For content marketers, metrics provide us with the information we need to survive. They tell us how many people are seeing the content we put out, what they’re doing with it, and whether they like it or not. Based on that information, we learn which content we should be upcycling, replicating, and studying. Metrics also tell us which content we should drop and never speak of again, which is equally as important.
One of the main ways to improve your marketing efforts’ effectiveness is to measure your results, and build off of what you’ve done right in the past. In this blog, we will discuss which results to measure and why they are important.
What to start tracking in order to measure your marketing effectiveness:
- Unique visitors
A unique visitor refers to the number of individuals visiting your website during a given time period. Regardless of how many times that individual visits your page, they are counted only once. Your goal should be to have a high number of unique visitors. This high number will tell you that you’re putting out useful and relevant information, and marketing yourself properly in order to be found.
- Inbound links
An inbound link is a hyperlink back to your site from another website. That can either be from your social media platforms, or from another company/organization linking to your content. One of the most reliable strategies in search engine optimization (SEO) is that sites with a variety of inbound links rank higher in the search engine results pages. Inbound links are important because they can bring potential customers to your site, boosting the number of unique visitors.
- Search engine traffic
Search engine traffic refers to the amount of traffic coming to your site via search engines, such as Google or Bing. If you are optimizing your content correctly, you should have a decent amount of traffic coming from various search engines. If you traffic is low, that is an indicator that you must improve your SEO.
- Page views
When you look at your page views, you want this number to be higher than your number of unique visitors. What that will tell you is that your visitors are finding your content interesting and are clicking on your internal links and exploring your site. If your number of page views is low, you should work on refocusing your content towards what your audience is looking for.
- Bounce rate
Your bounce rate is an indication of what people think of your site. The bounce rate measures how many people come to your site and leave without clicking any links. Your goal should be to have a low bounce rate, which means those who land on your page click your links. What a high bounce rate can indicate is that your content doesn’t match up to what the visitor expected, your content wasn’t visually appealing, your content didn’t load fast enough, etc..
- Conversion rate
As you know, the point of a website is to convert visitor into leads. You want someone to see your email signup and enter their information because they see that you offer interesting and relevant content. The approximate average conversion rate is between 2 and 3 percent. That seems pretty low, but if you’re bringing lots of traffic to your site by utilizing your social media platforms correctly, 2 or 3 percent of your visitors should make for a good number of leads.
It used to be that measuring your marketing effectiveness was a chore. Now, it’s as simple as putting up a post. As marketers, we rely on great content to attract new visitors, and our website to convert those visitors to leads. Be sure to keep your focus on creating interesting and relevant content, and offering a user-friendly, attractive, and functional website and you will get those leads.
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