3 Reasons to Measure Content Marketing by Collecting Data by Hand

Point of fact you must measure your content marketing. Now, how to do that is up for debate. If you are a brand, you’ve got access to lots of fancy tools. A small business owner needs to find a clever solution. That is what I’m providing today.

What we need for success is simple and you will find that we don’t need a tool to grab our data.

5 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Using the Simple Spreadsheet

1. Deciding What to Measure

The first goal for measuring your content marketing is to decide on your key metrics. I think the important ones for a small business are the following: Newsletter Subscriptions (there is money in the list), Conversions (how many people become customers), and Leads (did someone ask you about your services). The good news, you can set this all up in Google Analytics. What you are going to want to do is tag specific URLs and then create events.

• If someone clicks your sign up for the newsletter link you can count that as an event.
• If someone clicks on an item in our store that is an event.
• If someone clicks on our email form that is an event.

This sounds difficult but you can do it all with one Free WordPress Plugin.

We are going to use WP Google Analytics Events.

Once you have it installed you will want to go into the settings.

The simplest way to do it is to add a unique class to the link you want to track.

It looks like this in the code:

Then when you fill out the selector in the plugin you would choose “leads”. You can make up the other variables in the event tracker. Whatever will help you uniquely identify it in your Google Analytics.

That’s it.

If you have a button or other clickable element. You will want to use the Inspector tool of your browser. It will reveal the code underneath your website.

Here is the CSS for Social Warfare. If I wanted to measure a click event for Facebook, I would choose the “swp_facebook” selector for my event.

If you want help setting this up, give me a holler at susan@susansilver.net.

2. Vanity Metrics Have a Purpose

The issue with vanity metrics is that the numbers are often shallow measures of what is really important. We can transform them when we put them in a spreadsheet. Collect the right data and instead of follower count we have follower growth.

All you need is the number of followers per day of the month. Easy enough to track daily.

Then create a trendline.

Here is how I tracked the growth for TSR’s Facebook page. The slope of that line is our growth rate, 2.84%.

3. Scatter Plots Reveal Important Information

The last measure of content marketing we will look at is the Scatter Plot. You’ll want to collect as much data as you can. You should be able to get most of this from your Google Analytics. This is what my spreadsheet looked like when I did this for the TSR blog.

To do a scatter plot, we will choose two columns. For example, here is a comparison of unique page views and total word count.

Measure Content Marketing without Fancy Tools

Measuring content marketing doesn’t require that we pay more money to get more learnings. Collect data by hand using what is available to you in Google Analytics or Social Media. Use the chart ability in your spreadsheet program to generate graphs like scatter plots.

If you enjoyed this post you will like other posts in this category.

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Or Hire Me

I can provide you with measurement and analytical insights into your blog.

Services Include

• Setting up Google Analytics for your Blog
• Hooking you into Google Console
• Translate data into words so you know how your blog is performing

If you are interested email susan@susansilver.net

Featured Image Chungkuk Bae

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