It offers an opportunity to sell your brand, and simultaneously offer insights and value to your target audience. It can allow you to position yourself as an authority, a though leader, within your industry.

Why tracking of content performance matters?

Being able to analyze your content marketing activities, from development to distribution, is crucial to iterating its success. You can make use of analytics to recognize and address both concerns and opportunities in your content strategy.

Keeping a close watch on your numbers help you to understand what’s working (so you can capitalize on it) and what’s not (so you can re-consider it).

Metrics also help in understanding how each piece of content is connected with your end goal of making a sale. By keeping a close watch on the numbers through each stage of the buyer journey forms a thread that you can follow from click to conversion.

For instance, you can monitor the success of a blog from its first view (awareness), the average time spent on the page (reader engagement), and finally, the call-to-action (lead generation). If your blog gets high number of visits but readers stay on the page only for a few seconds, that’s an indication that you need to make changes.

To understand how well your content marketing strategy is performing, you need to analyze these four metrics:

1. Page Depth

Page depth is a great metric for understanding the effectiveness and quality of your content, but it’s important to categorize content by format so that you can precisely evaluate engagement. Understanding where the content is more engaging, where the people are leaving the content, and are the calls-to-action placed in the right spot on the page to reach the most people helps in fixing the blind spots in your content marketing strategy.

How to access the metric:

Page depth in Google Analytics is pages-per-session’s equivalent metric, which tells you how many sessions are yielding one pageview, two pageviews, three pageviews, and so on. To access it, move over to Audience > Behavior > Engagement > Page Depth (under Description).This is one of the most reliable content engagement metric out there.

Another way of evaluating if your readers are simply scrolling through your posts or thoroughly reading them is by analyzing the Average Session Duration. Average Session Duration is another metric that indicates how long on an average a person spends on your page during a single session. This value would only increase with better content and that’s how, more people will start spending more time reading an entire article and hopefully moving on to another.

How can you improve Average Session Duration?

Unfortunately, there’s no instant solution to improving your average session duration. However, to improve the amount of time each person spends on your page, you’ll have to:

• Develop compelling content that people would want to continue reading, and
• Add links to relevant content within the body of your article

With both links and better content that will keep readers engaged on your website and moving from one article to another, your Average Session Duration will improve.

2. Content Scroll Depth

This is the most essential type of content metric, and is unfortunately also the place where a lot of programs either start or end. Just because you notice having a lot of visitors doesn’t mean your content is performing extraordinarily well.

You don’t know if people are leaving just shortly after visiting your page because they fail to find the content intriguing enough. So, here’s when you should focus on measuring the reader engagement on your page.

The average session duration would help in understanding how much time on an average a visitor spends on your site and engages with your content. If a particular page has a lower session duration in comparison to others, it would be wise to analyze what better steps can be taken to improve reader engagement on that page.

If a visitor spends about two minutes on one blog post, and six minutes on the other, this will give you an insight into the type of content that your audience is more likely to engage with.

Besides, you can start producing content that will potentially drive improved levels of engagement and in-turn, conversions. Engagement metrics are necessary to fostering a relationship and gaining a sense of loyalty from your audience.

How to access the metric:

You can measure the time taken by the visitors to reach the length stage of a post i.e.

• Tracking by Quartiles (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% scroll length),
• Tracking by Quintiles (20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% scroll length,
• Tracking by Deciles (10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, and 100% scroll length).

In order to pursue this, you need to tweak your tag management solution such as Google Tag Manager basically for event tracking. Even if you don’t use GTM, there are ways to implement scripts for tracking events at ease. Click here to know more about the implementation of scroll tracking to access the data in Google Analytics.

Once done, you have to set up a Google Analytics event which tracks a reader’s scrolling rate of till the end of the post. Click here to know more about what an event is and how to set it up.

As the event is set up, head over to Google Analytics Behavior> Events > Top Events > (Event name) in your analytics and view the report.

3. Retention Rate

Retention metrics indicate how well you are holding the attention of your audience. This can be measured with the percentage of returning visitors on your page and individual content pieces.

Besides, you’d also want to monitor the frequency of returns, since it will give an insight into the relationships you are developing and how well your audience perceives you and your content as a reliable authority and quality source.

Getting your target audiences to read your content once isn’t enough, that’s a guest appearance, not a permanent relationship. The long-term content marketing strategy should be to keep them coming back and convert engaged readers into loyal audiences.

This is where the “retention metric” comes in. How many of your readers have returned on your site? More importantly, how different do they behave than your one-time visitors? Unlike page views or visitors, which often reflect unequal amount of new visitors, monitoring the amount of returning readers and their behavior can help you in focusing on how to acquire and retain them. The retention aspect is crucial.

How to access the metric:

In order to access the metric in Google Analytics, move over to Audience > Behavior > Engagement > New vs Returning > Returning visitors.

4. Content Impact Rate

Is your content excellent but momentary, like exploding fireworks? Or is it powerful enough to stay and continue generating interest and offer value for days, months, or even years?

In order to measure longevity by analyzing behavior, site content, all pages, and any specific page, Google Analytics offers a simple solution for long-term content.

However, Analytics will only capture specific content visits in days as the shortest time interval. Not every content piece will have an impact of a day or more, and not everything is even published on your site.

An effective metric for this type of output is content impact metric, which is defined as the time in days (or hours) over which the number of click through to a post reduces to an unexpected low of what it was when first published and distributed.

These indicators signify a great way to identify points in time when a reader is likely to change behavior. Pushing the shortened version of long URLs of the posts across social media and tracking their performance is the best way to measure their impact, be it short-term or long-term. Now-a-days, there are a number of URL shortening tools such as bit.ly, branch.io, Sniply, etc who do the work.

Other things being equal, content that sustains over a long period will win over the content with a shorter life span.

To Conclude

Evidently, you may notice that there are a number of advanced metrics to consider, and some may be more important than others. It’s important to note that it takes time for changes to occur, so don’t ever feel like monitoring these metrics is a waste of time. It’s a simple process to be followed to ensure that you are developing the right foundation to rest your site on, thus ensuring you make the right amount of impact on the web.

The post 4 Advanced Metrics that Show You Your Content’s Worth appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

SEO is not just a ‘gift of internet’ but an asset to your brand/business that backs you for your online growth. On the other hand, content marketing and SEO are like best friends that work hand in hand to obtain desired results. Wondering about its relevance? We have listed down the influence of content marketing (changing pattern) on SEO to bring internet revolution. Let’s see how best friends can become the game changer!

Bite Size Content

The length of the content has always been a topic of discussion. When Twitter introduced 140-character policies, the face of content marketing completely changed across all the digital platforms. Later when it increased the limit to 280 characters, companies increased their number of tweets per day to scale up their content marketing game. Do you think, the shorter message delivery on social media has empowered the SEO strategies?With shorter messages and easy to understand content, audience prefers reading these messages to get the information handy, compact and in a jiffy.  If you are a company that is looking to nail this trend with your open strategies, you need to cover your information in a crisp, short and fresh format and attract maximum readers on your targeted page.

Personalized Rich Content Experience

Remember eCommerce companies showing up on your email inbox to say, “We have 50 % discount coupon just for ‘you’?” This is what we call personalized content and it is comparatively an essential technique to ace the content marketing strategy.

With the bombarding numeric, statistics and information on the internet how do you think, your content can stand out? How is your content unique? Why should people connect with you? It’s all about empathizing with your target audience and even better, sending out a message to them in a better personalized and enriched form.

When you empathize with your target audience, you bond with them at relatively less time, leading to strong trust formation. Ever seen a fairness cream ad? The fairness cream brand highlights the problem of its target audience by not just getting into the psyche of its audience; in fact, it creates an inevitable solution for their challenge.

This is the reason behind personalized content being top-ranked into winning your target audience and enhancing your industrial growth at ease.

Similarly if you are an e-commerce company, the best approach that you can apply to acquire a customer is by formulating personalized e mailers for both men and women with the shopping suggestions matched with their buying habits- after all everybody loves to explore the best for themselves.

Trending Voice Search

What do you think has enabled Google voice search to penetrate the market with such limited users? It’s the thought behind this innovation that connects the audience with voice search.

We could have never imagined a visually impaired person using a smartphone just like we do- but Google voice search has empowered this thought to come true.

The changing ecosystem of SEO has made internet inclusive and accessible for everyone; thereby bringing specially-abled people into the fold of the internet. Now the question arises if SEO strategies fail in the coming years due to the popularity of voice searches? The face of display advertisements will have no use? The answer is no, we need to gear up to cope up with the changing technologies and fuel them with our added efforts.

To align with the increasing use of voice search, you need to create your content that is conversational. By building dialogues in a plain and simple language your brand can appear in the top results when someone searches for it by using a voice search.

The Change in the Content Pattern

Gone are the days when the content piece revolved around the long-tail keywords to build links and apply content marketing strategies on it to enhance its Google ranking. The deceiving part about this content pattern is, it has started to attract content just for the sake of ranking and without any useful content in it.

Accordingly, the new pattern is more user-friendly and result oriented. Now, instead of overloaded keywords, Google prefers content that intent upon finding a solution and providing suggestions to the end-users, greatly influencing the searching habits and content pattern.

Context is the king

From content being the king for nearly a decade, the focus has now shifted to context. What has brought the remarkable change in the content marketing strategy affecting the algorithm of Google? Well! It’s the change in the search as well as information delivery pattern that is being applied these days.

Do you still have questions about the concept of context? Context helps in resolving your query as quickly as possible by matching your query with its own data collection to reflect the best match for your (the concept of long tail keyword will slowly fade with the advancement of Context).

For example, if you search for ‘Taj Mahal’ in India, your probable suggestions will bea local guide to Taj Mahal, official government site, some local videos etc. When you search for same Taj Mahal from USA, the search result will greatly vary. It might show some Taj Mahal’s history, timings, about Agra or maybe flights to India. Hence, Context aligns your search result with the most suitable answer to enhance the SEO game.

Influencer Marketing is in

We believe lux to be the most amazing beauty soap available in the market with unmatched fragrance and quality- that’s the power of influencer marketing. It is highly believed that influencer marketing will dominate the SEO ecosystem by the end of the year 2018. With the advent of a free flow of information via internet, people have started believing more in online recommendations rather than offline.
Do you still lack trust? Open your Instagram, explore your news feed and open profiles of ten famous bloggers. You are likely to notice paid partnership updates on each of their profiles- and that’s how influencer marketing is spreading.

Transparency is the key

What was your first thought when you heard about the leading internet company being irresponsible in handling your crucial data and information content? How can they be so stupid? Is there any authenticity and credibility in what they say and what they do? Probably you lost an ounce of trust in them- to put it plainly if the internet can make you, it takes a second to break you because people are extremely exposed to the insights of anything and everything- and internet is all about transparency.

There are millions of websites with perfect SEO strategies applied to it but how can you become the most preferred amongst the lot? You need to depict transparency on your website. For example, if you are accessing the users’ personal data, firstly get it approved by the user. They might stay and accept your request or will simply leave your site- but at least, you will not be liable for legal actions and perform well with strategic SEO algorithm

Trending Video Content

What will you choose to complete your syllabus a night before the exam,online video classes or an online article? Without even a second thought your interest might turn towards online video classes as they are more appealing and interesting- that’s exactly what’s happening in the content marketing strategies and SEO techniques these days. Users are more interested in video content, therefore create content that is engaging, relatable and has high video quality and align with user preferences make it easily searchable. Switch to video content to cope up with the demands of the user and to facilitate SEO.

Acceptance of Native Advertising

Native advertising is like a date wherein the ambiance, food, and overall feel are overwhelming and starting points to engage in a meaningful relationship. Similarly, native advertising is a package of everything of your interest according to your searching habits and opting for it can result in better relations between the buyer and the consumer. Whereas content marketing involves long-term customer relationship building and trust building through a relatively greater amount of time.
What you think can work in favour of native advertising? This advanced form of content marketing has recently become the most preferred SEO technique due to its wide acceptance by the users. The message easily gets delivered to the target audience without the hassle of imposing the ads on your laptop screen- native advertising is the face of new SEO.

Do We Write Content for the Content Marketers?

Type “best indoor games”: on the google search page, go through the top 20 results. What did you see? Probably, you came across similar content in approximately 6 content pieces. What does this suggest? Do you write content for the content marketers?
With ever increasing competition in the internet industry, you need to be extra-ordinary, original and informative to announce your existence or else there are millions of websites offering the same as you. If you do not want your content just to be the part of marketers spinning words, write to engage with your audience and create an inevitable platform for you/your brand.

Our Way Towards an Adaptive Change!

Personalized content might not boost your SEO ranking immediately but it is the most ideal approach of engaging with your target audience and eventually becoming ‘people choice’. Hence, SEO is directly or indirectly influenced by the pattern of the content marketing that needs a follow-up and a change in the delivery of the message.  Here’s the most amazing part of the influenced and altered SEO, it will have enhanced: reach, awareness, consistency, visibility and traffic in the long run empowering all the section of people in the society with equal opportunity of absorbing technology.

The post How Will Content Marketing Strategy Influence SEO? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.