Module 9: KPIs and Metrics

Content Strategy

Jan 13

Welcome to KPIs & Metrics!

You’ll see four video lectures, transcripts, and resources in this module. This module aims to outline the metrics you should be tracking for yourself or your clients to track the success (or failure) of your content marketing.

[00:00:00] Sarah Noel Block: Hi friends. This is Sarah. And today, we are talking about KPIs and metrics. Why do they matter? First off, as you're creating content, you can't go around thinking. Oh, man. My content is amazing without any proof. You need to be able to look at your analytics and say, okay, I'm meeting my goals. I have these benchmarks that I'm trying to reach.

[00:00:28] Sarah Noel Block: And I'm progressing. I'm committed to getting better every single day. And you won't know if you were getting better every single day unless you're tracking these particular metrics. So today, we're going to be talking about a few different types of metrics, but in this particular video, we're going to be focusing on engagement

[00:00:48] All right. Let's get into the engagement. KPIs. What metrics will you want to look at to showcase engagement? [00:01:00] First organic traffic. How much traffic are you getting from search engines direct to your website emails. Look at organic traffic. Next click-through rate. How often are your buttons getting clicked? Our forms are being submitted.

[00:01:22] Time on the page. This really shows you how much. How engaged your audience is with your content. The longer they are on the page, the better.

[00:01:33] Pages per session, this. Particular. Benchmark will tell you that you have the right UX for your website. For example, if you have a great blog post, it's getting a ton of search traffic.

[00:01:51] But people are only going to that. Page and then leaving. That means that you need to update your UX [00:02:00] a little bit. So what I would suggest is adding in related blog posts. Having a template. That they can download. So that would increase pages on time pages per session, but it would also increase click through rate.

[00:02:16] Another way to increase your pages per session would be to have a clear CTA within every blog post. So make it easy to be able to. Drive people to other blog posts, other types of content podcast episodes, and make it easy to. Drive conversions with a clear CTA.

[00:02:38] Another benchmark you'll want to look at is bounce rate. The bounce rate tells you one. Andy Crestodina who runs orbit media. He says that he doesn't care about the bounce rate on his blog posts, because that is purely for brand awareness and it's driving traffic to his website, but [00:03:00] it's not important to him.

[00:03:02] As far as. Driving actual sales. so you can take this with a grain of salt. But look at your bounce rate. And see what pages people are bouncing on. If they are bouncing on sales pages, you might want to make an update. If they are bouncing on blog, post pages. I would suggest that you make sure that there's related content in there. There's lead generators.

[00:03:29] In that blog post to keep people on your website, but. Andy would say, just ignore the bounce rate on your blog post. So your decision there. And then comments, if you have blog posts. With a comment section in there, looking at comments is a great way to show your engagement rate. But you might be wondering how do I find all of this information?

[00:03:58] Sarah Noel Block: [00:04:00] So I've gone over. What engagement metrics you should be tracking, but how do you track them? So I'm going to give you a little tour of what GA four looks like. And their engagement. Dashboard. So that makes it a lot easier to start tracking these metrics. So go to engagement overview. And keep in mind that all of this can be customized. You can customize these reports.

[00:04:35] That wraps up engagement, KPIs. Next, we will talk about brand awareness KPIs. So head on over to the next video and we'll get started on that.

Brand Awareness KPIs and Metrics

[00:00:00] Sarah Noel Block: Hey friends. It's Sarah. And now we'll be talking about the KPIs and metrics to track. For brand awareness. So these are brand awareness is a little mushy. It's a little bit harder for you to track. Metrics that show you your brand awareness. And it's something that we all really care about. So let's get into these elusive metrics that you might not realize you can track.

[00:00:31] Sarah Noel Block: Okay. For brand awareness. The first metric you want to track is search and keyword rankings.

[00:00:41] Sarah Noel Block: Next track backlinks. How many backlinks go to your website? This tells us how often you're being seen in the media. Anytime you're on a podcast or a YouTube show or you're guesting on a blog. Those will show up as backlinks and it tells the Google gods and [00:01:00] you, that your brand awareness is is doing all right. It's got a gold star.

[00:01:08] Next look at referral traffic is traffic that comes to your website from someone else's website. So let's go back to that example of you being on a podcast. You're on this podcast, someone clicks on the link from the show notes page goes to your website. That's referral traffic. Next we have social shares.

[00:01:30] How often your content is being shared online by someone other than you. Tags and mentions is another metric to track on. That will say how many times you're being mentioned online, how many times people are talking about you? How do you track brand awareness, KPIs, and metrics? The first thing you'll want to do is look at the Google search console. This is where you can find your an overview of [00:02:00] how much traffic you're getting through organic search. You'll understand your brand awareness. When you're showing up in search results.

[00:02:10] Sarah Noel Block: What queries you come up as. How you appear in search results? And a new bonus page. Is content ideas. It tells you, what is your low hanging fruit for you to be able to rank more often? In search console. So if your website or your client's website is not currently. Attached to a Google search console and make sure to do that. It's free. There's no reason not to.

[00:02:40] Sarah Noel Block: Okay, next. You want to look at And SEO tool like Uber suggest. So Uber suggest is what I use and you can buy a lifetime. A lifetime access to it. So that's why I like it. I like not having to pay a subscription. I paid. [00:03:00] However much, it was one time, but now I have. All of their updates and I have lifetime access.

[00:03:08] Sarah Noel Block: What that will do is keep track of your backlinks, which is one of the brand awareness, KPIs, and metrics. We want to keep track of. So if you're looking to get more backlinks to your website, My suggestion for you would be to appear on more podcasts. I personally use a podcast manager who pitches me to podcasts.

[00:03:31] Shure MV7 & Screen: Every single time. You're on one. You get a back link from the show notes page, you get mentions in social media, which is another brand awareness metric that you should be tracking. And you can do the same thing for webinars for YouTube shows. They will end guest blogging on other publications. All of those have the same benefit as podcast. You get a backlink and you get social [00:04:00] mentions increasing your brand awareness.

[00:04:03] Sarah Noel Block: This is what Uber suggest looks like.

[00:04:07] Sarah Noel Block: And it keeps track of all of your backlinks and your domain authority.

[00:04:14] Sarah Noel Block: And then last you'll want to look at BuzzSumo now, buzz Sumo does monitoring. With monitoring. You can see how often you're being mentioned and how often your content is being shared online. So you can track those two KPIs and metrics here. There is a free version of it. You get a lot more with the paid version, but it's pretty expensive. So start off with the.

[00:04:43] Sarah Noel Block: With the free version and see how it works out. You can also see put in your URL and you can see. All of the back links that link back to you and how engaged that content is online. That gives you even [00:05:00] more of a boost. So here, for example, Willow Paul back link to my website and her blog.

[00:05:09] Sarah Noel Block: And it had this engagement on it. Gives you the evergreen score, but you can see.

[00:05:17] Sarah Noel Block: That it does this with any time that you're, mentioned. You're mentioned on another website and you have a backlink to it. On BuzzSumo, you can see how engaged that content is. So BuzzSumo is where you can track mentions social shares of your content. And another place that you can keep track of your backlinks.

[00:05:43]Sarah Noel Block: If you are adding tools to your toolkit, to be able to track metrics, Uber suggest BuzzSumo and Google search console are ones that I recommend.

[00:00:00] Hi. It's Sarah, and this is module nine. I think it is KPIs and metrics. In this video, we will talk about conversion KPIs. Conversion KPIs are the best of the best because they tell us the ROI on our content marketing. These are the KPIs to track when you want to know. Hey is this content marketing thing working for me.

[00:00:27] So now we're going to get into what KPIs you should be checking.

[00:00:31] The first KPI to check is the landing page conversion rate. You can do this in Google analytics by creating an event, or you could do it right in your website analytics, but basically it's any page that is selling or has a conversion form page on it. For example, a contact page or a webinar page. A sales page, all of these would count as landing pages for the context of this video. [00:01:00]

[00:01:01] You want to make sure that you have a good conversion rate? There aim for above 5%. That would be benchmarks on that. And It really comes down to. Math. How many people are submitting a form. Divided by how many people visit that page. That's what you're looking at.

[00:01:24] The next metric you want to look at is return customers. Now, I'm sure you've heard this a million times before, but it's so much cheaper to retain a current customer than to acquire a new customer.

[00:01:38] So your return customer rate. Tells us a lot about one. Your lifetime value, how much money you can make from a, any one customer. Too. It tells us what the experiences like working with you. If you aren't [00:02:00] getting a lot of return customers, people who are working with you time and time again, signing new contracts.

[00:02:06] That says that we need to adjust something with your experience. And we'll get more into that in the next module. We'll be starting that whole course. That's completely different topic. But track your return customer. Rate. And you could do this in your CRM, your customer relationship management.

[00:02:32] I use a simple one. I use streak, which is built right into Google, into my Gmail. So I can keep track of my customers right in there. HubSpot is another good option. There's a million options really, but it's a CRM type tool to be able to keep track of your return customer rate and how much you're making from each one of those customers. You'll want to know what the average is. [00:03:00]

[00:03:01] If you use square space, They will track your return customers for you because there's a store in there which is really nice. So that makes it super easy. Next, we will talk about the number and quality of leads.

[00:03:17] The number and quality of leads is another metric that you will be tracking in your CRM. So this would be something that you want to track for yourself, for sure. But if you are a content marketing professional, and people hire you to do the content marketing, this is still something that ideally you will track and be reporting on for your clients.

[00:03:45] But basically what you do is you set up a CRM. That will show what pages your leads are coming in from, and then you can track how good those leads are. So are they an [00:04:00] MQL, a marketing qualified lead. Do they move to an SQL, a sales qualified lead. Are they converting to customers? These are all things you can track in your CRM. Next we'll talk about customer acquisition cost.

[00:04:15] For the sake of keeping it simple we're going to simplify customer acquisition costs, because it can be super complicated, but it's also really important. So let's start from the beginning. Customer acquisition cost is. How much it costs to acquire a new customer. Now the easiest way to do this is to take the total cost of marketing over a period of time.

[00:04:43] So let's say you are tracking this metric by quarter. How much did it cost per quarter? To market. And then from there, you'll want to divide that by the number of new customers acquired during that same period. And that will give you a general [00:05:00] idea for customer acquisition cost.

[00:05:02] We touched on this a little bit earlier with return customers, but the next. Metric you want to look at is return on investment.

[00:05:11] Here is a fairly simple calculation that you can use to track your ROI. So take your lead count. And then multiply that by your lead to customer rate. So let's say you got a hundred leads and 10 of them. Turned into customers. So that's 10%. Than average. Then multiply that by your average sale. So we're going to say this one is 2,500. Is your average contract.

[00:05:41] Subtract your marketing cost for acquisition. So look at the campaign in particular that brought in those leads, you can use your CRM to track that. Or maybe it was a particular product launch. So it'd be easy to be able to track. Okay. I did. The [00:06:00] I made these assets. I did this webinar and this is how much it cost.

[00:06:04] For the sake of this, we're going to say that it costs you 3,500, that's the marketing cost of this campaign. And so you'll take that and then divide it by that number as well, 3,500, and then multiply that by 100. And you have your ROI percentage. So for this, I did an example. You got 100 leads.

[00:06:28] You close 10% of them. So that brought you 10 new customers.

[00:06:32] Your average contract length is 2,500. Or your average contract price is 2,500. So you multiply those and you have $25,000. 25,000 minus 3,500, which is your marketing cost. Brings you to, $21,500. And then you take that 21,500 and divide that by the $3,500 cost. That brings you to [00:07:00] 6.14 times that by 100 and your ROI is 614%.

[00:07:06] That wraps up your conversion KPIs. Now the very last thing we'll talk about is distribution KPIs .

[00:00:00] This is the last video lecture for KPIs and metrics. And this will be all about distribution. We are going to cover the email and the social media metrics. You should be tracking for yourself or for your clients. So stay tuned. First, we'll talk about email marketing. The first metric you will want to look at is the click through rate. That is the number of people who clicked on a link in your email divided by the number of people who looked at that email who opened it.

[00:00:33] Conversion, how many people who clicked through. A link on your email, converted on your website. So that could be either a sale that could be, they downloaded something. That is the number you want to look at. Next is bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that ended up not going to their inbox.

[00:00:58] So this could [00:01:00] come down to a few things. You are sending your emails that irratically, you're not sending on the same days and times. So their email provider might think that you're spam. You're going straight to the spam folder. You're doing some red flag things and your subject lines, like all caps or exclamation marks.

[00:01:21] All of those things can affect the bounce rate. Also not cleaning up your list. If you don't ever remove the unsubscribes, the people who aren't opening any of your emails, clean up your list. I clean up my email list once a month. Next list growth. How quickly is your list growing? With that you'll want to look at That you could track this in the form of conversions. How many people are converting on your newsletter signup page? Or any of your lead generators. This is a good place where you can check that you can also [00:02:00] keep track of it right in your email marketing platform. A lot of times they will have a report that shows you your less growth.

[00:02:10] Next is email sharing. Not all email marketing platforms have this available, but if yours does. The amount of times that your email is forwarded to someone else is a great indicator that your emails are doing something good. After that look at the ROI. How many sales are you getting from your emails? Check the ROI.

[00:02:33] And our last video, we talked about the We talked about how to calculate an ROI, but do you want to do that specifically for email two email has a really high ROI, so make sure that you're doing it right.

[00:02:48] After that look at open, right? How many people are getting your email and then opening it. And then last your unsubscribe rate. Or do you have a higher than normal unsubscribed rate? [00:03:00] That is a red flag that your emails aren't relevant to your audience. So make sure to keep track of that.

[00:03:09] Next, we're going to look at social media. What metrics should you be tracking? We've talked about this before, but zero click social media content is a must in today's day and age. It's considered its own type of content marketing. It falls within that umbrella. So you need a different way of measuring it than you used to. We used to look at traffic to our website.

[00:03:33] But with zero click content, we can't do that anymore. Not really not with everything that we're creating. So the first thing you want to look at is impressions.

[00:03:44] That is how many people are actually seeing that content that could be video views. That could be just impressions. How many people are seeing that post. There are so many lurkers out there who see your social media, but don't engage with it. But that doesn't [00:04:00] mean that it's not affecting them. Most of my clients have been lurkers.

[00:04:04] They saw me on social media didn't comment. Didn't like, but they ended up reaching out to me separately, wanting to work with me. Next look at audience growth. How quickly are you growing in your social media profile? Make sure to be tracking that month over month. That'll help you a lot. That is something that I put in all of my clients.

[00:04:28] Monthly reports. What is your social media growth? After that engagement. So your engagement rate is how many people liked or commented or shared your post. Divided by the impressions. So check your engagement. The click-through rate. So not all of your content is going to be zero click. Some of it will have to have links on there.

[00:04:55] So keep track of that. You can do that within your analytics. How [00:05:00] many how much traffic is coming from your LinkedIn, your Twitter, whatever your preferred platform is. And then last shares. Track your shares, how many people are sharing your social media posts? That is a huge white flag. This is good content.

[00:05:17] So that wraps up distribution KPIs.