Content Operations Metrics Part 1: Measuring What Matters
Understanding Content Operations Metrics
Content operations metrics are numbers that allow marketers and content creators to track the performance of their content as it relates to capturing, engaging, and converting their audience. These metrics are essential in content management and marketing strategy as they guide marketers in identifying lower-performing content to improve and higher-performing content to expand upon.
Which content operations metrics can make a difference in the grand scheme of a marketing strategy? While it can differ based on industry and goals, general key metrics include those that show how many eyes are landing on your content, where your audience is coming from, which content engages them, and which pieces drive the most ultimate sales.
The Core Metrics: What Really Matters
Essential metrics for digital content operations measure your website, emails, and social media’s relevance, engagement, and conversion power. Find out how each type of metric factors into your overall marketing strategy success.
Website Metrics
After first creating a website, a tool that many marketers turn to is Google Analytics. This can be an excellent starting place for beginners, as you can learn how to understand what you’re looking for at a glance.
A primary web metric type that every digital marketer should track is traffic, which shows you how many people are landing on specific pages and your website as a whole. When interpreting traffic numbers, larger numbers are usually considered better. Relevant metrics include:
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Users: Tells you how many individual people are viewing your website or page.
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Pageviews: Tells you how often someone has viewed your site or page.
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Unique Pageviews: Shows you the number of times a user has viewed the site or page for the first time.
Engagement is another type of web content metric that digital marketers should pay attention to. Metrics that measure how much a user is engaging with a specific piece of content include:
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Average Time on Page: Tells you how much time people spent on the page. A more extended amount of time is interpreted as higher engagement.
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Bounce Rate: Tells you how many people left the website after seeing this page. A lower percentage is typically interpreted as belonging to a more engaging page.
Once you have a handle on tracking traffic and engagement metrics, you can take it further by tracking conversions. Conversions track the relevance of your content to the audience that is most likely to purchase from you. Avoid creating high-quality, engaging content that brings the wrong audience to your website by prioritizing high-converting content.
You’ll need to set up your sales goals in Google Analytics or your tracking and reporting tool of choice to track conversions. This means telling the tool what action counts as a conversion for you ? for instance, landing on a ‘Thank You for Your Purchase” page ? and how much each conversion is worth. Then, the tool will track the number of conversions from a page and the amount of money the sale generated.
Social Media Metrics
Seeing how much your content has been viewed, shared, and engaged with on social media is also a good indicator of which content best connects with your audience. You can do this by tracking how many times users have clicked social share buttons on your website and tracking your content across various social channels.
When looking at your social media metrics, pay attention to how many views the posts receive, how much people engage with specific posts through likes, reactions, and comments, and how often people choose to share your posts to their social network. Each social platform should provide you with metrics, as will social media management tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social. Web traffic metrics can also tell you which views on your website are coming directly from social media channels.
Email Metrics
You can measure emails promoting your content to see which topics connect best with your email audience. Since your email audience should be built out of newsletter subscribers, past customers, and others who have already shown interest in your brand and its offerings, this can be a good place to get a pulse on how relevant your content is to your offerings.
Once you understand web metrics, email metrics are similar. Key metrics to track include:
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Open Rate: This tells you how many people opened your email promoting a specific piece of content compared to how many people you sent it to.
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Click Rate: A measure of engagement and website conversion, it tells you how many people clicked on a link or image in an email versus how many people you sent it to.
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Click-Through Rate: Another measure of engagement and website conversion, CTR tells you how many people clicked on a link or image in an email versus how many people opened the email.
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Unsubscribe Rate: This rate shows how many people unsubscribed after receiving the email versus how many people received the email overall. Indicates the percentage of people not engaged with the content you?ve sent them.
