Measuring the Value of Content: Metrics that Matter

It’s really easy to get into the habit of publishing content almost for the sake of publishing content, right? We’re all told about how Google loves “fresh” content and many will interpret that to mean they need to be publishing all the time.

The result is that in some marketing teams, there are people who are measured just on publishing certain amounts of content over a given time period.

But how do you know whether content is even worth it? 

Of course, everyone’s marketing objectives are different. But here are some metrics that matter when it comes to measuring the value of your content.

Enquiries or Sales

Direct enquiries or sale from your content is, of course, the epitome of content success. So if you have a landing page, guide or blog post that is directly generating revenue, this is great news.

Of course, if your goals for your content are those specific goals, then you’ll want to measure how much revenue or value is generated and how much time/money you spend creating that content asset.

Newsletter Sign Ups

Particularly with editorial content, it’s often the case that the audience it drives isn’t going to be converting at the same rate at the audience landing on your product pages. But what are the “softer” value adds?

Newsletter sign ups have value. This is an audience you can then reach directly through your email marketing. So one possible metric to measure is how many newsletter sign ups you win through your content efforts.

Traffic

Of course, irrelevant traffic is no use to anyone beyond vanity metrics.

But traffic matters if you’re generating revenue through ads. And there’s also real value in some non transactional traffic on your content.

As an example, let’s say you sell hiking boots. You have a huge guide on your site to the best types of crampons for winter hiking in a certain part of the world. People go to Google and they search, “What type of crampons do I need to hike in Scotland in January?” or they search “best crampons for rocky mountains.”

You could potentially have thousands of hikers here who are reaching your content because they are looking for advice on winter hiking gear for mountain hiking.

This is an audience you could retarget with ads for winter specific crampon compatible hiking boots and bring them back to win the sale through advertising.

So bringing in relevant traffic has value for multiple channels across your marketing activity.

Social Media Interaction

With more than a third of the population using Instagram regularly and billions of Facebook users, there’s a good chance that the people you want to turn into your customers are on social media. 

Creating content for your site that resonates with your social media audience is one way to earn interaction and expand your social media reach. It’s also material that can be used for social media advertising.

So if you have a social media strategy in place that makes use of the content you’re producing for your blog (repurposed or even just promoted via social) then measuring the interaction this content yields could be a useful metric for you.

Inbound Links

Not all content is going to drive an audience of prospective customers. Some content may be purposely created as “link bait,” to try and acquire organic natural links back to your website, which will in turn influence your rankings for other more commercial and transactional intent queries.

So if you’ve produced a linkable asset designed to generate inbound links passively, measure it on links and not on customers or enquiries.

Objective Setting

Ultimately, every single content piece you produce should have objectives of some sort – and it’s most likely that they won’t be the same for every single piece.

Setting goals for content (smart ones that are specific to each type of content asset you create) is the only way to truly understand whether your content investment is worth it.