For every marketer, tracking metrics and analyzing data represents the inseparable part of a daily or weekly working routine.
Why weekly?
Weekly reviews can help you in adjusting campaigns faster towards expected successful monthly results.
There are so many different metrics worth tracking, as well as a handful of planning ahead before you even get the data you expect.
First, you have to understand how metrics work.
Start experimenting and measure changes regarding the content you publish regularly.
Take notes of these changes and try to understand the reasons why they happened.
If there is a viral post, or many blog post views or just unusually more likes, measure this and try to adapt your strategy, replicate what you have done. Or if there weren’t any changes – why so?
But first, you need to know which metric to follow for the best results.
If you don’t have a huge marketing budget for automatic measuring tools and software, you can rely on Google analytics and use some of its indicators to collect useful data.
In this article, we have collected and explained the metrics that we follow, before we start creating the campaigns to drive more readers and potential clients to our website.
#1 Blog post views
The number of blog post views says a lot about your posts. Tracking these numbers represent a solid way to have a quick feedback for every published post. Is it good or bad? Or is it just inappropriately promoted?
If you aren’t satisfied with the view count, you can always search for topics your audience like more.
How can you find out which topic is more for your audience based on GA indicators?
Apart from view counts, you should pay attention to other metrics that say more about your audience interests.
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Time spent on site – the content quality indicator
The average time spent on the blog post is the best indicator to tell how much your readers love being on your website. Tracking this metric will help you to find the way to keep the readers longer on your site.
Take notes of the average time spent on every website page. Compare results and see what the reason for higher numbers is.
If and when you see good results, try to apply similar content to other pages of your website.
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Unique visitors – the indicator of content strategy influence
It is pointless to invest so many time and effort into content that nobody can’t see.
If you measure the number of unique visitors you’ll be able to determine whether or not your marketing campaigns are working. However, this metric is not the only indicator of a successful campaign, keep that in mind.
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Returning visitors – the indicator of the audience interest
Earning long-term readers is every bit as important as gaining new ones. This metric can tell you if you have reached the necessary level of content “stickiness”.
For example, you can measure blog post views to figure out which blog content is performing the best. Knowing which topic got the most views naturally could help you create other similar types of posts.
In addition to Google Analytics, you can use SEMrush, another excellent tool for measuring your content traffic.
Collected data from this tool can be used for measuring which pages on your site receive the most traffic and from which sources. Moreover, gathered insights can also say clearly which piece of content drives the most traffic.
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Bounce rate – the indicator of the audience lack of interest for your content
A “bounce” happens when your website visitor comes to one of your pages and then clicks “Back” without doing anything on the page.
In short, a high bounce rate usually indicates that people are not so interested in what you have to offer. Less possible is that they found what they wanted and just left.
You can track bounce rate on a daily or weekly basis, so you can detect the pages with the bounce rate higher than usual. By looking at this information week over week, you can make adjustments to your content schedule to improve your results.
What can you do? Change the content on those pages, keep it relevant and attractive.
In addition to Google Analytics, you can also use SimilarWeb to measure your page bounce rate. This tool can provide you with your bounce rates same as your competitor’s rate.
#2 Click through rate
After someone reads everything on the page they clicked on, there is always a great potential to offer something more and to keep that person a bit longer on the cite.
So you need to offer a proper CTA button to move the reader to the next post or whatever you want him to do next.
The metric you should most closely measure for CTAs is your click-through rate or the percentage of users who clicked on the CTA.
How will you do that?
Take a look at what CTAs are performing the best for a day. Look at those with higher conversion rates. Decide what might cause better performance and then try to apply that to other pages.
Pay attention to these CTA characteristics and analyze them carefully:
- Is it the design of the CTA?
- The CTA position?
- Is the content that the CTA is promoting more intriguing than other CTA’s
For example, if you have a high conversion rate on CTAs that lead to video posts and lower conversion rates on CTAs that lead to a regular blog post, that may mean your audience prefers videos over other forms of content.
#3 Social media share
Social networks represent another important metric that indicates the range of quality that comes with published content.
If you measure your social shares, you can discover what kind of content drives attention the most, or which social media channel your business can use the most.
Of course, you won’t have to check all shares manually. You can use BuzzSumo to easily check all the social share data in one place.
How can you improve your social reach?
You can use your weekly reports to follow progress and discover which content has been attracting more followers. Use report results to increase your future results.
How can you do that?
Think about hashtags. Check the engagement percents that attracts each of hashtag you add.
Check the popular ones and use them to create some with trending potential. There is a huge potential that comes with great hashtags, both on Twitter and Instagram.
Think about publishing channels, what type of content you had there that was successful. Replicate the same for other channels.
Use all ingredients that gave your social media needed boost. Do that every week, or just use the results to prepare a weekly social media plan.
#4 Traffic Sources
You can improve your content strategy based on the success of published content on your channels or external ones.
External channels are the websites that republish or just share your links and content. They are the precious source of unexpected traffic if somebody else finds your content useful, so you always have to think of the relevance of the content you share.
That’s why you must track data from these different channels as well.
For example, you could get traffic from any of the following sources:
- Organic Search: Visits that come organically from the Google Search
- Direct Traffic: Visits from people who type your website address directly into their browser
- Referrals: Visits from inbound links on other websites
- Social Media: Visits from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others
- Newsletters and emails: Visits from emails you’ve sent
- Paid Search: Visits from paid search results
Track overall traffic to your website, but pay attention to the external sites that are sending traffic your way as well. If you identify these web pages it will help you to easily adapt your campaign.
To sum up,
There can be a pattern for successful content, but it depends on how well you understand your metrics. You can follow and replicate all that you have done excellently.
Digital marketing works on trial and errors.
Don’t be afraid to experiment.
