What’s a better measure of the impact of your content marketing: the size of your audience, or engagement with your content?

According to Contently, the jury is split. In a 2014 survey of 302 B2B and B2C marketers, 50% of respondents expressed a desire to be able to measure how much real attention people are paying to their content.

At TrackMaven, we fall firmly in favor of treating content marketing metrics like relationship metrics. Relationship metrics are the key to evaluating how your audience engages with your brand at every stage of the funnel.

Here are 4 tips to help you re-evaluate your content marketing using relationship metrics:

1. Evaluate Audience Engagement — Not Just Visits!

The odds have it that “brand awareness” is one of your marketing department’s ultimate goals. According to Contently, 73% of marketers identified brand awareness as a goal of their content. But do the metrics you use to evaluate your content actually map to this goal?

If you’re measuring pageviews and unique visitors but not time on page and social shares, then the answer is, “No.” Remember, a link click is great, but having a prospect actually take the time to read and engage with your content is better.

2. Understand The Value (And Limitations) Of Each Metric

While social shares can correlate with surface-level interest in a topic, Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile points out in his research that there is no true correlation between social shares and read time. In fact, most often, articles with high social activity have low read time.

There is, however, a valuable use-case for measuring social engagement with content. Measuring engagement with various social posts, for example, is precisely how VideoBlocks successfully uses the TrackMaven platform to identify trending topics and tactics.

VideoBlocks CMO TJ Leonard notes that “engagement with our content is a great leading indicator of future success.” In other words, by leveraging engagement metrics to identify your audience’s interest, you can predict the content that will drive engagement with your brand.

3. Prioritize Time On Page

Chartbeat’s Chief Data Scientist Josh Schwartz noted succinctly that “click data on article pages tells you how enticing links were, not how engaged readers were with the content inside.”

Interestingly, Schwarts found that users’ engaged time is strongly correlated with brand loyalty. In fact, his research found that visitors who read an article for three minutes returned twice as often as those who read for one minute.

If you’re getting readers to both engage with your content and return to your site, then you are successfully building relationships via content marketing.

4. Spot and Optimize Inconsistencies!

Spotting inconsistencies across metrics is an efficient way to optimize and repurpose your content.

Let’s say, for example, that you have a blog post that delivers a steady stream of unique visitors, but the time on page and conversion rates are low. Try updating the post with a relevant call-to-action near the top. Track the results to see if you’re able to capture more visitors.

If you’re still not seeing success, consider repurposing the content into another format that is easier to digest, like a SlideShare or infographic. Check out 3 Ways To Extend The Half Life Of Your Content With Smart Purposing for more on the subject!