CHAPTER 13

Progress, Refinement, and Success: Measurement

Armed with goals and a plan, the fruit of our integrated search and social media content marketing efforts must be determined through proper measurement. There are many dimensions to assessing an optimized and socialized content marketing program, enough to fill several more books. A good foundation for success will be to emphasize the role of measurement according to the influence of content across the buying and customer life cycle. From awareness to advocacy, content plays an important role and through an adaptive process of hypothesis, benchmarking, assessment, and refinement, businesses can create competitive advantages and value for their relationships with customers.

Whether you’re trying to attract more customers through search engines or social networks, the relationship between setting goals and measuring performance must be in close alignment for a successful effort to reach overall marketing and business goals. Organizations have many reasons for publishing digital content, and while our attention to goals has focused on marketing and sales objectives, it also extends to other communications, audiences, and business benefits. In Chapter 4 we discussed setting goals for increasing leads and sales as well as to improve media coverage, attract talented employees, and serve online customers more efficiently. In this chapter I will explore some of the key considerations for measuring content marketing performance relevant to the overall goals of attracting and engaging more customers with particular emphasis on key performance indicators and objectives associated with optimizing content and social media engagement.

APPROACH TO INTEGRATED CONTENT MARKETING MEASUREMENT

All measurement must have a starting point, and an important part of establishing a baseline of integrated search and social media marketing performance is to identify goals. Broader business goals related to content marketing often go beyond an “increase in sales” to include:

• Elevate brand perception
• Establish thought leadership
• Drive customer engagement
• Provide better customer service
• Increase customer retention
• Grow customer advocacy and referrals

Content plays an essential role in helping organizations achieve a range of business goals and the intentional optimization and social promotion of that content can improve the speed and relevance of how a brand connects with both prospects and existing customers.

THE ROLE OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIs)

Earlier, I mentioned the adage that “facts tell and stories sell,” so to help you understand the role of analytics and measurement within a search engine optimized content marketing plan, I’ll use a story set in the context of a Minnesota winter.

If there is too little snow, Jason, Eric, and Bill will not be able to go on their snowmobile trip. To ensure their plans aren’t foiled, each sets out to measure the amount of flakes on the ground.

Jason meticulously counts each individual snowflake. While incredibly accurate, his process stretches across such a long period that by the time it’s complete, he forgets exactly what he is measuring and what he should be doing with the data he is gathering.

Eric takes one look outside and determines that the amount of snow is “not enough.” He retreats inside, thinking his potential trip a failure.

Bill, meanwhile, develops formulas designed to measure exactly how many inches of snow are on the ground, and more specifically, how many inches have fallen on the portions of land that will make up his snowmobile route.

Days later, it turns out that Jason’s individual counting method was the most accurate form of measurement. And Eric was absolutely right in the sense that there just “wasn’t enough” snow on the ground. But despite being less accurate than Jason and less vast in scope than Eric, Bill was the only one that day who enjoyed a successful snowmobile trip. He did not allow himself to get hung up in minutiae—yet he refused to accept an overly big-picture view.

How does this analogy apply to measurement of optimized content marketing metrics? Let’s start with two basic truths: (1) Absolutely everything can be measured, and (2) the big picture can be misleading (especially if you are aiming toward very specific objectives, as discussed in Chapter 4).

Let’s explore the danger of minutiae. Logging in to your web analytics reporting platform such as Google Analytics will provide you with nearly every possible metric you’ve ever cared to measure about a website or blog. Are you interested in how many visitors landed on your home page by typing the keyword “red widgets” into Google and who stayed longer than five minutes? You’ll find the answer in minutes. Need to segment this red widget information further to measure the amount of traffic that came from Facebook in Singapore? Just a few seconds more. When evaluating website metrics, there is no difficulty in finding the data you want to measure—just as the ridiculously tedious act of counting snowflakes is extraordinarily simple. The level of difficulty increases when deciding what to measure rather than determining how to measure.

So, what do we need to measure? The most basic, highest-level KPI that should be measured for a search-focused content marketing campaign is the traffic generated by organic search. Is this metric increasing or decreasing in line with your efforts? Organic search traffic is one metric that anyone responsible for an online marketing budget will be most interested in seeing improve—and so it is a metric that holds a great deal of importance.

While Google has implemented encrypted search for logged-in users of Google services, all is not lost with the ever-increasing frequency of referring search phrases labeled “not provided.” Within the SEO community there has been no shortage of speculation about how to infer meaning from the masked Google search phrases, from extrapolation based on historical search phrase data associated with specific pages to pulling in data from Google Webmaster tools. Near the time of its announcement, Google forecast the percentage of “not provided” traffic at less than double digits, but along with many of my SEO industry peers, I’ve seen our own percentage of masked keyword traffic approach 26 percent. With the growing popularity of Google+, there is no reason to think that number will do anything but increase.

Most analytics and optimization experts are still adjusting to encrypted search causing referring keyword phrases to be designated “not found” but there are a few things content marketers can do to interpret and find meaning. The 75 to 90 percent of organic keyword traffic that is not encrypted can be used as a sort of proxy for understanding the distribution of referring keywords that are encrypted. Also, when keywords are mapped to specific pages and the organic search traffic is increasing or decreasing to those pages over time, associations with keyword ranking provided by Google Webmaster Tools and other 3rd party ranking tools can help provide content marketers with some insight as to keyword performance. These tactics and many more can be helpful at filling the void of “not provided,” but the direct correlation of specific referring organic keywords to conversions for the 5 to 25 percent of encrypted search queries performed on Google is gone.

THE VALUE OF SEO FOR CONTENT MARKETING

Measuring the return on investment of optimized content on marketing and business goals relies on a number of factors including: The ongoing investment made by the brand in SEO activities, the effect of search traffic on PR, customer service and job listing content, the advertising equivalent of organic search visibility and traffic, the value of conversions from organic search, order size, order frequency and even the cost of not implementing SEO. Determining the value of implementing SEO best practices should factor the body of content a brand publishes over time, not just a single landing page over a few months. The impact of publishing optimized and well-linked web pages is cumulative over time. The more optimized pages that are published, the more possible entry points there are to brand content through search, links from other websites and social shares.

For SEO programs that have been able to achieve some momentum, individual conversion rates can be calculated for groups of keywords, individual keywords, for categories of content and for individual landing pages. Attribution models can be tricky, so keep in mind the overall consumer journey and sales cycle when determining the conversion value of SEO on specific pieces of content. Relying solely on the last click rarely tells the entire conversion story.

Other important search engine optimization KPIs include: keyword phrase position in search results, aggregate social shares such as Google+ votes per web page, inbound links from third-party websites to each web page, visitors from organic search (brand and non-branded phrases), visitors from links, and visitors from social media sites managed by the brand.

As a common marketing tactic, SEO is often held accountable for attracting visitors that are actively looking for answers, into a conversion of some kind. Those conversions might be a transaction like a purchase from an online store or an indication of interest such as downloading a report, signing up for a webinar, registering for a newsletter, demo or free trial. Using our holistic content marketing perspective, those conversions might also be a journalist inquiry on the newsroom, a candidate application for an open position, or the five-star rating of an FAQs page.

Beyond websites, SEO can attract search traffic to blogs and brand social media content on and off the corporate website. Social media optimization goals for improving social network growth and engagement because of discovery through search should be included in the KPIs and SEO program performance metrics right along with broader traffic and conversion goals.

There is often an inherent problem with focusing on one large overall metric: A lack of context. For instance, say your organic search traffic has decreased 15 percent over the past two months. It may be very tempting to view the current amount of organic traffic as “not enough” and paint your SEO and content marketing efforts as a failure. But a slightly deeper look reveals that, although total organic search has decreased, organic search traffic generated by keywords that you have focused on during optimization and content marketing efforts (i.e., “red widgets”) has increased. Better yet, visitors who arrive at your site with variations of these keywords are converting (i.e., completing an action ranging from submitting a form to finalizing a sale). In this case, with some very basic context pulled from the most basic analytics reports, we can determine that the portions of our campaigns that we have most recently optimized for are proving to be successful. We can also put into place a plan to replicate this success, either by creating more content optimized for red widgets or by applying the same principles to a new category.

The role of SEO with measures of success isn’t just about converting keyword queries into sales, although that’s certainly important. SEO can improve the search visibility of any kind of content—from news to job listings to customer support. Set goals and develop a hypothesis about what the impact of increased search visibility could do for improving the performance of your content for customers that are actively in a search for answers. Identify the key performance metrics that are indications toward success for content types, personas, and across the buying and customer lifecycle. Take benchmark measurements for those key metrics as well as for overall program success measurements. Analyze performance on an ongoing basis and make improvements to scale what’s working and reoptimize what isn’t.

SOCIAL MEDIA KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS)

The question regarding whether social media’s true impact on online marketing efforts can be measured is one that has been asked countless times—with strong cases on both sides of the fence. Ultimately, the important question is whether social media can be directly measured. At the most basic level, you can see this by simply logging in to your web analytics account and looking at the referring traffic report. If you see social networks as referring sources such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you know which social media sites are driving traffic to your website.

Of course, this direct measurement, while worth tracking, goes somewhat against the idea of what social media is about. Social media helps build connections. Connections, in turn, can help to build inquiries and sales. To attempt to draw a direct line from one to the other, while possible, is akin to drawing a direct connection between a snowy day and a snowmobile trip. The snowy day makes the conditions right for a snowmobile trip, but it doesn’t directly cause a trip to be taken—unless you’ve already previously established this connection in your mind.

That said, if direct measurement of social media is nebulous, what should we be looking at to determine its success?

One quantifiable KPI is the total number of connections with brand social properties or individuals that represent the brand, which could mean those who “like” your company on Facebook or those who are following your updates on Twitter. It certainly applies to the number of people who have added your brand’s Google+ page to their circles. When your brand is included in others’ Google+ circles, the likelihood of your content appearing in their search results while logged in is substantially greater. The number of examples for social engagement being correlated to an impact on sales has increased significantly over the past year. For example, over 50 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to purchase from brands they follow.1

Likewise, a corresponding article in USA Today indicates that Coca-Cola Facebook fans are 10 times more likely to purchase than nonfans.2 As noted previously, this is not a direct line from “Facebook” to “sale,” but rather an indication that building connections in social media can be measured, in part, by a correlating increases in bottom line objectives.

Another quantifiable metric that can contribute to both bottom-line objectives and to building more effective social connections is the amount of shares, comments, links, or citations. All of these actions can be found within traditional search results. Think of these metrics the same way you would think of conversation at a business dinner party. If your guests are sharing what you say with others, making commentary on your statements, linking conversation to a statement you had previously made, or even citing past statements you made, you would have a very vibrant and dynamic conversation. Would this conversation immediately lead to these customers purchasing your goods or signing a contract? Probably not. But depending on that potential client or customer’s need—and the vibes they feel after the party commences—it is by no means out of line to suggest that these conversations could directly and positively impact your bottom line the next day, week, month, or year.

Put simply, we buy from those we feel a stronger, more personal connection with. Social media may digitize this, but it’s Relationship Building 101. And the strength of your relationships is not always something you directly measure, but rather something you attribute to your bottom-line success.

KEY SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS

Social media is a fantastic platform for content discovery, sharing, engagement and influence both short and long term. Consumer behaviors in a social media and networking context can be very different from the explicit intentions common with search. And yet, consumers do tap into their social networks for specific recommendations that lead to purchase. Brands are indeed creating incentives and offers for product and services that consumers act on. Social commerce is a reality and that makes social media metrics even more important.

I mentioned above the task of developing a hypothesis, which is an important question to answer with social media measurement. For example, let’s say a simple hypothesis with a product blog and its effect on a sales objective goes like this:

We think an increase in blog subscribers, comments, and social shares over the next six months will correlate with an 20 percent increase in inquiries and sales.

With that hypothesis, the brand can identify overall goals as well as individual KPIs. The insight into customer personas and what they care about is translated into an editorial calendar and efforts to optimize, attract links and engage on the social web. The performance of blog content and social engagement activities are monitored for their effect on goals and KPIs will indicate progress.

What actually gets measured depends on goals, but consider these key areas for social media focused content marketing: Revenue, Engagement, and Cost Savings.

Revenue Goals:

• Speed of sales cycle
• Percent of repeat business
• Percent of customer retention
• Transaction value
• Referrals
• Net new leads
• Cost per lead
• Conversions from the community

Engagement Goals:

• Members
• Posts or threads
• Comments
• Inbound links
• Tags, votes, bookmarks, shares
• Referrals
• Post frequency

Cost Savings Goals:

• Issue resolution time
• Account turnover
• Employee turnover
• Hiring and recruiting
• Percent of issues resolved online

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Measuring business outcomes is about taking raw data and giving it context to the greatest degree possible. It is the difference between driving total traffic and driving quality traffic. It is the difference between total sales and sales of a product we are actively marketing.

Any conversation on business outcomes must start with a clear understanding of business objectives. As noted earlier in this chapter, measurement of your online marketing program can be both extremely broad and extremely granular. You can measure success based on both total traffic and individual visits from Facebook. And while both metrics have value, both also lack context, which is vital for your objectives. And without context, we can make decisions that are misguided—or we can become paralyzed from making any decision at all.

Let’s circle back to three examples of very specific business goals shared in Chapter 4:

• Online public relations
• Human resources and recruiting
• Customer service objectives

In each scenario, broad metrics such as total traffic could help to indicate the success of these initiatives. In the same sense, individual visits from Facebook could also help to indicate the success of these initiatives. But would they really give us a clear picture that we could use to make actionable improvements?

Let’s look at our online public relations example first. More so than any other objective on this list, this is the one that is most likely going to impact broader objectives, such as driving total traffic. The reason for this is that the goal of most public relations–related campaigns, with the exception of ultratargeted initiatives, is to reach a broader audience.

At their heart, public relations objectives are about boosting awareness for your brand. In regard to business outcomes, these can most directly be measured by major news channels or PR sites picking up your press releases and by media mentions of your brand. In a less direct sense, the value of online public relations can be measured by direct traffic to your site (or by users arriving at your website by typing your URL directly into a browser or accessing your site via a bookmark, which is a common report in any Google Analytics package).

Online public relations measurement can go one step further, however, with the simple inclusion of SEO best practices. Say, for example, you introduce a new product into the market: red turbo widgets. You distribute a press release optimized for this phrase that links back to your website. Sometime later (e.g., a day, a week, or a month), you analyze your web results and see that the press release you distributed is appearing as a top referring source back to your website. This is a direct form of measurement indicating the success of this release. And, in looking at your keyword report, you see that variations of “red turbo widgets” have increased steadily since distribution of your release. This is one step beyond pure measurement and into the realm of actionable data. In other words, there is strong evidence to suggest that your audience is interested in this new product—and you may attract more prospects by developing more types of content.

Other types of business outcomes, while perhaps less direct and bottom-line oriented, can be equally measured and shaped in a way that supports action.

Taking the second bulleted item, measuring your human resources and recruiting objectives, requires looking at the segment of results you are most trying to influence and, potentially, the portion of your website you are most striving to drive traffic to.

It’s reasonable to suggest that if you were to develop a job listing for an SEO copywriter, you would host this information somewhere on your site. If so (and this is the beautiful thing), you would be well on the way to being able to measure the results of literally any source, ranging from search to social, that could help contribute to the success of this listing.

For instance, properly segmenting your landing page report in your analytics platform (i.e., a report indicating where on your site visitors landed) can provide you with details regarding not only how many people visited your job listing page over a specified period of time, but also which keywords they used to find this page. This data can provide you the information you need to reoptimize or test new messaging on this page in order to drive even more search traffic.

Furthermore, segmenting this report to show referring sources rather than just referring keywords can provide a clear indication of which social sources are actually driving the most interest. For instance, did your page receive 45 visits from LinkedIn but only 10 from Facebook? This may be an indication that your recruitment efforts for the position in question, from a social perspective, are best served by LinkedIn, and more of your effort should center on this platform.

The king of all measurement factors in regard to human resources is quality job applicants. Setting up your online job listing as an online job application—and setting up an appropriate form-completion goal in your analytics platform—can tell you how many applicants your page converted and which keyword or source drove these applicants. To circle back to our social example, let’s say that you received five applicants from LinkedIn (out of 45 visits), only two of which were quality. On the other hand, you received five applicants (out of 10 visits) from Facebook, four of which were quality. You now have a quantifiable measurement indicating that Facebook, in fact, may just be the stronger recruiting platform for your needs. With this data in hand, you can choose to spend more time either recruiting on Facebook or building up your candidate network in LinkedIn.

Finally, in our last example of customer support, it may be that you do not need to measure success by any traditional factor such as online traffic or inquiries. Instead, you might be more focused on how users are interacting with your site.

To revisit our example from Chapter 4, pretend you are a manufacturer of universal remotes and you have discovered that each call to your customer service line costs you $32.50. To decrease costs, you develop a new FAQs page designed to answer some of the most common questions your call center receives. Using the landing pages report in your web analytics platform, you can identify how many visits this page is capturing each month. You can even correlate this information to a second graph, pulled from your call center’s log reports, showing the total volume of calls day by day. If this report is trending downward at the same time your new FAQs page traffic is trending upward, you have strong data to suggest that this new page is earning its keep on your website.

And because you can always take things one step further to make actionable decisions, you may also determine that, based on the types of keywords that are driving traffic to this page, there exists a much broader range of questions in the minds of your users. This can help you justify the decision to add content to your FAQs page, as needed, or even to create a second page to address a new set of questions.

Additionally, while looking at the types of calls your call center continues to receive, you may determine that most customer support calls focus on a handful of specific features. This can provide the data you need to update pages on your website that are related to these features (through the addition of hyperlinks or calls to action) so you can more effectively funnel visitors to FAQs pages, and this helps you save money by reducing customer support calls.

ANALYTICS TOOLS

Perhaps the most fundamental measurement question you may ask (apart from, “What should we be measuring?”) is, “How should we be measuring it?”

In regard to search and social media measurement and analytics tools, there are a number of applications and services available. Unfortunately, there is no “one size fits all” solution, but with the right understanding of KPIs, overall goals, and process for evaluation and improvement, you’ll be able to narrow down your choices. Many individual social platforms offer their own analytics, such as LinkedIn business pages statistics, YouTube Insight, or Facebook Insights, as complementary services or bundled with advertising services. There are also several third-party web analytics and social media measurement tools to consider:

Web Analytics:

• Google Analytics is the most full featured free analytics tool and has a social tracking plugin.
• Clicky is a real-time, low-cost web analytics tool.
• HubSpot offers inbound marketing software including web analytics.
• Adobe SiteCatalyst is an advanced feature, real-time analytics solution.
• KISSmetrics offers customer analytics for improving conversions and retention.

SEO Measurement:

• Advanced Web Ranking is a suite of tools including search result rank tracking.
• SEOmoz PRO and Raven Tools both offer rank checking options and basic social monitoring.
• Majestic SEO is a premium link-tracking tool.
• SEMRush identifies organic keyword visibility tracking for Google on any website.
• Google Webmaster Tools provides detailed reports about web page visibility on Google.
• Bing Webmaster Tools provides data on search queries, crawling, and search traffic for websites on Bing.
• BrightEdge is a premium social media SEO performance metrics and reporting tool.
• Conductor offers a suite of enterprise SEO tools and performance reporting options.

Social Media Monitoring:

• Trackur offers low to mid-range pricing options for social media monitoring.
• Sprout Social offers a low-cost social media monitoring and management solution.
• Alterian SM2 is a full featured social media monitoring toolset.
• Vocus Social Media Software offers a social media monitoring solution includes sentiment and influencer tracking (TopRank client).
• Radian6 is a premium social media monitoring and crm solution.

Social Media Analysis Tools:

• PeopleBrowsr offers social media analytics and competitor analytics.
• EdgeRank Checker offers analysis for Facebook news feed optimization.
• AddThis sharing widget offers sharing analytics.
• Bit.ly url shortening also offers basic analytics on shared URLs.

There are many other web analytics tools to provide insight into the KPIs that will provide indications toward the progress you desire. Keeping business and marketing goals in mind related to website marketing performance, tool identification, testing, implementation, and scale is a much more efficient process.

There are volumes more to be said about search and social media analytics, but these insights about measuring content marketing performance will definitely get you started. They are a framework to help you understand the business goals and measurement relationship as well as the importance of developing a perspective toward measurement hypothesis, benchmarking, assessment and refinement. Now go forth, market, and measure!

ACTION ITEMS

Notes

1. “What Twitter Users Think About the Brands They Follow,” eMarketer, November 7, 2011, http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008675.

2. Jefferson Graham, “Coke is a winner on Facebook, Twitter,” USA Today, November 8, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/talkingtech/story/2011-11-08/coca-cola-social-media/51127040/1.