As 2015 draws to a close, many content marketers will be tasked with reviewing their performance and impact over the course of the year. We recommend you consider these five content marketing metrics to help enhance an EOY report.
1. Inbound Links (vs. Key Competitors)
For most digital marketers, total inbound traffic is perhaps one of the most important metrics included in an EOY marketing report. Inbound links can impact both search (as Google uses inbound links to measure domain authority) and referral traffic. There are a number of ways to determine the backlink profile of a website (Moz, Alexa, Majestic, etc.). It’s important to look at the strength of your website relative to your key competitive set, since those websites are likely your competition for search traffic and SERP share of voice.
In this example, we’ve used data from Alexa. As a reminder, Alexa tracks more than 30 million websites worldwide to rank their performance using a sample size of data.
Below, you can see that one sample brand Target (orange) and their competitor Walmart (green) gained and lost links in in step with each other over the course of the year. These fluctuations are likely due to Google’s algorithm changes. However, neither seemed to create compelling enough content to build their backlink profile meaningfully.
2. Monthly Unique Visitors (vs. Key Competitors)
Monthly unique visitors is another metric to include in an EOY reports. Typically, these numbers are collected for your own brand using Google Analytics. We look at unique visitors because it demonstrates an increase (or decrease) in new visitors to your website and new eyes on your brand. Alternately, total monthly visitors can also be useful as that will show the number of visitors who continue returning to consume content your site.
While Google Analytics can only provide data for your own website, a tool called Compete can be used to estimate web traffic for a key competitive set, allowing digital marketers to benchmark themselves against their competition. For reference, Compete is panel data. It’s collected from two million US-based internet users and is extrapolated to match the demographics of the United States. Performance is measured the same way for all the brands in your competitive set, so it’s a great way to evaluate your performance on a level playing field and add data for other websites you are unable to extract from Google Analytics. While this data isn’t necessarily 100% accurate, the sample size is large enough to draw relatively meaningful conclusions.
In the example below, you can see that Target (orange) is underperforming Walmart (green) but driving more uniques other competitors like K-Mart (teal) and Kohl’s (purple). K-Mart and Kohl’s had a relatively flat year traffic-wise, while Target and Walmart steadily increased over the course of the year.
3. Performance Across All Key Social Channels
Over the course of the year, it’s likely you’ve grown your following across multiple channels and your efforts have had varying levels of success. It’s useful to look at your brand’s performance across multiple channels on a level playing field. We use TrackMaven to visualize interactions per post across multiple channels which we normalize, showing interactions as a function of your audience size (average interactions per post per 1,000 followers). This highlights whether your performance is relatively high or low channel by channel, taking out the effect the number of followers will have on engagement. This is particularly helpful when comparing your own performance against your competition, as it’s probable audience sizes vary.
In the example below, you can see that Kohl’s performance on a normalized basis was highest on Instagram (teal), followed by Facebook (orange) and Twitter (green).
4. Performance Over Time on Key Social Channels
Over time, the number of interactions your content receives on a given social channel will change. As your performance improves, factors like search rankings or reach on social platforms will also be impacted. As a part of your year-end report, we advise to take a look at how your performance compares to key competitors on channels you’ve deemed important.
In the example below you can see that normalized interactions on Instagram (average interactions per post per 1,000 followers) have declined at around the same rate for Target (orange), Walmart (purple) and Kmart (teal), indicating that none of these brands were successful in increasing engagement levels over the course of the year.
This context provides an additional level of color to your EOY report since you can demonstrate that core competitors were in a similar boat and this decline in engagement levels could be attributed to some other factor (e.g. organic reach on Instagram becoming more difficult).
5. Share of Voice on Key Social Channels
While one of your goals is to improve performance across social channels, you can assume your competitors have the same intent. As such, it becomes important to report on your share of voice on these networks, which measures the percentage of total interactions received on a social channel for your brand versus competitor brands. Looking at this over time will measure who has gained or lost ground as it relates to social engagement levels.
In the example below, Target (orange) started the year dominating this industry’s conversations. Until October, this was enough to dominate share of voice, compared to Kohl’s, Walmart, and K-Mart. However, in October, Kohl’s gained traction from audience engagement and ended the year with the largest share of interactions on Twitter.
This information can also be used to identify what content or campaigns Kohl’s ran from September to identify what did and did not resonate with this particular audience. A social marketer in this space could learn from Kohl’s and incorporate some of their strategies into their own.
These five leading metrics will help provide additional context and color by adding insight beyond the standard vanity metrics digital marketers typically look at (absolute audience growth, engagement levels without comparative data, etc.). This is an incredibly effective way to demonstrate your progress (or lack thereof) relative to brands you are competing against for attention. When this data is favorable, these insights can be used to reinforce the ROI of your efforts, as well as visually prove your brand is gaining more traction than your competition.
All of the graphs provided here were generated using TrackMaven. We invite you to take a look at your own brand against your competition to understand how your brand could benefit from using marketing analytics software.