Tools to Measure the Impact of your Content Marketing Funnel

Why are you analysing your content?

Before going deep into measuring, you should ask yourself: what do you want to achieve from your efforts in content marketing?

Your answers will most likely lead you to 7 metric categories that are shared below:

Consumption/Utilization Metrics 

Look at the number of readers who read and utilize your content, the channels they use, and the frequency of their utilization.

• Website or blog: Looking at unique visitors, page views and average time on your site using a tool like Google Analytics
• Social media: For measuring click through action tools Bitly can help
•  Email: MailChimp,  Marketo, Eloqua, and Constant Contact measure areas such as clicks and open rates for your email campaigns.
• Assets: like downloadable ebooks or whitepapers: Check form completions or your downloads using Marketo, Eloqua,Pardot, Act-On, or another marketing automation platform. Keeping in check that if your asset is indexed by search engines, users may be able to skip the submission form and download the asset directly.
• Feeds: Use FeedBlitz or FeedBurner to check your content’s views and clicks
• Outreach: Use Hubspot's Sidekick to know who all opens your mail and what are the timings when they open most of them.

Retention Metrics 

It takes in the importance of holding on to your audience's attention beyond the initial point.

• Website or Blog: Look at the number of visits, returning visitors percentage, the pages per visit, and the bounce rate using a tool like Google Analytics.
• Social media: 

1. Targetting and Following the right users on Twitter with Follower wonk by Moz
2. Tracking audience on Facebook through its insights and tools like Hootsuite etc.
3. Checking number of active followers on Instagram on apps like Instafollow, Crowdfire.

•  Email:  MailChimp, Marketo, Zoho and Eloqua can measure the number who opt out or unsubscribe from your content.

Sharing Metrics 

This helps in examine:

• what content is being shared
• who is sharing it
• where is it being shared
• how are they sharing it

SharedCount can help quantify retweets, “likes” and social media shares of your content.

Engagement Metrics 

These metrics are one of the key points on understanding whether your content relates with the readers or not.

Is there any action after they read your content?

If yes, are the consistently taking action?

• Website or blog: User's session duration can be measured through Google Analytics and it can also tell as to how deep has a user been in your site
• Social media:To check social impact of your content, tools like Klout can be handy to have

 Lead metrics: Converting your leads successfully and keeping your existing leads intactbecomes a priority in your marketing plan. Tools like Eloqua, Marketo, Act-On and similar marketing automation platforms can assist in this area.

Production Metrics

This comes in where you have to internally assess your content operations.

Be it measuring how your team is performing against your editorial calendar with deadlines and goals. Keeping up on the time taken to turn a content idea into a published content piece and also on the number of content pieces being published in a week or month. Content team has to measure these things on their own over time. I suggest using a simple Google drive sheet to track this.

Cost Metrics

The most important metrics of them all as it helps in calculating return on investment for content marketing. What's the cost of delivering anything related to content be it blog post, infographics, white paper or a email campaign? The costing should not just involve the freelance budget, staff time but also design fees, stock images being used and cost involved for paid distribution channels.

You don't have to measure everything at once. Just start with measuring the metrics which help you take business decisions.