Lesson #6 – Measure the Right Metrics

Which metrics should you really be measuring?

Everyone invested in any kind of content production will know how important it is to track the right “metrics”. The only way for know to certain which of your pieces are the most effective (and valuable) is to keep track of essential data highlighting things like engagement and growth.

Unfortunately, too many marketers focus on the same handful of surface metrics and fail to search for deeper insights. Many companies still build their entire paid media ROI on page views and unique visitors alone. While these simple measurements are important, there’s a lot more involved in determining how successful your content really is. Businesses need to start looking beyond simple interactions and start homing in on engagement.

“The performance of our content is only as good as the engagement levels, impressions, views and opens just isn’t enough in B2B marketing”  – Rob Scott, Publisher

14 Key Metrics for Tracking Content Performance

Fortunately, our experience in the content marketing world has given us plenty of opportunities to determine which metrics really matter. In fact, we’ve pinpointed 14 crucial measurements capable of telling us everything we need to know. Let’s take a closer look.

Crucial Interaction Metrics

As mentioned above, interaction metrics are still important to understanding the overall value of your content. Here are the ones we consider to be the most valuable:

• Page Views: The number of times a post has loaded on a browser (indicating your reach).
• Unique visitors: The number of new people who have visited a page or post at least once during the reported time period. This indicates how many individual readers you acquired.
• Display impressions: The number of times a display advert has loaded in a browser.
• Email opens: The number of people who have actually opened an email in their browser or app – showing a level of interest.
• LinkedIn Impressions: The number of times a post has been seen by LinkedIn users.
• Facebook Impressions: The number of times a Tweet has been seen by Twitter users.
• YouTube Impressions: The number of times someone sees your video thumbnail on YouTube.

Essential Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics move beyond interactions to highlight how people are actually connecting with your content. Just because someone sees a LinkedIn post doesn’t mean they’ll be inspired to interact with your brand. Engagement metrics show you if you’re driving action.

• Engagement rate: The length of time a user’s screen was focused on a specific web page.
• Display click-through rate: The percentage of times a display advert is clicked, compared to the number of impressions.
• Email click-throughs: The number of subscribers who click on at least one link in your email campaign.
• LinkedIn reactions: The number of emoji-style expressions sent by LinkedIn users for one of your posts.
• Twitter engagements: The number of times a user interacts with a tweet, by commenting or sharing the information.
• YouTube views: The number of times a viewer intentionally plays a video and watches the content for at least 30 seconds.
• Social video views: The number of times a user watches at least 3 seconds of a video in their social media feed.

Measuring and understanding each of these metrics gives you a clear view of how many people are seeing your content, and how many people are taking action as a result.

Read the next blog in our Content Code series – Lesson # 7 – Don’t Look Back In Anger