5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Evaluating Your Content  

Do you know what you should be looking for when you’re evaluating your content?

In our upcoming Benchmark Report, we asked marketers how they would rate the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies. And nearly half of all respondents did not feel confident in their content marketing strategy. Yet, those same marketers stated that they plan to spend a portion of their budget on content marketing next year. 

We tell our clients that the key to a solid content marketing strategy you are confident in is evaluating your content. Understanding consumer behavior, interests, and intent gives insight into whether your content marketing strategy is successful. It will allow you to optimize well-performing content, identify gaps, and improve where needed. 

If you relate to the respondents of our Benchmark Survey and need more confidence in your content marketing strategy, keep reading. We are sharing five questions to ask yourself when reviewing your analytics that will give you insight into how your content is performing.  

Did users “like,” share, or comment on your social content? 

Review your social content to see which pieces received the highest engagement. Comments, likes, and shares indicate that your content resonates with your audience. You can dig deeper into your engagement with the following questions: Are there similarities in the content with the most engagement? Do they have similar style graphics and copy? Or are they about the same topic? Or are they all different?  

Is your social content driving traffic to your website? 

If your social content is solving your audience’s problems, entertaining them, or educating them, they will find your content valuable and follow your prompts to the website. You can feel confident that your social content strategy is working if you see a good amount of website traffic from your social channels. 

If you are not seeing that traffic, review the data to see if there are one-off posts that are driving traffic. Is there anything different about this post than your other content that would make it more engaging? Is it the graphic? Or the copy? Or the topic? Once you understand the answers to those questions, you can hone in on what is working from this post for future content. 

What content received the most downloads? 

Downloads could be a good indication of two things: your users are looking for more in-depth content, or they are interested in the topics of your downloads. See if you can draw a correlation between the content downloaded and other highly viewed content to determine which it may be. If they want more in-depth content, try creating more relevant downloads. If the topic has their attention, explore more ways to create content around it. 

What content saw the most traffic?  

When you are reviewing your analytics, pay attention to the content that is receiving the most traffic. That is a good indication of the content people want to see. Take this a step further by reviewing the keywords people use to get to the content. If you are ranking high for those keywords, are there ways you can organically incorporate those keywords into your upcoming content?  

How many users are new vs returning? 

Returning users could indicate that you are creating brand loyalty and affinity with your content. Be sure to review the pages returning users engage with and how much time they spend on them. Are there specific content types they are looking at?  

Looking to learn more about user behavior and Google Analytics? Click here. 

This list will give you some good data points to start with when evaluating your content. Compare this data against your KPIs. From there, you can get a good picture of how your content marketing strategy is performing. 

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