Content marketing offers your business the opportunity to better connect with customers by providing high quality content that solves problems and answers important questions, as well as a chance to establish your business as an industry leader. It’s not enough, however, to simply publish content – without the ability to measure content performance, you’re completely left in the dark about exactly what that content is doing for you.

Without performance metrics, you’ll never be able to determine whether you’re spending your marketing dollars wisely, or if audiences who enjoy your content are actually being converted into customers. Measuring content performance also allows you to pivot when something isn’t working – whether it’s changing the focus of your strategy or taking a different approach to SEO, analytics can be a saving grace when nothing about your marketing efforts seems to be working.

Ask yourself these two key questions

When it comes to the performance of your digital content, there are two key questions to ask yourself: Is my content attracting an audience that is engaging with it? And is my content converting that audience? In order to find out the answers and be able to fine tune strategies that are proving ineffective, you need to be able to accurately measure performance.

If your content simply isn’t attracting any sort of audience, performance metrics will allow you to improve SEO and identify opportunities for improving engagement to help you draw in users. If an audience is being attracted to your content but aren’t being converted into customers, performance analytics can help you identify opportunities you weren’t previously aware of. Without being able to measure your content performance, you’ll never fully grasp what impact your content is having, and whether your dollars could be better spent.

How to measure content performance

There are many tools available for businesses to measure content performance from a variety of perspectives. One of the most widely used platforms is Google Analytics, which can be used to analyze the behaviour of users who make their way to your website. Using Google Analytics, you can measure how many unique pageviews your content is receiving, how often users are returning to your content, where they came from, how long users are spending on your page(s), and even what actions they took while on your pages. This information is extremely useful in determining what channels to focus your efforts on, deciding how to encourage users to spend more time on your website, and gauging how effective your content is at drawing in users and encouraging them to stick around.

It’s not enough to rely solely on Google Analytics for measuring how well your content is doing. Other tools like SEMRush offer deeper insight into how well optimized your content is, and what you can do to improve SEO. Auditing your entire digital presence is made easy by tools like this, which identify issues with your content and provide you with a roadmap to fixing them and improving your website’s overall performance. 

For total coverage, it’s recommended that you combine performance measurement tools like Google Analytics and an SEO tool like SEMRush with Zoho One. Zoho gives you the power to easily track leads from the first moment they hit your website all the way through to conversion. Being able to track what is converting leads ensures that you can better focus on what’s workingWith Zoho, you’ll also be able to determine what type of paid advertising led them to your website, giving you information about actual ROI rather than relying solely on the data provided by each platform.

By using these tools to measure content performance, you ensure that no blindspots exist and that you’re fully able to see the whole picture. Knowing what’s working and what isn’t gives you the opportunity to act proactively by focusing on SEO and content optimization, and the ability to identify new opportunities for what type of content you should be publishing. By enlisting the services of an SEO professional to write and optimize your website’s content, you’ll be able to get the very most out of the content you spend so much time and money creating. 

Our preferred way of setting up your analytics is to enable Zoho dashboards that give you a bird’s eye view of your digital marketing and website performance. We have experts certified in Google Analytics and search engine optimization experts who are used to working with advanced tools. As a business owner, you don’t have the time and you may not have the expertise to work with these tools – but we do. Viewing your content marketing performance in Marketing Hub and other Zoho tools is really all you need to worry about. Let the experts do the rest. If we identify a problem or opportunity, we’ll ask you if you want us to do the required work to follow through and we’ll get it done professionally and quickly. Additionally, if you ever see anything in your dashboards that you have questions about, we’re always here for you if you make us your partner. 

ion8 is an all-in-one business consultancy with an experienced team of digital marketing experts ready to optimize your business’s content to better attract new audiences and improve conversion rates. To find out more about everything that ion8 can do to transform your business, contact us today.