How To Measure the Engagement of Your Content Efforts

Content engagement refers to the metrics indicating the number of people consuming your content. It is a broad term used to learn about and understand visitor behavior and how users consume your content.

Websites use content in blogs, videos, audios, emails and ad posts to communicate with their audience. These content forms have call-to-action (CTA) buttons and links to visit your website or read more blogs, increasing your domain authority and helping you rank better on search engines.

You may choose to outsource digital marketing to promote your content online for better engagement, just as 68 percent of U.S. companies do. This helps save money while getting the best services for your website and social profiles.

As per SEMrush, about 84 percent of businesses have a content marketing strategy, and 61 percent measure their content marketing return on investment (ROI) to understand how their content is performing. In this article, we will discuss the metrics you need to measure your content efforts – and how to do it in a few easy steps.

What Do You Need To Measure?

Consumption Metrics

Consumption metrics show the number of people viewing and consuming your content at a specific time.

Pageviews

Pageviews help you determine your most engaging content pieces so that you can create more content around these topics. As your aim for your content is to win more sales, it’s important to keep an eye on which pieces contribute to that goal. The key to getting people to click and spend time on your blogs is to produce high-quality content.

Pageviews also show how many people went from one page to another on your website or the number of people visiting different content pieces from a lead funnel. A high number of pageviews is an indicator of more visitors. 

Therefore, you can learn how well your content strategy is performing by how much traffic you’re seeing.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors are the people who have visited your website at least once. This number does not take into account multiple visits from the same user. Unique visitors will tell you how well your content is doing in impressing people at the top of your funnel.

Another crucial aspect is the number of people following your CTA or sign-up feature on your website. You might use website language translation features to increase the number of people clicking your CTAs to boost your SEO even more.

Average Time on Page

This refers to the time spent by a user on your web pages reading and consuming your content. The higher the number, the higher the engagement will be. This metric is determined by the time users spend scrolling actively on and interacting with your page. Moreover, it shows your content is performing well, and people actually like spending time reading it.

You may see a lower average time if people are just visiting your site and not scrolling further to read the content. This will be related to the bounce rate of your website. To get users to spend more time on your page, you need to improve your content and engage the user.

Behavior Flow

Behavior flow shows how users navigate through your website. It indicates where the user is landing on the site, what further pages they are visiting and the exit points. This may give you insight into the drop-offs and retention points of the users.

If your content piece gives users what they want, it will encourage them to seek out more content of equally high quality on your site. You can use Google Analytics to understand how well your content is working and improve your internal linking structure. 

Website Engagement Metrics

This indicates the number of followers visiting your website and engaging with the content.

Inbound Links

Inbound links are the number of sites referring to your website and contributing to a higher domain authority. You may use SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to get the values of these metrics. Look for the pages on your site that contain the top links and use them as a template and reference for new pages. This will help you achieve better ranks and visibility.

These links also drive traffic from referral websites and let Google know that your content is credible. You may have to assess your content on a regular basis to ensure the links are of high quality and are doing what they are intended for. This is one way to achieve top ranks and gain more traffic.

Session Duration

Each visitor contributes to one session on a website. This is the amount of time a user spends on the site without considering the number of pages they view. These metrics help you identify the engagement of your content efforts.

Look through the pages per session and the average duration of the session to determine the visitor’s engagement. The average session is calculated by the duration of the time a user spends on your website as a whole. You may use this information to create similar content for your target audience.

Page Depth

This is the indicator of the number of total pages a user visits in a single session. You can learn about the average page depth from the Google Analytics Behavior Flow report and it can help you curate a more effective content strategy.

Click-through rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks to views on your site. A higher CTR indicates that your website has considerable engagement. Calculate the CTR by dividing the total clicks on an ad by the total impressions. You can also check the CTR on emails and blog pages.

On average, the Google Ads CTR is more than 4-5 percent, with a display network rate of more than 0.5-1 percent. This may vary for different websites indicating how successful their content is amongst the users.

How To Measure These Metrics

Here are the steps to measure content engagement.

Step 1: Determine much you spent on content creation.

This includes the tools and software, employee salaries and outsourcing costs.

Also, take into account any external workers who are contributing to your content. This may include audits and content recommendations that are not currently in-house.

Step 2: Determine how much you spent on content distribution.

This includes paid advertising, social media advertising and tools and software costs.

Besides this, aggregate the cost of any paid tools and software you or your team may need to create and distribute the content. Step 1 and 2 will amount to the actual cost of the content on your website.

Step 3: Add your expenses to calculate the cost to produce your content – this is your total investment.

Your primary focus is to increase leads and sales via content in a customer-friendly way. Some users may follow through and create revenue for a business by buying its products or services.  

Conversely, a user may just read your blog or watch your videos, not click on the links contributing to sales. This will not generate any revenue for your website and take longer to cover your expenses. However, it has an indirect link to sales when considered along with other metrics.

Step 4: Add all the sales that resulted from your content to calculate your final return.

To get the total expenses and revenue, add the total sales that resulted from your particular content pieces. This will be the indicator of your total earnings and returns. Sales may not come from all your blogs, only your best-performing pieces – but it will hopefully cover your total expenses.

Step 5: Calculate your content marketing ROI using the formula below.

To calculate your content marketing ROI, you need to subtract the initial value of your investment from the final value of your investment. The absolute value of the investment is the net return from the revenue you calculated in Step 4.

Now, divide this number by the investment cost and multiply by 100 to get the ROI percentage. This will give you a clear picture of the final content marketing ROI.