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I'm looking at something right now that doesn't warrant linking to, partially because its a hook to get you interested in an e-book which requires you to join a list. I happened across a slideshare version of this that I can at least say was useful. I wanted to vastly compress it, share the information, and see if you guys are doing this, doing it differently, or doing something different entirely.
Content Marketing Metrics
To do this properly and fully, you need to be able to track every move a visitor makes and track enough of them accurately after the fact to see about customer retention (if you're selling a product). If you're displaying ads for CPM's or CPC's, things are going to be a lot simpler.
The question is, how do we know if our content marketing strategies are worth a damn, and how can we know what style and which articles are earning us money? This way, we can replicate the successes and refine a winning pattern.
Four Content Marketing Metrics
There are four different ways to measure the success of a piece of content, and combining this data should reveal the real winners.
Consumption
In more familiar terms, how much traffic is each piece getting? We are talking about page views for articles, play counts and lengths for videos, document views for stuff like Slideshare or Scribd... # of downloads on an e-book or audio file, etc.
Sharing
Is your content resonating with your demographic? Are they liking and sharing on Facebook? Tweeting and retweeting on Twitter? +1's on Google+? Pins on Pinterest? How many backlinks is each piece getting? Are you receiving referral traffic from emails?
Lead-Gen
The metric here relates to you building your lists. Are you getting form completions? Email subscribers, RSS subscribers, are you pulling emails from your blog commenters? You could take all of this and create an overall conversion rate into leads from each piece of content.
Sales
Cracking those code is money. Are certain pieces of content turning into direct sales, versus indirect and having to coax people through your funnel?
Content Marketing ROI
ROI = Return on Investment.
Track your Income and Expenses
Surely you're tracking your expenses and income, right? Track everything monthly. Assign a value to your hours, add in the cost of outsourcing content, throw in a portion of your overhead from everything and you'll have some form of total expense related to content. This number will vary month to month, so keep an Excel sheet so you can track over the long-haul and auto-calculate everything. Do the same with your income related only to content marketing. For some of us, that may be the only type of income. For others, you'll have to remove PPC and other methods from the equation.
Calculate your Return
So let's say you spent $3,000 on content last month. After the month is over, you determine that you brought in $4,200 from those efforts. Subtract the investment from the return and then divide by the investment... Like this:
$4,200 (return) - $3,000 (investment) = $1,200 (profit)
$1,200 (profit) % $3,000 (investment) = 0.4
Multiple the final answer by 100 to convert it to a percentage and you'll find you had a 40% ROI. That'd be great.
How To Use This Info
Calculate your ROI over enough months, and continue to track your four metrics and shift and pivot your content plan to replicate the style of your winners. Eventually you'll begin to maximize your ROI. Now the question becomes not how much are you spending, but how much can you spend before you receive diminishing returns. Once you figure that out, you can get crafty and start attacking tangent demographics to gain even more profit.
What are you guys doing to track your success? What metrics are you concerned with? Any methods to share?
