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Video Transcript

The purpose of tracking content metrics is to understand how the content you create and curate impacts your specific goals . To get a clear picture of trends over time, it’s necessary to collect data at regular intervals on the same metrics for at least a few months. How frequently you pull this data will depend on how often you publish content. Once a month is a good place to start and will help account for  occasional deviations such as daily spikes and declines, and holiday activity.

From there, your objective is to identify and duplicate successes and pinpoint underperforming initiatives. To see what works, look for posts that consistently draw attention from your audience in the form of likes, comments, shares and clickthroughs and think about how to create similar content. Say you run a fitness studio and your Fit Friday tips get a lot of shares and comments. Since you know this content works, think about how you can expand on it, perhaps by adding a weekly nutrition tip. Template the elements of the content creation process such as where to source the image and the tip, and when and where to share it so that going forward it only takes a few minutes to put together a successful post that you know your audience will love.

With content that hasn’t performed well, deconstruct it to see which elements can be improved. Can the copy be more compelling? Can the image be more striking? For example, let’s say you post a weekly discussion question to your audience and it’s not getting much pick up. Try presenting the question in a different format - instead of text, create a visually engaging graphic. Think about how you can make the question more relevant to your audience, or try posting on a different day. If after those efforts the content still falls flat, it may be time to  shelve it.

To fine tune your ROI it’s important to track  hard costs such as labour, stock image photography and freelance writer and designer fees. If putting together an ebook costs $500, it should generate enough leads and sales to provide an adequate return If it doesn’t, focusing on blog posts that you can later merge into an ebook might be a better route. Thinking about these details will help you produce content appropriate for the different stages of your business.