A Guide to Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Content Efforts
Measuring your website data is a key component to ensure that you always have ways to improve.
There’s a great business management quote by Peter Drucker that says, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it”. You can’t know if, or how much, something is improving or worsening if you’re not measuring your data.
The numbers behind your website visitors can give you valuable insights into what you can do better for your customers and online business. Knowing how people use and behave on your website can also be very profitable when running future marketing campaigns and reaching out for a greater audience.
Sometimes it can be challenging to identify the exact metrics that are most beneficial to your particular business, or to fully understand the stories they tell. Still, there are some very effective, easy-to-measure web metrics, often with free tools, that you should monitor closely. Following are a few of the most important:
Website Traffic and Average Time on Page
Google Analytics is the perfect tool to track the number of people coming to your website, the percentage of new, unique visitors, or how long they all stay with your content. These numbers are clear signs of the effectiveness of your business and strategies.
It’s important to build a loyal following for your brand, and ensure a steady growth by bringing in new people. To increase the numbers, focus on the right keywords, target them with quality and useful content, promote and share it on social media, and improve your website SEO.
Incoming Links and Domain Authority
Knowing how people find you online can help determine the best platforms to target in order to grow your reach, as well as improve your SEO and marketing efforts. An increase in your organic search volume, – that is clicks from unpaid search engines’ listings, shows your work on boosting SEO is paying off.
The results from your social promotions and shares can be seen in the social traffic. Direct traffic includes the visitors who come directly to your website by typing your URL in their browsers or by clicking a bookmark. Referral is the traffic coming from other blogs and websites. And PPC advertisements can be monitored via the campaigns.
For a stable long-term growth of your business, it’s important to have a well-balanced mix of all traffic sources. If all your traffic is coming from Google, only a simple algorithm that affects you can cost you lots of money very quickly. Also watch your domain authority to track the popularity of your links and search ranking potential. Moz’s free SEO tools are great for monitoring these metrics.
Click-Through Rates (CTRs)
Click-through rates show the percentage of people who’ve followed a link to your website, and can be used to measure the success of your SEO, social, and email marketing efforts.
For search, you can calculate CTR by dividing the number of organic visits from Google to your site by its total impressions in users’ search results, and multiplying it by 100. Email CTR shows the percentage of recipients that click on one or more links in your emails. For social media CTRs it’s best to check out the analytics provided by the platforms or to use social analytics tools like Buffer, Followerwonk, or Quintly.
Growth of Email Subscribers
When it comes to emails, the number of subscribers in your list is an important metric to follow. These people are potential buyers of your products and services, and they want to stay in touch with your business. Make sure you know and understand this demographic, analyze the type of content that interests them the most, and performs best in terms of conversions.
In addition to the click-through rates, it’s also important to monitor the number of new subscribers, and the overall growth of your subscribers list by dividing the difference of new subscribers and un-subscribers by the total number of subscribers in your list.
Social Media Followers and Shares
Social media is among, if not, the most important marketing channel every business needs to reach out to new customers and stay close to the loyal ones. The number of social followers and shares by network give you an insight into the success of your efforts through each and every one of these sites.
Create great content and track the shares, comments and engagement it receives, as well as the web traffic it helps generate. Buzzsumo is a great tool for these metrics. The information is later priceless, when planning and creating your new content.
These web metrics are important for almost every business out there, as they give information on what matters the most, and can point and guide you to your greatest success. Analyze and combine the data to understand your customers’ needs and wants even further, but make sure to put it in the right context as well, in order to ensure accurate results.
Cathy Baylis is a freelance content writer at Assignment Masters specializing in personal growth, career development, leadership, and education. She loves sharing her interests with readers, and she has something to say, for sure. Writing is not only her hobby but profession at the same time.