If you’re a copywriter – in-house or freelance – or you need to hire one, the task seems fairly straightforward: write great content. But how do you define “great”? This is a trickier subject than you may think.
What can you do to find metrics to define the performance of content performance? In this article, we’re going to get into the different data-driven solutions to correctly measure the quality, impact and role your copywriting directly plays in digital marketing or sales output.
Know Your Audience
Defining the performance of your content largely depends on defining exactly who your users are. You’ll need to pinpoint various information about your audience. This is powerful knowledge that can facilitate you in tweaking your activities and resources more efficiently.
Measure the Reach of Your Content
One key metric to measure content performance is recording the number of page views. How many users did your content reach? How many unique views did a page gather? Page views are a starting point for comparing different kinds of content and ultimately gauging trends over time. They’ll aid you in measuring if and how fast your reach is growing.
Organic Traffic and Keyword Positions
Good content should be rooted in a solid search engine optimisation strategy. The bottom line? Your content should be SEO-friendly. Don’t do this, and your site won’t be visible in SERPs, neither will it receive stable organic traffic. It’s important to optimise your content for targeted keywords. Platforms such as SEMrush, Positionly and Google Keyword Tool will enable you to research keywords and measure your keyword positions daily.
Time Spent on Page and Bounce Rate
Aside from reach, measuring the time a user spends on a page and bounce rate are two metrics that are vital – you must monitor both meticulously. For the most effective and helpful results, wait at least 30 days prior to measuring your campaign. Ensure your results fit into averages in line with benchmarks provided by Quicksprout.
Google Analytics
Fast, free and accurate, Google Analytics is the most widely used platform for measuring a website’s visitors. The web analytics service provides you with statistics about where visitors are coming from, what keywords they used to find your site, what pages they spent the most time on, what links they click on and much more.
You can use Google Analytics to measure your social media performance and establish which social platforms generate the most traffic to your website.
Social Media Content
Defining the performance of your content on social media works a little differently to search engine traffic in that people are effectively lending their commendation to an article (or are actively attacking it). In other words, those that see the shares are much more likely to click the post.
With this in mind, social sharing is a wonderful shorthand for how popular/appreciated the blog or article is with real people and is a good indicator of whether or not it’ll go viral. Think Facebook shares, Twitter retweets and LinkedIn shares. Rake in the shares, and that’s a sign of likeable content.
Key tools to use include SocialMetricsPro (a powerful WordPress plugin that helps people keep tabs on where their content’s being shared, by whom and in what volumes) and social share counter plugins (help you monitor social shares, display them, help new audiences see how popular your content is).
Bounce rate, page views, time on site, conversions, keyword positions and social media tracking are sure-fire key metrics for defining the performance of content. It’s a good idea to check all of them in unison when calculating the content quality and your successes.
When you write a piece of content, be patient and check your results after 30 or even 60 days. Analyse the results, month by month, and evaluate your growth rate. Get to know your audience and utilise that knowledge to your advantage.
If you want to know more about how to create compelling online content, take a look at the copywriting services we offer, or get in touch for a free quote.