My conversations as of lately has been centered around content marketing and how to effectively manage it’s success. It seems that so many people are really concentrating on page views. While page views will be a dead give away that people actually went to the page why not look deeper to see what people are doing when they actually arrive. After all there should be a deeper strategy towards content marketing other than getting page views. In order to get deeper understanding of how people are reacting to your content consider the four metrics below:

1. Average time on page is a really good indicator of quality content. If you find that that your time on page is low you might want to tweak your content, but this is variable depending on the industry of your business.
2. Exit rate could be a good discussion for debate. I say this because high exit rates could indicate that people didn’t find what they’re looking for and therefore leave the site right away. But, I believe that we need to break this down by referral traffic instead of looking at this as a whole. For example if people found your site organically through keyword searches and your blog post ranked the exit rate might be higher because they might have just clicked on your link because it was the first on in the SERPs. If you’re looking at your social referrals the exit rate should be lower because you’re sharing the content with your following that is suppose to be interested in your services. And this actually brings us to the third source to look at.
3. Traffic sources is a very important metric to look at especially when your looking at all the metrics because as I stated in the above examples knowing how to break down how each of your referrals are reacting to your content will give you insight on how to make adjustments accordingly.
4. Social reporting and trackable links is a very valuable metric to consider when trying to identify which one of your social properties your business is the most engaging on. Having trackable links on your content is a no brainer you want to be able to identify what social platform your getting more interaction from and also if your paying for sponsored links you want to measure some kind of KPI.

So long story short when you’re diving into a content marketing strategy it’s important to have your KPI’s identified before you begin so you can get your benchmarks before beginning so you’ll be able to measure your success from that point moving forward. So do this by knowing what metrics to look at first.

Good Luck!

Tanesha White

~ DigiDiva