A forensic approach with a strong business case
On the one hand, existing metrics are hard to relate to the bottom line and do not allow you to really measure customer engagement at all.
And on the other, there are so many metrics, there is a risk of digital data overload!
Marketing needs to be selective, not measure and track everything, but think ‘lean’ in terms of which metrics will help the business to really drive customer value.
The two established metrics are:
Clickthrough - how many are attracted in
Average readership time - how long they stayed
Most people are familiar with how these can be used. For example low clickthrough can indicate headline, visual or topic choice needs improvement. But what specifically? Or is it the content has not properly optimised for the device or the browser?
Some genuine next generation tools now allow you to get a much more granular understanding of how your content is performing:
Page performance metrics (average read time by page) – by understanding where in the content customers have spent time reading, which allows you to build real understanding of customer content preferences.
Engagement metrics – (interaction with the content that generates customer data). When customers like what they read they start to answer questions, view videos, and share socially.
Accessibility metrics - what devices are readers choosing to use, where they came from and when they choose to read can be used to optimise marketing and sales objectives.
Once marketing habitually thinks customer and measures performance this way, it places the building blocks in place to personalise content and it begins to transform its own destiny and its performance too!