is performing, organic reach is one of the best metrics to follow. Organic reach helps content creators see how audiences are receiving and, more importantly, sharing their content. The best part about organic reach is that you can use this metric to follow your content on a variety of platforms. Most businesses will syndicate their content on their site, social media posts and in their newsletter. That wide breadth of publishing options provides an ample amount of data that content creators can use to elevate their entire marketing approach.Comparing the reach of content shared on a variety of programs helps business leaders evaluate their messaging on each platform. For example, creating good, SEO-driven content on a website may require a more informal tone in an email newsletter. Slight customizations on each platform are essential for success, and organic reach is the best way to make those adjustments.
Kyle Risley, Lift Vault
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