An article from Estate Agency Marketing

Effective content marketing is a combination of a well-organised content strategy, clearly defined targets, and constant analysis of the results. No matter how compelling and well-written your copy is, it will only be judged by the value it generates for your business at the end of the day.

So, how do you analyse the performance of your content? The answer, you’ll need to find the right metrics to focus on.

CONTENT MEASUREMENT STARTS WITH YOUR BUSINESS GOALS
According to the B2B Marketing Report by Content Marketing Institute, marketers create new content to support the following business objectives.

-Lead Generation
-Brand Awareness
-Engagement
-Lead Nurturing
-Sales
-Customer Retention/Loyalty
-Subscription Growth

Do these reflect the goals supported by your content?

MEASURE CONTENT IMPACT THROUGH A 6-STEP FRAMEWORK

Having identified your business goals, you can now dive deeper into the content marketing metrics that influence your content’s impact. For simplicity sake, let’s break these marketing metrics into six steps:

1. Determine if Your Content is Discoverable

So, first off: Is your content discoverable without having spent a fortune in paid traffic acquisition? This potential is why marketers are latching onto the Content Marketing and SEO trend. As you may know, utilising SEO best practices will make your content ideation more effective. First, select content topics that are of high value. Meaning, those that are both relevant to your target audience and have high monthly search volume. Then, use products like SE Ranking to view the topics your competitors are ranking high for, but you’re not.

Furthermore, you can use tools such as Google Analytics to find out if your content is discoverable. Impressions, Clicks, Click-Through Rate (CTR), and site visitors, are all ways in which to can determine how discoverable your content is.

Impressions: How many times was your content visible on SERP? This metric helps you understand whether search engines find your content relevant to search keywords.

Clicks: When your content was presented to search users, how often did they click to visit your site? This metric helps you understand how well your content resonates.

CTR: Dividing total clicks by total impressions will give you CTR for a keyword or keyword group. Measure CTR overtime for a piece of content to see if it is improving, or benchmark it against your site average or competitors’ content to determine if it’s a top performer.

Site Visitors: Once your content is discoverable by search engines and online search users clicked on your SERP listing, they become visitors to your site. You’ll want to ensure a consistent influx of new visitors, to grow the overall user base that you can nurture. But, make sure there is a healthy balance between new visitors and repeat visitors, which is appropriate for any business model.

2. Traffic

Once a visitor has clicked and arrived on your site, the “big show” starts. Your initial content page needs to do the heavy lifting to make sure the visitor remains interested and views additional pages within the same session. Metrics like Time on Page and Bounce Rates are two good starting points. For pages with low percentage of Exit Rates, Time on Page is a fairly good indicator of how long the visitor stayed on that page. If the Time on Page for a particular page is lower than your site average, and you are spending money to drive traffic to it – immediate attention is required.

In Google Analytics, the metrics you want to be looking at are:

-Users – the total number of unique visitors to your page
-Pageviews – the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed
-Unique pageviews – If a single user has viewed your page multiple times, these visits are combined into one pageview to calculate this metric.

3. Sales or Conversions

So people are visiting your site and reading your blog. That’s great! But what else are they doing when they’ve finished reading? Are they clicking your links and reading more? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Completing a Lead Gen form?

It’s up to you what counts as a conversion. For an estate agent, the goal of your content might be to get valuations, while for others, it just might be to raise awareness of your brand and increase your authority.

4. Engagement

Sometimes the amount of traffic your content gets is more a measure of how effective you are at getting people to click your links, rather than how good your content is.

To really find out if people are engaging with your content, you’ll need to track how long they’re spending on your site and how many pages they’re visiting in each session.

The goal is to keep them on your site as long as possible so they can read more of your content (unless, of course, you want to funnel them to a lead gen page as quickly as possible.)

You can see this information under Audience Overview in Google Analytics. Here, as well as seeing your total number of sessions and visitors, you can see the average number of pages per session, the average session duration, and your bounce rate.

For content that’s designed to be read, ideally, you want a high number of pages per session, a long average session duration (depending on the length of your content) and a low bounce rate.

5. Social Media Engagement

Tracking the number of impressions your content is getting will help you in two ways.

Firstly, it will help you to identify if you’re posting at the right time. If your content tends to get much higher impressions when you send it out in the morning, you know this is a better time to post compared to afternoons or evenings.

Impressions is also a great way to measure content performance. If your impressions are in the thousands, for example, but you’re getting very few engagements, this could be a sign your content isn’t appealing to your audience.

6. SERP Ranking

Where you appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial if you want potential customers to find you.

If you’re on page one of Google’s search results, for example, there’s a stronger possibility that people will click on your site. The higher your rankings, the more traffic you’re likely to receive, which improves your overall SEO.

If your website is ranking highly for your targeted keywords, it means Google considers it to provide value and is a good indication that your content is performing well.

From this, you can gain valuable insights into why your content is performing well in search or what else you can do to give it a boost. For example, a good position in SERPs could indicate a new link building campaign is working well, you’ve chosen the right keywords, or Google has identified your content as high-quality and relevant.

Do you need help with your marketing? Get in touch with Estate Agency Marketing.

Who are Estate Agency Marketing?
A super friendly and effective digital marketing agency that focuses solely on estate agents and their digital marketing needs. Whether you're after a specialised SEO, Content Marketing or Social Media campaign, we are here to help you became the go-to estate agent within your territory.

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