Is Podcast Advertising Effective?

Podcasts are growing in popularity. According to Edison Research, the podcast audience has grown to 90 million listeners a month, up 113% since 2014. An increase in listenership in this medium means you have a chance to spend advertising dollars, reaching new and current audiences in different ways. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you necessarily should.

Spending part of your budget on a new method of advertising or convincing your boss that this is a good idea will more than likely cause you to pause. How do you know if spending money on podcast advertising is actually worth it? Will you see results? Even if other brands are seeing results, how do you know you will?

In this post, we explain the reasons why podcast advertising is effective and help you determine whether it makes sense for you to spend your money on it.

Why is Podcast Advertising Effective?

Although it is currently difficult to track hard metrics for podcast advertising, there are still some compelling reasons why we believe podcast advertising is effective. Let’s dive into them below:

There’s a Strong Host-to-Listener Connection

If you’ve ever gotten hooked on a podcast, it’s almost certainly in part because you felt a connection with the host. That’s because of what Glenn Rubenstein, the author of Podcast Advertising Works, calls “the voice inside your head.”

According to Rubenstein, “If you spend even a short amount of time listening to the radio, an audiobook, or a podcast, you begin to make a connection to the voice you’re hearing. After you spend hours listening to that same voice on a daily or weekly basis, it feels just like you’re listening to a friend.”

It makes sense. If you’re an avid podcast listener with a long commute, you could be spending up to 5-10 hours a week listening to the same podcast host. And who do you trust more than anyone? The people with whom you spend the most time and/or admire.

When you trust someone, it’s likely you’ll value their recommendations more than anyone else’s. The idea behind this is the same as word-of-mouth marketing and influencer marketing, and it works with podcast advertising, too.

When a host recommends a product, you’re more likely to remember it and purchase it.

You can see the direct correlation between an affinity for the host and the purchase of products in a study done by Midroll, which found that 72% of people who have listened to a podcast for four or more years have made a purchase because of that podcast. Additionally, 63% of Midroll podcast listeners have bought a product they heard advertised on a podcast.

Listeners are Engaged

Unlike more passive forms of media like TV and radio, if done well, people will search for and subscribe to podcasts—coming back repeatedly for more. This is a unique opportunity to connect with your audience when they’re actively engaged and ready to hear your message.

One of the reasons people are so engaged with podcasts is because they require your brain to create images of the story in your mind (unlike visual media, which provides those images for you).

Emma Rodero, a communications professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, explains that “…like reading, listening to audio allows people to create their own versions of characters and scenes in the story.” She believes that listening, is more active, “since the brain has to process the information at the pace it is played.”

Many of today’s podcasts also have staff, budget, and industry experience, and subsequently the ability to use sound effects and music in addition to just talking heads. The use of sound effects increases the level of mental imagery, causing listeners to pay more attention.

People are also engaged with podcasts because they’re often listening to them when they’re by themselves—cooking, driving, walking the dog, or working out. When people are alone, they’re less distracted and more able to fully tune in. Additionally, wearing headphones while you listen creates an even more intimate experience.

Add to this the fact that streaming audio is now easier than ever before, with newer models of cars becoming more connected with capabilities such as Bluetooth and USB cables.

“Connected cars are a boon for the entire streaming audio industry, but they’re especially exciting for podcast makers, whose shows are perfectly suited to in-car listening,” Kevin Roose says, “Just as TV watchers can now choose Netflix or Amazon streams over surfing channels, radio listeners will soon have a bevy of on-demand options at their disposal.”

You Can Accurately Target Your Audience

Your ability to target specific audiences through podcast advertising is one of the most compelling reasons to give this medium a shot.

“I think that the great thing about podcasts is that there is literally one for everyone,” says Christine Merrill, Account Executive at Gimlet Media. “There are so many podcasts in the world, and there are so many different niches.”

At Portent, we’ve seen this ourselves with podcast advertisements that we developed alongside our client MagellanTV, a documentary streaming service.

MagellanTV has many different genres of documentaries available, which allowed us to drill down our targeting. We could have gone after any podcasts with available advertising slots—after all, most people are interested in documentaries. Instead, knowing that they have a specific niche in history and science, we started with podcasts that focused on the same subjects.

In targeting those subject areas, we found that the podcast hosts were genuinely excited to work with MagellanTV because it was such a natural fit. In one instance, the host of a podcast we targeted accidentally doubled their time when talking about MagellanTV because they were so stoked about the streaming service (which they were able to try out before they recorded the ad).

You Don’t Necessarily Need a Huge Budget

Podcasts are priced on CPMs (Cost Per Mille, or thousand listeners). A CPM pricing model makes sense—the more popular a show, the higher the price of the advertising slots.

Initial prices may seem like a lot, but if you sponsor multiple episodes the pricing goes down, which is also better for brand awareness.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. MagellanTV sponsored the History on Fire podcast, which gets ~150,000 downloads per episode, at a cost of $2,000 per episode.

For one of our client’s who is in the development space, we placed ads with Developer Tea, which gets ~60,000 downloads per episode. We spent $1,500 per episode on ad spots.

You may be thinking, but the audience size is so tiny, what’s the point?

We’ve seen first-hand through our work that larger audiences don’t necessarily equal higher engagement.

Hack the Entrepreneur, another podcast we worked with, gets ~14,000 downloads per episode, but we saw the highest time on site (10:39) and page views (106) from this ad. Within the same campaign, we placed ads with The $100 MBA. They average ~70,000 downloads per episode, but our time on site was only 4:17 and our page views were 52—about half of the engagement we saw with Hack the Entrepreneur.

Don’t shy away from an opportunity just because it’s small. Think of it as you would keyword research. Even though some search terms have a smaller keyword volume, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth targeting; you can still go after long-tail keywords with smaller search volume if the user intent is there.

How Do I Know If Podcast Advertising is Right for Me? Things to Consider

Although podcast advertising is effective, that still doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand.

Below, we’ll explain a few things to think about before you start setting aside a budget for podcast advertising.

Challenges with Audience Metrics

If you’re pitching this to your boss, it’s likely they’re asking how you plan on measuring the ROI.

With podcast advertising, the answer isn’t simple. Podcast advertising analytics is still very much in its early stages, so we don’t have quick and easy-to-read metrics like we’re used to. We also don’t have a direct way to track conversions. Some podcasts offer their own independent tracking, but there aren’t any consistent practices in place yet.

There are, however, a few metrics we can start looking at now such as:

• Downloads per Episode
• Direct and Referral Traffic
• Exclusive Offer Code
• User Engagement

For a deeper dive into how you can track these metrics, check out Kat Shereko’s post, 4 Effective Metrics For Measuring Podcast Advertising.

Although it is still challenging at this point, there is good news on the horizon. Apple Podcasts is investing in podcast performance insights and Spotify acquired Gimlet Media and Anchor, two data-driven podcast platforms.

There isn’t an easy way to measure the efficacy of radio or TV advertising either, but advertisers continue to spend their dollars there. Don’t let the lack of current analytics stop you from experimenting with a possible new way to connect with your audience. We believe that podcast advertising analytics are going to get more sophisticated in the future as the medium continues to grow.

Challenges with Scheduling

You need to be comfortable with planning ahead if you want to run a podcast advertising campaign.

With the model we’ve been using at Portent, we start two months before we actually launch any promotions. Ultimately, this is dependent upon the popularity of the podcasts we’re working with. For podcasts with larger audiences, seeking out an ad placement spot on their calendar six months in advance may still not be enough time.

We recently tried to place ads on the Syntax podcast for the same client we mentioned above that’s in the development space. Syntax has ~28,000 downloads per episode, but they were booking their ad placements out six months in advance, which didn’t give us enough time.

Fizzle is another podcast that we worked with for the same campaign and client. Fizzle gets ~11,000 downloads per episode, and we were able to book with them two months in advance.

How far in advance you need to book depends on the popularity of the podcast spots you’re going after. Overall, schedules and budgets vary greatly. You may even be able to haggle and get a spot at a lower price.

Ultimately, we recommend researching what podcasts you’d potentially like to sponsor, reaching out to them, and seeing what they say. Once you start scheduling spots, you should stay organized by creating a calendar such as the one below:

You can also get more information about pricing and effectiveness from this fantastic article on Ahrefs Podcast Advertising: $51,975 Spent. Here’s What We Learned.

Types of Ad Placements

It’s important to determine what type of ad placements you want for your campaign.

In podcast advertising, there are three different types of ads: pre-roll, interstitial or mid-roll, and post-roll.

Pre-roll ads: occur at the beginning of an episode.
Mid-roll ads: occur in the middle or as a break during the show.
Post-roll ads: occur after the episode.

We believe that mid-roll ads are the most effective because people are highly unlikely to stop what they’re doing and skip past the commercials. If the ad is at the beginning or the end, they may skip it entirely. Because of this, mid-roll ad placements are typically the most expensive.

However, some podcasts will require you to use a combination of pre-roll and mid-roll ads. Having a mix of the two can work well.

Pre-roll ads can give listeners that first exposure to your brand, followed by mid-rolls to explain what you’re offering and who you are.

Running one mid-roll ad followed by multiple pre-roll ads can also work.

Bonobos frequently runs a full-60-second mid-roll ad the first week and then follows up with a few weeks of pre-roll.

This approach helps them keep their costs down while also repeatedly exposing the podcast audience to their brand since they know listeners usually listen to every episode.

Advertising Styles

In addition to the different types of ad placements, there are different styles for interstitial or mid-roll ads. You’ll need to check with your podcast host to determine what type of ads they provide.

Sponsor-produced ad: typically ends with a clear call to action and uses music, sound effects, or a voice-over artist.

Host-read produced ad: delivered by the show host but is often produced and may include an interview with a sponsor’s customer(s).

Host-read integrated ad: read by the show’s host organically during the recording of the show.

If done well, the host-read integrated ad can be one of the most effective styles of podcast advertising because it feels so genuine.

As we mentioned in the MagellanTV example, if you allow the host to use your product or service before they record the podcast ad, and it’s a good fit, they’ll be genuinely excited about sharing it with their audience.

Is Podcasting Going to Be Effective For Your Brand? A Checklist

Although podcast advertising is successful for many brands, there’s still a lot to consider before you decide to bring the idea to your boss and spend your budget on it. We recommend asking yourself the following questions to determine whether or not you’re ready to give it a go:

• • What are you advertising?

What is your product/service? Are you clear about who you are as a brand?

• • Does podcast advertising make sense for your audience?

Who are you planning on targeting through podcast advertisements? Does your target demographic listen to podcasts? What podcasts do they likely listen to?

• • What are you offering?

Are you running an awareness campaign, or do you have an actual service or product for which you can give a discount or free trial?

• • Is it that good of an offer?

Is the product or service ready for market? Is the price of the product competitive? Are you running any better offers, discounts, or lower prices elsewhere? Note: We do not advise this. If people do a quick Google search and find a better offer elsewhere, guess which one they will choose?

• • What is your budget?

How much money do you have to spend? If you have a low budget, are there podcasts out there with lower prices, but highly targeted audiences that would fit your demographic? If you have a high budget, how much of it are you willing to allocate to podcast advertising?

• • What is your timeline?

When are you planning on launching your campaign? Give your budget and which podcasts you want to advertise on, do you realistically have enough time to launch?

At the end of the day, authenticity is key when it comes to successful podcast advertising. If your product/service is market-ready and you can find podcasts that fit your niche, we recommend launching a few ads to test and see what works and what doesn’t.

The post Is Podcast Advertising Effective? appeared first on Portent.

Is Direct Traffic an Indicator of Brand Strength?

If you’ve gone into Google Analytics lately to look at your website performance, you’ll notice a large chunk of traffic and conversions attributed to “Direct.”

It’s tempting to think all those visitors came to your website because they either already know your brand, or saw some kind of offline advertising you did. But in this post, we’ll lay out a few reasons why that isn’t always the case, and what you can do to get a true understanding of your brand strength in Google Analytics.

Some Background on “Direct” Traffic

A very common misconception in digital marketing is that Direct traffic is registered when a user visits your website by typing your URL into their browser, or from bookmarking the site.

This might have to do with Google’s definition of Direct source traffic, which is as “users that typed your URL directly into their browser, or who had bookmarked your site.”

This is true, but not comprehensive.

Direct traffic is actually:

1. Users who type your URL directly into their browser
2. Users who bookmark your site and navigate to it from their bookmark
3. Users from any source where Google Analytics can’t detect referral information

That third grouping of traffic can create a black box for marketers.

We hope to shed some light into that black box and provide you with a handful of metrics and reports to better show the strength of your brand through Direct traffic.

Direct Traffic That isn’t Actually Direct

When traffic arrives on your site that doesn’t fit any other Google Analytics channel and can’t be considered actual Direct traffic, we refer to it as “dark” traffic.

Recently, Portent Analytics Architect Michael Wiegand did a study and found that an average of 17.6% of our clients’ traffic was dark.

For example, if you’re getting Direct traffic to pages deep in your website, or to URLs that would be unnatural for someone to type into a browser, then that traffic is likely “dark” traffic. Depending on the page content and volume of landing page sessions, a bookmark may also not be likely.

However, “dark” does not necessarily mean “bad” traffic. It simply means that Google Analytics cannot track where the user came from when they arrived on your site. The reality is that there is a growing number of reasons for this. Some examples of sources that GA sometimes cannot track are:

• App referrals
• Text messages
• Incognito/secure browsing
• Social platforms
• Bots

However, there are tools at your disposal to make corrections for some of these instances. If you know you are sending traffic to your site that is not within Google defined segments, you can build your own custom segment and capture some of that misattributed traffic.

Another common source of Direct traffic comes from third-party booking sites, which can be fixed with cross-domain tracking.

Mobile traffic also tends to generate more traffic than Desktop. Redirects from HTTP to HTTPS may also break the user path in a way that Google can’t track. Even the browser you use may contribute to what Source/Medium data is available to GA. These instances are where “Direct” becomes a catch-all for anything GA can’t attribute with a defined Source or Medium.

Direct Traffic That is Actually Direct

While those caveats might seem overwhelming, it’s not time to throw out your Direct traffic metric just yet. There is obviously a good portion of your Direct traffic that is truly Direct.

Reviewing the landing pages of your Direct traffic is a good indication of what is legitimate.

Traffic that lands directly on the homepage is likely real Direct traffic because that is what users are most likely to type into a browser. Direct traffic to other URLs with short page paths may also be legitimate traffic.

In terms of visibility, this difference in Direct traffic to the homepage could be a good indication of how well-known your brand is to users on the internet. Big brands like Nordstrom will tend to see higher volumes of Direct traffic, where small start-ups don’t see the same level of brand recognition reflected in their Direct traffic.

For example, we work with a large e-commerce retailer whose brand name is commonplace. Over the past quarter, 68% of their Direct traffic was to the homepage. For a smaller client brand, around 20% of Direct traffic went to their homepage.

Direct Traffic as a Piece of the Brand Strength Puzzle

Now that we have an understanding of the right components of Direct traffic to be looking for, how do we use it as an indicator of brand strength?

To get a full picture of brand strength in GA, we recommend combining the following sources:

1. “Real” Direct traffic. Likely by homepage landing page traffic, and other pages you determine are appropriate.
2. Organic traffic to the homepage. This captures people who type brand names into a search engine and click the homepage link in the search engine results.
3. Traffic from Paid Search campaigns that are triggered by branded keywords. This captures the second group of brand-name-Googlers who click on paid branded ads, instead of the organic homepage listing.

We’ve built this out in Google Analytics as a custom segment, free for your use. Download it and update the “Landing Page” and “Keyword” fields to capture information specific to your company.

The next time you’re asked about brand strength, refer back to what we’ve laid out here to get an answer backed by your data. There are so many ways to gauge the strength of your brand but by using Google Analytics and understanding the appropriate indicators, you can be readily equipped to clearly answer that question.

The post Is Direct Traffic an Indicator of Brand Strength? appeared first on Portent.

Use This SEO Strategy for Your Next Website Redesign

Redesigning your website presents a significant risk from an SEO standpoint if not managed appropriately.

What can be years of optimizations to your infrastructure, design, and content are going to be overwritten, and it’s hard to predict if the organic rankings you’ve earned are going to be swept away. `

If your redesign strategy includes taking SEO into account post-launch, you’ll probably end up in for a world of hurt.

Here’s a look at organic traffic from a brand that came to us after launching a new beautifully designed site, wondering what happened to their SEO traffic.

Don’t be that website.

If your brand heavily relies on organic search to drive traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics, the risks from a redesign are real, and the impact can be devastating.

But through careful consideration throughout the redesign process, you can account for potential pitfalls and mitigate your chances of a drop in organic search ranking and traffic post-launch.

Follow along as I outline how we approach this at Portent.

How to Approach SEO Strategy in your Next Redesign

For many websites, organic search is the channel that brings in the most traffic, and inherently, conversions- whether that be leads or transactions and revenue.

Adding to that, organic traffic is the acquisition channel most at-risk through a significant website redesign.

SEO isn’t a tactic to employ after the website launches to clean up loose ends. Approaching your redesign with SEO in mind from the very beginning of the project is vital to ensure your channel’s requirements are baked into the result.

The key to preserving organic rankings through a redesign is two-fold:

1. Marketers must focus on minimizing risk pre-launch

2. Marketers must have a response plan to threats post-launch

With that in mind, our approach to minimizing risk and building a response plan requires us to include an SEO-minded team member in the project from the very start, identify and address gaps in the marketing stack throughout the redesign process, and quantify the impact on organic KPIs post-launch.

This approach lines up with three stages of the project:

• The planning and design stage (before any code is written)
• The development stage (when the website is being built)
• The post-launch stage (after the dust settles)

Let’s explore each of these stages further.

Get SEO Involved Early

The best way to handle potential SEO issues in a redesign project is to prevent them from existing in the first place. SEO for a website redesign starts long before the first line of code is written.

Get your SEO team a seat at the table from the very first meeting.

Their role on the project is to find solutions to infrastructure and content issues that may crop up. Providing a list of SEO requirements and expecting a designer or developer to take them into consideration isn’t enough.

SEO must be hands-on throughout the process.

Don’t wait for infrastructure decisions to be made for you. You may end up with a funky hosting plan, three subdomains, and two of them running on Wix.

(We’ve seen it happen.)

As an SEO, here are some of the questions to consider when kicking off a redesign process:

• Is the new CMS or framework SEO-friendly?
• Will you need to prerender JavaScript?
• Does the new information architecture include your essential landing pages?
• How many URLs are going to change?

Find the Gaps

As your new website starts coming together, you should ask yourself the question, “is this website more or less optimized than before?”

To answer this, you need to conduct two SEO audits of the website’s infrastructure and content: pre-launch and post-launch.

The goal of the pre-launch audit is to find all of the big problems that you can’t afford to launch with. Auditing a website that isn’t finished yet may seem premature, but it’s a great exercise; it allows you to correct any show-stopping bugs you may find.

This audit is where your SEO team will do most of the work involved with a typical redesign:

• Redirecting old URLs to new URLs
• Migrating title and meta description tags
• Correcting broken links and unnecessary redirects
• Testing mobile rendering
• Ensuring canonicalization

The pre-launch audit should also communicate gaps between the two websites in a few key areas:

Site speed

Does the new platform have fewer site speed optimizations?

Content

Does the new content satisfy queries better than before? Are the same Featured Snippets targeted?

Site structure

Is site navigation more or less descriptive than before? Do your important pages still have smart internal links?

Conversion

Do you expect the conversion rate to be higher or lower?

Your post-launch audit should uncover any new bugs and make sure the website is being crawled and indexed correctly.

Some important factors to review post-launch are:

• Robots.txt (It’s incredibly common for websites to go live disallowing all crawling)
• Sitemap submission in Google and Bing search consoles
• The index coverage report in Google Search Console
• Checking redirect implementation

Doing two thorough audits goes a long way toward minimizing risk.

Any major threat to your rankings will be identified and hopefully addressed before launch, and everything else will be a known quantity. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of which way your site’s performance will go.

Measure the Impact

Before you launch your new site, make sure your web analytics and rank tracking are recording reliable baseline data for your KPIs.

Also, confirm the new website has your web analytics implemented correctly. You don’t want to launch with all of your conversion goals broken.

I find these metrics and trends the most useful when gauging post-launch performance:

Organic users by landing page

If you didn’t change your URL structure, this report will be incredibly helpful in narrowing down performance gaps.

Organic users by website section

This report will help you find problems with the design or internal linking structure for sections that aren’t doing well.

Non-brand keyword rankings

For each important landing page, add the non-brand keywords contributing the most traffic to a rank tracker. If any of these rankings take a dive after launch, you’ll know which topics you need to prioritize.

Conversion rate by landing page

If your sales copy or CTA links had a drastic change in the new design, this report would let you know which pages will need their offers reconsidered.

Bounce rate and exit rate by website section

Increases in either after the launch might indicate usability problems with the new design for that section.

Common SEO Pitfalls

There are SEO problems so common to redesigns that I’ve seen one in nearly every launch I’ve cleaned up.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making these mistakes:

Unnecessarily changing the URL structure

The best way to map old URLs to new URLs is to not change them at all. Plus, you won’t break year-over-year reports in Google Analytics. Unless you have a good reason, don’t change your URLs in a redesign.

Not redirecting URLs with backlinks

If you have to change your URLs for a new website, make sure you aren’t throwing your backlinks away. Redirect your old URLs to keep the link authority flowing into your site.

Not checking robots.txt on launch day

If your traffic flatlines after launching the new site, this is probably why. Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly.

Using uncompressed images

Please don’t make your users download 4 MB of images on every page. Use the right image format and level of compression to keep your images crisp and as small as necessary.

Introducing unnecessary subdomains

Keep your content in one place. Adding a subdomain to your site will split link authority and guarantee a migration project in the future. Always base a new website on a single platform that can do everything you need.

Time to Go Live

Eventually, it’s time to go live with your redesign.

It can be a nervewracking time for every party involved, but at the end of the day, it’s going to happen.

And while redesigning your website can have profound effects (both positive and negative) on site performance, there are ways to mitigate your risk through the process you take.

Be sure to:

• Get SEO involved from the start
• Find the gaps
• Measure the impact

Sticking to this strategy can set yourself up to limit website problems that could devastate your organic traffic.

The post Use This SEO Strategy for Your Next Website Redesign appeared first on Portent.

Your Guide to Choosing Content KPIs

To measure content marketing effectiveness and evaluate the ROI of your content campaigns, you should use simple, relevant, and useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The ideal KPIs are content metrics that can measure performance over time and across all levels of the conversion funnel.

This post identifies sixteen of Portent’s favorite content KPIs, sorts the content metrics by the goals they’re best at measuring, and tells you how to start tracking your content marketing efforts.

How to Measure Content Performance: Establishing and Setting KPIs

A good KPI is quantitative, relevant, and easy to calculate.

To establish relevant KPIs, we recommend following Aleksey Savkin’s rule of thumb.

Savkin recommends:

“If you are not sure if you are dealing with a KPI or a simple metric, do a simple test: imagine that you can double the value of this indicator. If you expect the performance of the business to be increased significantly, then it’s a good KPI for your business context. If not, then it is a simple metric.”

If you’re trying to set KPIs for your content, find the numbers where you really want to move the needle and use those values as metrics that matter most.

What the Conversion Funnel Means for Content and KPIs

While establishing these metrics, it’s important to know where and when to use them. Visitors to your website are at different stages in their customer journey, and your content should speak to them in different ways depending on where they are on this journey.

When you’re planning your KPIs, keep the conversion funnel top of mind; you should be able to measure content performance during every step of the conversion funnel.

A Chart of Portent’s Favorite Content KPIs

It’s tricky to pair content metrics with a user’s specific path in the conversion funnel. To help you get started, here’s an illustration showing how Portent breaks down content KPIs according to the different stages of the customer journey and their overlap.

In our content marketing strategies, users are funneled through journeys that result in three goals:

• Conversion
• Reputation
• Engagement

Each goal within these journeys has a few ideal KPIs. Some KPIs can be used to measure success across more than one goal.

Tracking your content marketing campaign performance is a tactical move that gives you ammunition to speak to stakeholders about the quantifiable value you’re creating. It also helps you learn to be a more user-focused, goal-oriented marketer.

If you want to learn more about measuring the long, messy game of content marketing, we’ve included descriptions of all the content KPIs and how they interact with each other.

Content Metrics: Conversion KPIs

Leads

If you’re writing content that’s meant to generate leads, you should track how many leads you’re generating.

For example, if you’re debuting a new gated resource, you should measure how many new leads that resource brings in. Afterward, compare that number to the leads generated by other gated resources.

This analysis will answer some critical strategy questions:

• What are your customers looking for?
• Are your customers willing to give up their contact information to get your content?
• What kind of content generates the most qualified leads?

Transactions & Revenue

For businesses focused on driving e-commerce revenue and transactions through their website, Google Analytics e-commerce tracking is highly recommended. Within those reports, add the secondary dimension of “landing page” to see how many people purchased after touching a piece of content you produced. This metric allows you to discover what copy has the highest transaction or revenue level.

If you use revenue as a KPI, your findings will vary according to how much a customer spends. If you’re just curious about how many people touched your content eventually converted, and you don’t care how much they wound up spending, use “transactions” instead of “revenue” as the guiding metric.

Goal Completions

If you don’t have enough transactions or revenue to see how those figures interact with your content, you can set goals inside Google Analytics that allow you to track conversions without a dollar value. You can see what URLs accomplished which goals you’ve set. A non-monetary goal might be filling out a form, making a phone call, or joining an email list.

Below is an example of what this looks like.

Content Metrics: Reputation KPIs

Influencer Mentions

Did key industry influencers mention your content? Even if they didn’t link back to you, mentions help your reputation. You can measure mentions with a tool like Sparktoro, or by creating a Google Alert for mentions of your brand or a particular content campaign. It’s also beneficial to track whether those mentions are positive or negative.

Keyword Ranking

If you build a content campaign around a targeted keyword, make sure you’re tracking your success. There are a lot of tools on the market for tracking your keyword rankings, such as Ahrefs and SEMrush. For most of our SEO and content campaigns, Portent uses STAT, a SERP-tracking tool out of Vancouver, Canada.

Here’s an example of what SERP position tracking looks like in STAT. We chose Portent’s ranking for the term, “choosing content KPIs.”

When you show up high in the SERPs, you’re building your reputation both with Google, its crawlers, and potential site visitors who are browsing search results. Even if they don’t click on your page, they’ll still see it in their query results, which improves awareness.

Share of Voice

Another useful metric that STAT offers is Share of Voice (SoV). This KPI measures how visible a keyword set is on Google.

STAT says the concept follows two principles:

Not all rankings are equal, and higher ranks give you more Share of Voice.

Not all keywords are equal, and earning a keyword with higher search volume gives you more Share of Voice.

You can use SoV to determine how your content is affecting brand exposure on SERPs. It’s a great KPI to monitor if you’re launching a brand-awareness campaign or implementing a content hub project.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a complicated topic that’s usually relegated to social media, but major brands can leverage this AI technology to track the way people are talking about their content campaigns, too. Sentiment analysis measures reputation from your social media mentions. If you just launched a new educational center, for example, this metric is a useful way to keep your ear to the ground for relevant Twitter chatter.

For a deep and technical dive into sentiment analysis, we recommend this story on Yelp from Stack Overflow’s David Robinson. For something higher-level, Brandwatch is one of the oldest names in the business and offers a clear, accessible explanation.

Content Metrics: Engagement KPIs

Comments

Are people commenting on your blog post with valuable insights, questions, or feedback? If you write a blog post that gets through to people, they’ll often show it in the comments. Tracking this engagement KPI will help you learn what topics resonate with users and spark conversations.

For example, check out these comments on Ian Lurie’s blog post, The Digital Marketing Checklist: 48 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t.

People read it, considered its points, and then responded thoughtfully:

As with any robust comments section, it’s important to meaningfully engage with users, too. This interaction helps build brand loyalty and further improves the value of comments as a KPI.

Scroll Depth

If you want an easy, fast way to tell whether or not people are reading your content, look at the scroll depth of the page.

Most heat mapping programs, such as Hotjar, will provide you with scroll depth tracking. After you’ve set up tracking on the page through Google Tag Manager and the heat mapping platform, take a look at your scroll depth maps. You can see where your readers are dropping off, and how fast. A rapid drop might mean your content needs to be reworked.

Time on Page

Time on page is a similar key performance indicator to scroll depth in that it shows you how long people typically spend reading your content. Instead of being measured in pixels, however, this KPI is measured in seconds.

If you’re creating a new content strategy for your blog, your goal might be to increase the average time on page for new blog posts. Generally, the longer someone spends on your page, the more they’re engaging with your content, which means you’ve successfully earned their attention.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that time spent is related to the content length. Don’t compare the content of different types and lengths for time on page. A 2,000-word guide will probably have a much longer time on page than a 300-word blog post, but 50 percent of readers might make it all the way through that blog post versus only 10 percent who read your whole guide.

Pages Per Session

You can swap out this KPI with bounce rate if you prefer — they both tell you if readers are leaving your site after viewing your content. But bounce rate only tells you the ratio of visitors who leave versus those who keep digging deeper; the average pages per session will tell you how many pages they visit.

What’s a good rate for average pages per session? This depends entirely on your business. Generally, a site that serves to generate leads will have fewer pages per session than an e-commerce site, where users often spend time browsing product pages. If your e-commerce site doesn’t see an average rate of pages per session of three or four, you need to retool your strategy. In comparison, if a blog post on the Portent site has a rate of pages per session more than two, it’s excelling at this KPI.

Content Metrics: Conversion & Reputation KPIs

Return Customers

Returning customers are the intersection of reputation and conversion. They know your brand, they like it, and they want more.

It’s hard to measure the impact of content on return customers, but you can use Google Analytics to set tracking codes from the “thank you” page or log-in screen.

From here, you can see what kinds of content this group interacts with. Here are a few questions to consider when evaluating return customers:

• Do your returning customers visit your blog?
• Do they read your long form content?

If not, why not?

If so, which ones are popular?

Content Metrics: Reputation & Engagement KPIs

Likes & Shares

Social media is one of the best barometers for gauging the success of your content. The more likes and shares, the better the content is performing in terms of engagement, which affects your reputation.

Social media is sensitive to many factors. If you want to measure the impact of your content based on the content’s virtues alone, promote different content pieces with the same amount of money to lookalike audiences at the same time of day. If a piece does well, throw the rest of your promotional budget behind it. And then create more content like the winning article.

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most crucial KPIs for content — for many writers, they are the carrot on the other end of the stick. They are also a valuable barometer for assessing who respects or enjoys your content to the point they’re willing to recommend it to others.

As SEOs often say, every link is like a vote. When you receive unsolicited backlinks from authoritative sites, your readers are engaged, and your reputation is growing in the eyes of both readers and Google’s ranking algorithm.

Content Metrics: Engagement & Conversion KPIs

Open and Click-Through Rates

These are the KPIs for measuring conversions and engagement with email marketing campaigns. Your site’s content extends to all owned channels, and that means email, too. If you aren’t setting KPIs for your email marketing campaigns, you’re squandering one of your few opportunities to speak right into a customer’s ear.

Content Metrics: Conversion & Reputation & Engagement KPIs

Page Views

Without visitors, you’re not going to engage, convert, or build any kind of online reputation. The more people who view your site, the more people are engaging with your brand, and the more your reputation spreads. And the wider your reach, the more likely you’ll generate conversions.

Page views are the easiest way to measure the success of content. Unsurprisingly, they’re also the most popular. And some might even say the laziest.

Unless you’re combining page views with some other metric, you’re going to be missing a big part of the picture. What sets apart great marketers is their ability to layer a versatile yet surface-level metric like a page view with other KPIs to understand whether and how a piece of content connects with readers. A click-bait headline, for example, might generate a lot of page views, but if the content doesn’t address users’ needs, the time on page won’t be very long, the pages per session will be low, and you probably won’t get any backlinks. So use this KPI in conjunction with others.

Tying it All Together

So there you have it!

We’ve shared the 16 KPIs we look to monitor when evaluating the effectiveness of content.

As we have shown, evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts is like playing a game of chess — patience and careful planning go a long way toward success. There is not one right way to track the success of your content- it’s all about identifying your goals, setting KPIs, and then iterating to find what works well for you.

So go on! Test and try a handful of metrics to find the right mix of what works for you.

The post Your Guide to Choosing Content KPIs appeared first on Portent.