It’s the beginning of a new month, which means pulling data from the previous month and measuring the performance of your content marketing initiatives. This is one of my favorite things to do! It’s when you can actually see how your posts and articles are impacting the bigger picture of the company.
Evaluating Your Content Marketing Performance
To get a good picture of your progress, it takes quantitative and qualitative data. That means, you can pull the numbers from a tool like Google Analytics but you’ll still have to use your head to make connections and determine the “why” behind the figures.
Instead of focusing on exact numbers (ex. 10 visitors from Facebook), look for general trends like increasing traffic from organic search. (The exact numbers can be inaccurate for many reasons and it won’t help to examine the behavior of one individual.) What you want to see with the data is if you’re making progress toward your goals. Keeping an eye on general trends will help you with that.
Here are a few questions to get you started:
- How many people visited the website last month compared to the previous month? Keep track of this metric in an excel file so that you can see the difference from one month to the next.
- Whether it’s up or down, why do you think that’s the case? For example, one of my clients has lower traffic in March compared to February because they had a seasonal topic that took off during the coldest months.
- What was the rate of new vs. returning users? This metric means different things to different businesses. Generally speaking, a company looking for brand awareness would want to see the new visitors increasing at a higher rate.
- What pages did they land on when they first came to your site? The first page that they came to will tell you a lot about what topic or themes matter most to your audience.
- What channels (organic search, direct, social, paid search, etc.) generated the highest website traffic? Since we handle organic search and social media marketing, we want to ensure that those channels are consistently generating more website traffic from month to month.
- What are your most viewed pages? This section can provide insight as to an old blog post that might be generating some traction again or help you identify a content opportunity on a similar topic.
- Did any day or week stick out as a time for high website traffic? If so, look for the source of the website traffic. Perhaps your uptick can be tied to an email newsletter that was released that day.
- What goals have the highest conversion rate? Hopefully, you’ve set up goals on your website. If not, take a few minutes to do that now. By looking at the conversion rates of your goal, you can identify the main interest that your website visitors have when seeing your site. Then you can either make it easier for them to convert by tweaking your website structure or know the right call-to-action for your blog posts.
- Do you notice any common topics in your top 10 viewed pages? Oftentimes, you’ll notice blog posts take over most of your top positions. See if they cover any common themes and use that information to fuel future content creation.
Conclusion
Evaluating your content marketing performance on a monthly basis is necessary in order to ensure you’re making progress toward your goals. Dig into the data and adding your insights to help improve your content creation moving forward.
Join the Million-Dollar Marketing Strategies Facebook Group if you have any questions on this topic. In this private group, I’ll show you how to create a Million Dollar Marketing Strategy that attracts customers and produces consistent leads for your business.
