The single most confounding question for anyone in the content marketing section is how you measure content marketing and its effectiveness. While answering the question, marketers often fall back on the soft metrics like shares and page views or anecdotes regarding how their content is performing using feedback from their sales team.

There’s always a better way!

Content marketing has travelled far from its ethics in just past few decades. Thus, digital marketing world is now available with definite content marketing metrics to answer the question along with the help of up-to-date technologies that support in quantifying the return on content marketing investment. Measurement comes at the end of the framework, but for many marketers, it’s the beginning, middle, end and everything that comes in between of your content marketing procedure. It looks simple, but not an easy task to accomplish.

Research says 33% of B2B marketers and 41% of B2C marketers refer to the inability of measuring the significant challenges. Though content marketing has been enormously adopted worldwide, but still people trying hard to measure the effectiveness, of it. In this section, content marketing metrics could help in measuring. So, “what the metrics are that can help measuring content marketing” probably be your question to ask.

Read Also: Why is content marketing becoming important for every business?

Ways to measure content marketing success:

Frankly speaking, the majority of your content is web-based; therefore, the backbone of your content measurement should depend upon your website analytics. You don’t have to memorize or obsess over single measurement entity in the Google analytics. On the other hand, be careful about the short-sight and spotlight on the single measures such as page views. Instead, there are other measures like time on site, bounce rate, crawl rate and inbound links that act as the number of success measure in content marketing.  Once you get comfortable with these measures, you can have the privilege to measure most of the content engagement and user experience.

• Social Media Metrics:

It’s pretty easy today to start going under the social media metrics. Nowadays social media is the largest widespread source of big data around the world that help to share the voice. The fact of marketing content over social media platforms is that it’s increasingly tied to search engine optimization. It is highly imperative, and you can’t even ignore these numbers so that you can measure how well your content is.

• Qualitative data:

Take notes on what your potential readers say about your contents. Look whether your content’s comment section appears like a bunch of crickets. It’s the responsibility of every marketer that they should turn their sites into a more vibrant online community so that discussion can be accumulated while listening to the potential readers.

To measure the content marketing, it is significant to give more emphasis on qualitative feedback that you receive from customers/readers and make your best approach to apply them. Bear it in mind that even world’s top ranking content writers face critical evaluation phase from time to time. Try to aim at increasing the feedback for your contents and if possible maintain a high ratio of positive and negative feedbacks.

• SEO metrics:

To be frank, there is a huge quantity of overlap present between social media metrics, website metrics and SEO metrics. This is not going to change soon because search engines go on with a wide array of factors to rank web pages. There’s a pyramid structure of SEO tactics that will help you to get the most effective results to gauge success. In the top-to-down pyramid, you’ll find website rankings on the top of the list.

Next-below is the page visits. Next to that is user behavior on your site. Next conversions and in the end it’s ROI. These factors will help you not only in measuring the content marketing but also increases page authority, enhances keyword rankings. Besides, it also helps in generating increased click through search results.