Measuring content performance is a complicated process since it involves gathering metrics from multiple sources. You’ll want to make sure you’re gathering metrics for both internal and external reach, and if you don’t have a comprehensive interface to keep track of all your information, things can get messy fast.
Building a marketing metrics dashboard helps you easily organize your data.
For a full outline on navigating your marketing metrics, check out our eBook The Blueprint to Marketing Metrics for Content.
Now, let’s look at some steps you can take toward building an efficient, comprehensive marketing metrics dashboard.
The Three Pillars of Content Measurement
The three pillars of content measurement are crucial when building your marketing metrics dashboard. You’ll want to track these three major cornerstones in your dashboard:
1. Health of Content Production
At the core of any campaign, you’ll want to track your content production cycles. We’ve broken this down into four major components: average length of production, on-time delivery rates, content coverage gaps, and workflow bottlenecks.
A key metric you’ll want to track with this pillar is the average length of time for production. How long does it take for a piece of content from idea to publication phase? This will help you build out a visual timeline for your marketing metrics dashboard.
2. Content Reach
This pillar also involves multiple metrics. When you measure your content’s reach, you’ll want to measure total reach. This means gathering metrics for both external and internal reach.
This can also be thought of as a closed feedback loop. Research how your content is consumed by both internal teams and external clients.
For external reach, add key social metrics to your dashboard. Some key metrics to track will be email open rates, amount of downloads, and a list of key social channels your users are engaging with most often.
3. Conversion Rates
Since determining conversion rates can get tricky, start by designating a section in your marketing metrics dashboard to note content score. You can do this by evaluating a buyer’s movement through each part of the pipeline and dividing it by categories or assets touched. Of course this isn’t the universal method, and there are other scoring approaches too.
Break Your Metrics into Three-Month Cycles
By grouping your metrics dashboard into three-month cycles, you’ll be able to measure quarterly performance on each component. This will be especially helpful for measuring things like internal downloads/shares, page views, and email open rates.
List All Your Social Channels
Get a complete list of all the external channels where your content is distributed. This way you can break down each channel and decide which ones are seeing the most engagement, and which need improvement.
To find each channel’s effectiveness, have a sub-list of the following metrics in your dashboard for each channel:
- monthly traffic
- engagement rates
- most engaged personas
Outline the Steps in Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline
For measuring conversion rates, you’ll want to outline your entire sales and marketing pipeline in your marketing metrics dashboard. After you’ve listed all the steps in your pipeline, you can break down which assets have been most effective per quarter.
While it might seem like a lot of extra work to build out your marketing metrics dashboard, it’ll save you time with future campaigns. For more detailed explanations on each part of your marketing metrics dashboard build-out, make sure you check out our eBook The Blueprint to Marketing Metrics for Content