What is content performance?

Content performance refers to the impact of your published content on your target audience and overall marketing goals. This impact is measured by marketing teams to analyze the alignment of content with audience needs and to ensure that the investment in content production and distribution is driving desired business outcomes like brand awareness, lead generation, engaged customer interactions, and more.

Why is content performance important for your business?

Analyzing content performance is crucial for a successful content marketing strategy. The insights that you derive from this analysis help you:

• Create better and more relevant content for your target audience, resulting in increased engagement on web and social platforms.
• Allocate team efforts and marketing budgets effectively, improving resource efficiency.
• Achieve results like leads, sales, and other conversions, leading to better ROI.
• Make informed decisions based on data to stay ahead of competitors.

How to measure content performance?

Measuring content performance involves setting benchmarks, tracking different metrics, using analysis tools, and reporting. The key steps include

1. Set clear goals: Ensure the content you produce is mapped with defined objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, getting sales, increasing website traffic, etc.
2. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs): Based on your goals and channels chosen, identify the metrics that would act as the KPIs and set benchmarks based on industry standards or past performance. Some examples include Sign-ups, Conversion rate, Number of visitors, etc.
3. Use the right tools: Use tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, Ahrefs, Hubspot, etc. based on the phase of analysis and content distribution channels.
4. Analyze and report: Create dashboards and reporting templates to simplify tracking KPIs, deriving insights, and sharing results with team members.

What are the metrics to measure content performance?

There is an overwhelming number of metrics that you can track to measure content performance. You need to choose the right KPIs based on content objective, format, and distribution channels for effectively assessing the impact of content. Different content formats like blog posts, web pages, emails, social media posts, videos, etc. have their specific measurement metrics.

Let’s explore some commonly used content performance metrics categorized by business goals:

1. Engagement metrics: These metrics help marketers measure the user’s engagement with content on various channels.

   • Page Views: Indicates the total number of times your web content page is viewed.
   • Unique Users: The number of unique visitors on your content page.
   • Engagement time: The amount of time for which the content was in the foreground of users’ devices, signaling active engagement.
   • Session: A session is a group of user interactions on your web pages within a given time frame. An engaged session is one that lasts more than 10 seconds or includes a conversion event or has two or more page views.
   • Engagement rate: The percentage of engaged sessions.
   • Bounce rate: The percentage of sessions that were not engaged.
   • Click-through rate(CTR): It is the percentage of users who click on ad content (or an organic search engine result) compared to the number of times it is displayed.
   • Likes, reactions, and comments: These metrics measure user interaction and indicate content’s relevance and appeal on social media.
   • Social shares: The number of times a content piece is shared on social media, indicating the popularity of the topic or engaging writing style.

2. Conversion metrics: These metrics signal a business that the users are taking key actions after visiting their content.

   • Leads Generated: The number of prospects who fill out a form with their contact information after engaging with your content.
   • Sales: The number of paying customers you acquire through content marketing.
   • Conversion rate: The percentage of page visitors who take a desired action after engaging with your content.
   • Cost per lead: The amount you invest in content marketing to generate one lead.

3. SEO metrics: SEO metrics help you in planning your content strategy and measuring the corresponding impact.

   • Organic search traffic: The number of users visiting your website via organic searches.
   • Keyword ranking: The average position of your website in the search engine results page (SERP), seen organically.
   • Backlinks: The number of external websites linking to your content.
   • Domain Authority: A metric that defines the likelihood of a website to rank based on its current content and backlinks.

4. Revenue metrics: The revenue impact that your content marketing is generating for your business is measured by these metrics.

   • Revenue: The total amount of revenue generated through content marketing.
   • Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The amount you invest in content marketing to acquire a paying customer.
   • Return on investment (ROI): The revenue you earn for each dollar that you spend on content marketing efforts.

5. Video content metrics: Some content formats, like videos on Youtube, have their own unique metrics, like

   • Video views: The number of times a video is watched, indicating the popularity of the content.
   • Watch time: The total accumulated amount of time people have spent watching your video.
   • Average percentage viewed: The percentage of the video that the average viewer watched. It measures your video’s ability to hold the viewer's attention.

How do media assets impact content performance?

Media assets like images, videos, presentation slides, infographics, etc., capture user attention with their visual appeal and persuade them to take the desired action. For example, if you want to improve engagement on your social media content, experiment with different media formats like images, videos, graphs, etc., depending on the message you want to share, you can measure the impact with metrics such as CTR, Likes, reactions, comments, shares, etc.

Likewise, you can use media assets to improve content performance by

• Using optimized ad graphics for better audience engagement on all placements and channels.
• Generating enticing video thumbnails and previews, resulting in enhanced video views.
• Personalizing images and videos for your users based on collected data, leading to better ROI.

Wrapping up

Measuring content performance with the right metrics is key to successful content marketing and helps in aligning content efforts with overarching business goals.

Media content, like images and videos, plays a critical role in optimizing content engagement and improving content marketing performance. A digital asset management (DAM) system like ImageKit with built-in media processing makes media management simpler and efficient.

Interested to learn more about ImageKit’s DAM and Media processing capabilities? Visit ImageKit.io