The 4 types of content metrics that matter: consumption metrics. This is the most fundamental type of content metric, and sadly, it's also where a lot of programs start and end. This is the most basic and fundamental of the four types, and one that most marketers will already be familiar with. Consumption metrics, or what content was most frequently consumed, analyze how many people consumed your content and how often.
This can be measured as page views, videos, downloads, or other similar statistics. If you've ever explored Google Analytics, then you've analyzed consumption metrics. Consumption metric data is critical, but it's only part of a larger story. Remember that your ultimate goal is action, not just your eyes.
Sharing metrics analyze how often your content has been shared, usually on social networks. It helps you understand how your content impacts your audience, which gives you an idea of how your content affects your brand awareness and audience participation. Sharing metrics can include statistics such as “likes”, number of shares, retweets, pins, reposts, or inbound links, all depending on the social platform on which they are shared. Sharing metrics is important, but sometimes they are given more importance than they deserve because social networks tend to make the data public (for example, YouTube views appear in a prominent place below the video).
Assign internal business value to your sharing metrics to help provide some clarity, rather than being obsessed with optics. Pages viewed: the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed Unique views: If a single user has viewed your page multiple times, these visits are combined into one page view to calculate this metric. Continuously adopting metrics that help explain why specific content is shared is mandatory if you want to survive in the competitive digital world. To understand how to set the objectives and KPIs for your content marketing, you need to understand in depth why your company exists.
And since you've created different types of content depending on where in the buying cycle you're targeting your audience, there's no metric that can measure its effectiveness on its own. It forces you to think beyond your business and to focus on providing value to your target audience with content around your topic. The resulting e-book, A Field Guide to the Four Types of Content Marketing Metrics, details the critical analyses that content marketers must pay attention to if they want to deliver more effective results. When it comes to tracking the sharing metrics of sites, blogs, assets and social media posts, the metrics that need to be tracked are all quite similar, but the key metric that should be tracked are actions on social networks.
Identifying your main objectives and KPIs is an essential step in determining what metrics to use to track your content marketing efforts. You can also break down the data to see where your traffic comes from (geographically and how they found your site online) and the type of device they used to view your site. At this point you will understand that content marketing consists of creating useful content that attracts your audience, influences their behavior, generates loyalty for your brand and converts them into customers. Pawan Deshpande is the founder and CEO of Curata, a Boston-based company that offers content marketing software used by thousands of marketers around the world.
This is regardless of whether the user shared directly through the social network channel, if they liked or retweeted someone else's post with the share button on your content, or if they used a tool to share metadata such as Buffer. Understanding the four metrics of content marketing (what they tell you, what they don't and what parts of the full story tell) will allow you to have a holistic measurement system that will help you evaluate the content you create and, more importantly, draw conclusions from them to help you adjust your future content creation efforts to maximize the return on investment. You can measure each of the above marketing metrics on various content channels, such as websites, blogs, or social networks. Even though content marketing has been around for quite some time, some companies, especially smaller ones, have trouble understanding that content marketing results are rarely shown as macroconversions.
Of course, there are more metrics that you might find useful, depending on the type of industry you're in. .