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This post dives into how to measure content effectiveness. There are discrete measures but often it can fall into areas of ‘it depends’. This helps to give the reader the tools to help answer the question – is this effective?
Marketing effectiveness seeks to understand how well the work is producing the desired results.
Before going further, these posts may be of help:
- Guide to Content Measurement
- Guide to Content Marketing Analytics
- Guide to Content Marketing & Guide to Branded Content
Table of contents:
- How to tell if content is effective
- Common metrics for understanding content effectiveness
- Why is measuring content effectiveness important?
- What makes content ineffective?
- Macro vs micro view in analyzing content performance
- Qualitative vs quantitative metrics
- Top performing brands have a scorecard
- A process for measuring quality of new content
How to tell if content is effective
How do you measure if content is being effective? It must pass a few criteria.
- Content is effective when it does its job.
- It delivers on what the purpose it was created for.
- And most often that is delivering a companies objective.
- And to deliver on that objective it needs reach and impact.
To measure this combination, you need a content analytics platform (like Nudge) that provides you with the tools to measure content effectiveness.
How content analytics works is. You will need tracking code, to measure the content, or API connections to a system that does. Then a dashboard to show the data.
In terms of measurement, you also need to measure the right thing. Metrics also need to go deeper than surface level, content has to be seen and heard.
For example, you need a meaningful number of future customers (or existing customers) to read the content. If you have 100,000 prospective customers and only 200 or 300 read it, you have really lost out.
The other thing to think about is impact, are they reading or consuming the content? For the content to leave an impact with each person, they have to have enough meaningful consumption. 5,000 people arriving on and leaving the content straight away means the content isn’t doing its job.
Common metrics for understanding content effectiveness
Common metrics to measure content effectiveness are:
- Reach, how many people are we getting in front of
- Attention, how long people are engaging for each click.
- Average Scroll, how are customers consuming the page and content.
- Engagement rate, what customers do on the page, and if they click out, to make a purchase, or sign up to webinar etc.
- Conversion rate, rate at which people take the desired action.
- Bounce rate, are people staying, but use a bounce rate that captures if people leave even without clicking a link. Like Nudge does.=
Explore more in Content Marketing Metrics.
Why is measuring content effectiveness important?
It is an opportunity to better understand consumer response to a brands marketing strategy. It offers real time and real world feedback on what is working and resonating. Without it, brands would be operating in the dark.
It also helps to articulate the ROI of content investments, hold partners/team accountable and to set KPIs.
What makes content ineffective?
It can be helpful to explore the opposite, what is it that would mean a piece of content has been ineffective.
- It doesn’t shift the needle
- Not enough reach to make a difference
- Attracts the wrong audience
- Is effective but cost too much to produce or requires too much
- Isn’t viral, as in, folks that engage with it don’t share it at all
Macro vs micro view in analyzing content performance
>Marketers need to be careful to not get too hung up on any one piece of content. When looking at effectiveness it can be more constructive to look at all the content holistically, and/or analyze different strategies, tactics or baskets of content. This helps to inform strategy and answer those ROI questions.
Going deep into each piece of content can be helpful when you’re trying to diagnose the why. And identify common learnings that can be exploited across the whole strategy.
Individual analysis can be more instructive where there is a mandate for optimization. Or for troubleshooting.
Qualitative vs quantitative metrics
Qualitative metrics help to add color and depth to the quantifiable metrics. Collecting qualitative metrics can be challenging unless the content has enough scale. This is because the response rate in live environments can be low and brands want the content to perform for their business not be a vehicle for surveys. What’s more important, a conversion or answering a survey?
Solutions to this include exploring social sentiment, collecting emoji responses and/or retargeting for survey responses. Or surveying a segment. Each add additional color in understanding effectiveness.
It also brings back the question of analyzing a piece of content vs a basket or tactic/strategy, where these outputs may be more insightful.
Sign up to Nudge to measure the effectiveness of your content. Get set up within 10 minutes, add your domain, install the code, get insights.
Top performing brands have a scorecard
Establishing an internal scorecard for success is a common behavior of top Performers. By articulating what exactly good content for their objective looks like in terms of performance metrics, this helps nudge the team in the right direction.
An example scorecard could be as simple as:
- Number of people
- Attention above 30 seconds
- Average scroll
- Conversion rate
Often brands will come up with their own cross metric, like return on attention, how much attention did we get per dollar of spend.
A process for measuring quality of new content
Many brands establish a workflow to review the real time data on their content after it has gone live. To see initial performance and identify any problems that can be fixed quickly.
This could be on a time basis, one week after posting or a threshold basis, when content surpasses 100 people.
- Decide the meaningful threshold, time or quantity
- Batch and schedule a content review of that content
- Implement changes
Marketers use tools like Nudge to review content effectiveness and get transparency on if and where their content is being effective.
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For more read our full Guide to Content Measurement.
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