How to Measure Your Content Marketing Efforts So Your Business Can Get the Most Out of Everything It Publishes

When building pages or adding new information to a website, creating relevant content is vital to its success. This content should market your website by providing visitors with valuable information and have an end goal of making a sale therefore creating a profit.

The key is figuring out if your content is actually working since there is a gap between when the content is published and when a sale is made. As a result, you must know how to measure the success of your content strategy so that you can make changes if necessary.

Content Marketing: Measuring Your Traffic

The first thing you should do is look at the raw traffic numbers. This is easy if you have published the content on your own website since you can see your page views through Google Analytics. When you publish an article on someone else's website, you will have to look at referral traffic to get an idea of how much traffic your content is generating.

If you are not getting much traffic, you might want to make some changes. Start by looking at your search engine ranking. There is a good chance that your article is not properly optimized if you are not receiving hits. Consider using new keywords, changing the title, or hiring an SEO company. It also helps to encourage others to link to the article.

Engaging With the Reader

High-end content engages the reader and turns visitors into customers. Therefore, it is important that you measure the engagement of your articles to see if readers are interested in purchasing your product. You can use Google Analytics to check for bounce rates, the average visit duration, and the number of pages looked at per visit. If readers are leaving shortly after clicking on your article, it means that the article is not engaging enough.

You can make your articles more engaging by limiting advertising, making your font larger, providing short content, creating well-structured content, and giving readers some new and insightful information. In short, make the reader enjoy his or her time spent reading your article.

Social Media Impact

You can also include social media buttons at the end of your articles that help measure your social impact. Whenever someone retweets, likes, or shares your article, the number will appear on your page. This is an easy way to measure how many people are sharing your articles with their friends.

Keep in mind, however, that just because someone shares your article does not mean that others will read it. This is where creating engaging content comes into play. The better the content reads, the more likely those who come across it on Twitter or Facebook are to give it a try.

Earning Solid Backlinks

Having backlinks is important because it creates unique traffic and improves your Google ranking by turning you into an authority. You can use Google Analytics to see how many people have linked to your articles and how legitimate these websites are. While having backlinks is important, it is more important that they come from websites with a solid reputation. If a number of spam-filled websites link to your articles, it could hurt your Google ranking.

As a result, you should not only look at the backlinks that you have but also the traffic and the page ranks of the websites that are linking to your content. This is one reason why purchasing backlinks never really worked - because they usually come from websites that will not help your ranking.

Conversion of Traffic

Of course, conversions are what it all comes down to if you want to make money. You could generate plenty of traffic, but if you do not make sales, it really does not help your bottom line.

Google Analytics can help you in this situation, as you can look at your goal completions, total abandonment rates, goal flow, and visitor flow to see how well your content is turning readers into buyers.

To improve your conversion rate, make sure that the reader understands the next step. Include a call to action at the end of your article with a link to another page where the reader can sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, or do whatever else your content was meant to accomplish.