Links.
The main reason why could justify the performance is through your strategy of obtaining high authority links which could drive traffic to your website or increase your SEO (we will cover this later). Simple tools will provide the changes that have occurred during your marketing campaign, in addition to domain ratings and custom metrics to see the difference over time.
SEO benefits and links
It is always important to focus on your SEO positioning. Are the links achieved matching up to the ranking increases? SEO can be influenced by many different factors including on-page optimisation so it’s important to understand whether your link building had a direct impact.
Use can also use keyword tracking tools to record the performance of your target keywords and when changes were made to see if that is matching with any ranking increases, this proves to be very useful if those rankings are changing for pages and keywords that were linked to your content marketing.
Engagement on social media.
Some of the most engaged and popular content every month receive zero links but goes viral in terms of shares on social media, comments, likes and retweets. If your social media gained new followers and engagement, that is an audience you can be sure are interested in your business but might be a result of your social media marketing campaign. You do have an influence if it’s your content on the posts or it’s supplemented with your content campaign.
The Referral traffic.
Since we are talking about direct traffic, you already know you need to be watching out at how much traffic your content marketing has managed to bring in. People always want to view the content but there are some users who will want to explore the site and you can even start getting come conversions out of this.
If you do receive a conversion from this, it won't be just after viewing the content marketing of your site. You can, however, still find the data for this by driving a bit deeper into your Google analytics.
Assisted Conversions.
With your Google analytics, you are able to see if your referrals are having the desired impact on the conversions and how many in specified date ranges. Go through all conversions. Multi-channel funnels and into assisted conversions. Check your referrals and you will be able to see exactly the sites that have been contributing to a conversion.
Measurement of Brand Awareness.
Brand awareness is often just a marketing phrase thrown in boardrooms like nobody's watching. Although ultimately, you do need to assess whether or not you are in front of the correct audience, that could easily be a new emerging target or even an existing customer base for your brand. If you are trying to reach out for people who would find your brand relevant and engaging, you have made them aware and you will see how they will end up converting one day.
Here’s a nice secret, you can actually measure brand awareness. With Google search console you can see your brand searches with detailed metrics showing allowed. If you start seeing the increase that aligns with the content marketing you have been working on and you not performing any offline activity, it is more than safe to say that you have succeeded with making that huge impact to many with your content marketing.
So next time you’re reviewing your content marketing campaigns performance, make sure you’ve planned ahead and prepared some key data to support your results.