Content KPIs: Which of my content is actually successful?

Especially in times of crisis, keywords such as controlling, content KPIs and
ROI (return on investment) become particularly important. After all, you are probably even more motivated to use your financial and human resources in a targeted manner at the moment. In this article, I’ll show you how you can measure the success of your content – as a freelancer or in an agency.

In some situations, monitoring success in digital business is comparatively simple: a landing page should have a clear call-to-action, for example. Whether this is actually used or not can be clearly measured. In this case, you would take the number of leads or purchases gained and compare it with the number of visitors to the landing page. If this value is too low, then it’s time to troubleshoot. Or to put it more positively: optimisation.

This approach becomes more difficult the further forward a piece of content is positioned in the customer journey. Think about the topic of content marketing – its content should not initially sell anything. Read my articles on content marketing for agencies & freelancers and on targeted content strategy. With this kind of content, you want to:

1. Attract the right target group and then
2. Achieve a positive change towards your products and offers

This is where it becomes much more difficult to determine and record the right key figures. And yet you still want to know how your content is received by the target group.

Finding the right key figures

One major problem: typical and easily available metrics such as page views are usually not very meaningful. After all, what good is it to know that your new blog post has been viewed 10,000 times? What value does it have for you that 5,000 people have subscribed to your newsletter? And are 200 new fans on Facebook enough or not?

Such key figures are sometimes called “vanity metrics”: They are essentially there to flatter one’s vanity. For example: Anyone who is responsible for social media channels is probably familiar with the pressure to have more fans and followers than the competition. But it’s as if a retail shop is primarily concerned with having more visitors than the shop next door. Of course it is important to attract potential customers. However, rent and salaries are only generated from sales, not from the number of visitors. It is much more important to attract the right visitors – and to convince them of what you have to offer.

This example also shows you that comparisons with others often don’t help. Because if you have a jewellery shop and there’s a supermarket next door, then you naturally have completely different conditions. And even two jewellery shops do not necessarily have comparable offers and customers. One may focus on mass-produced goods, the other on exclusive individual pieces.

Therefore, instead of comparing yourself with others, you should first and foremost focus on measuring your own progress. After all, who is to say that your outwardly successful competitor is actually making better sales than you? And: Only through your own experiments, measurements and conclusions can you discover and find out something that your competitors may not even know about.

Firstly, your goals must be clear

Which key figures are “the right ones” for you depends on your goals. It would go too far to explain the topic of company goals at this point. So let’s keep it brief: They should be formulated as “SMART” as possible. This abbreviation stands for specific, measurable, achievable, result-orientated and time-bound. For example, your stated goal is not “more sales”. Instead, your goal states exactly how much more turnover you want to achieve by when and in what way. Based on this, your further considerations look something like this:

• What do you want or need to achieve in the short, medium and long term?
• How can you achieve this?
• What actions and measures would make this possible?
• How great is the probable effect of a measure compared to the effort involved?

You will gradually create a prioritised list of goals and measures. Your content on your own website, on social networks or for your newsletter mailing list is also included.
And because your content and activities now hopefully have clear goals and tasks, it is much easier to derive the appropriate key figures from them.

The KPI Finder

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the more interesting and meaningful a KPI is, the more difficult it often becomes to measure it. See Andreas Köster’s article on measuring success, which is still well worth reading, in which he sheds light on this phenomenon in the field of social media marketing. He divides possible measurement values into a three-stage pyramid. You won’t be able to glean many important insights from analytics tools. Instead, you will have to ask your prospects or customers directly, for example.

In order to find the key performance indicators (KPIs) in the content sector, the Bundesverband der Digitalen Wirtschaft BVDW e.V. (Federal Association of the Digital Economy) has also created a free PDF guide that is well worth reading. It also provides the KPI finder. Both relate primarily to the topic of content marketing, but are also interesting for other content.

The BVDW divides the KPIs into three broad objectives: “interaction”, “reach” and “conversion and costs”. You must therefore already be clear about what you actually want to achieve (see above).

In the next step, you choose which platform you are interested in (website, online shop, newsletter, Facebook, etc.). The KPI finder is limited to listing possible measurement values. You have to do your own research to find out what the KPIs mean, what information they can provide and whether they apply to your situation. Nevertheless, I find the tool helpful for searching specifically for possible KPIs and getting inspiration.

Regularly record and analyse key figures

If monitoring is to be of any use, it must be carried out regularly and as often as possible. Checking once a year to see what your content work has actually achieved is clearly not enough. Depending on what you are looking at, you should also keep an eye on certain values on a weekly or daily basis. The frequency depends on the respective key figure. Some can change in the short term (page views), while others tend to develop over a longer period of time (Facebook fans).

Also make sure to select meaningful comparison periods. It is usually a good idea to use both the previous period and the same period a year ago. After all, there are sometimes seasonal differences. Comparisons with competitors, on the other hand, are only of limited use, as mentioned above. This is simply because you are very unlikely to see the key figures of your competitors that are actually of interest. Further tips:

• To ensure that your figures are comparable, you should only use one data source for each measured value. This is because even things that seem clear, such as a page view, can be assessed differently depending on the measurement tool.
• Also make sure that the figures are as clean as possible. A typical problem is, for example, counting your own visits to the website. This of course distorts the results.
• Speaking of falsified results: Some measurement figures, such as dwell time, are subject to technical errors. You must always be aware of how accurately something can be measured. And some values such as the “bounce rate” can have different meanings depending on the situation, as this article explains.
• Last but not least, it is important that the measured figures can be easily analysed, for example by displaying them in a dashboard. Do you or your colleagues find it difficult to gain insights from the measured values? Then there is a high risk that the task will fall by the wayside or that long-term changes will be overlooked.

Even a simple tool such as Excel or Google Spreadsheets can serve as an aid here. There are also specialised tools such as Klipfolio or Geckoboard. However, make sure that they are GDPR-compliant. Another important point in the evaluation is one that I briefly mentioned above: How much effort was required to achieve the result? It is sometimes noticeable that there are comparatively small activities that can have a major leverage effect.

At the same time, there may be content projects and products that seem far too complex at first glance, but make up for the effort with long-term success. And other content may be prestige projects that are celebrated internally, but in reality have hardly any external impact.

Draw consequences

Targeted and sustainable performance measurement is primarily about drawing the right conclusions. These fall roughly into three categories:

• Learn from mistakes: In line with the lean startup approach, you should not see “mistakes” as a defeat, but as a gain in knowledge. Failures also provide valuable data! They can provide you with insights that your competitors don’t have because they don’t experiment as much as you do.
• Marketing budget: That’s why you should always have a budget available for experiments. This is the only way you will discover new tools and methods that will help you move forward. If you try something and it doesn’t work, then at least you won’t have to wonder whether you’re leaving potential lying around.
• Optimise: Sometimes something will neither be a failure nor a success. It’s not always easy to decide whether to continue investing or not. It all depends on how important the measure is and what you expected from it. Sometimes even seemingly small things can be decisive. For example, you may have created a great whitepaper, but its title is not appealing to the target group. Of course, it is also possible that you have missed the actual central question.
• Research: It is important that you do your research well in advance. If you are sure that your content should actually be much more successful, then invest the time – and keep experimenting.
• Strengthen your strengths: Are you in a fortunate position and have scored a hit? Try to find out exactly what made this success possible – and repeat it. However, this sounds much easier than it is, as many one-hit wonders show …

What is important in all of this is that anyone who records their figures and then relies solely on their own gut feeling, or ignores them for other reasons, can save themselves the trouble. If you ask questions, you also have to live with uncomfortable answers. Favourite projects must not be taboo if they turn out to be inefficient. And just because a lot of time and effort has gone into something doesn’t mean it has to be kept alive (see “Escalating commitment“).

Lean Startup approach

If you take a close look at the success of your content as described, you are sure to find a lot of potential. At the same time, content controlling should not be at the bottom of your to-do list. The sooner you find out what works well and what doesn’t, the less time and energy you waste. Here again, I come back to the topic of lean startups, which can also be applied to content: Test your ideas with simple tools before you create an elaborate whitepaper, for example. Raidboxes, for example, creates simple blog posts before turning them into a complex e-book:

Interested parties can then perhaps sign up to a newsletter mailing list to be informed about its publication. Only when the feedback suggests that there is a need for information do you get to work. Or use channels such as social media to find out what questions your target group actually has – and incorporate this into your planned content. Once your content has been published, the work begins. You have to publicise and distribute it and continue to work on it – unless it turns out to be a total flop.