You have a website or a corporate blog and want to know how it’s going? More precisely: if you want to understand your content strategy is giving the desired results, that is, if your content marketing will make you meet business goals you have set? Well, open Google Analytic and read statistics: the answers you seek are also – and sometimes primarily – in the numbers that you will be presented.
Let’s face it: the most important parameter of all is what earns your online project. In practice, you need to apply this old – but still valid – little formula: GAIN = REVENUE = COSTS. If you’re not active, your website or your company blog have probably needs an overhaul in terms of content, calls to action, usability etc. Or are you even review your digital strategy in full, since the ROI related to your online presence is deficient.
In this sense, if your company is not tracking the conversions and sales coming from e-commerce, register for the newsletter, then it is not properly assessing the effectiveness of their business digital marketing.
This is true of all companies, no matter if they are big names or tiny SMEs. The measurement of results is indeed essential; because it is from it that we can understand if the road taken is the correct one or if there is need for revision surgeries tactics – or even the strategy.
But there are parameters that can give us the pulse of the situation and that, at the same time, they are immediate to be evaluated? I.e. the parameters that exist, especially for businesses that have created an institutional website or have opened a company blog a few months ago, not force us to express hasty assessments on ROI, which at that time was far from satisfactory for strength? Yes, these parameters exist. Specifically, I’ll mention three.
If your online project is young, you first stare of these parameters, because it will tell you roughly if you are doing well or not. These parameters are also important for those who have a website or a blog now fully operational, even if – as I said – in those cases, the main yardstick against which to evaluate their actions in content marketing becomes the ROI.
Let’s see what those parameters that can give us a fairly clear indication of how well we are doing on the web.
1. Bounce rate
The bounce rate, as defined by Google Analytics, “is the percentage of single-page visits, ie visits in which the person left your site from the page on which he entered without interacting with it.”
In line Max, just to give points of reference, if your bounce rate of your business site exceeds 55-60%, have no reason to worry. If you have a blog, in my opinion, you can raise that to the 70-75% limit, just because often some web users will arrive on the blog just to see if you have published a new post and, not finding him, they will go away.
Keep in mind however, that the bounce rate is important, but it is a parameter that should be read together with other data, and must be contextualized. For example, on my blog often create so-called post evergreen, that is, long content to try to thrash out with a good degree of completeness a topic – for example, posts about how to make money with a blog , on the web writing rules on content strategy. Clearly, in such cases, the person who read the post – perhaps employing five or six minutes – does not give grounds to continue the visit: it has got all the news he needed. Therefore, in these cases, a visit to a single web page cannot be considered a bounce, because the visitor has read a long time – maybe all the way – the content, obviously finding it relevant and of a certain value.
As a result, lends extreme care in evaluating the bounce rate of your company website and your company blog. If the parameter value is high and, concurrently, the residence time of the visitors on the pages is low, you should certainly take action, for example by improving the quality of content. In other cases, is’ a more thorough evaluation.
2. The percentage of new visitors
Reaching more and more new visitors is the dream of every high and every marketing manager, and the percentage of new visitors gives us the direct feedback of how many users arrive for the first time on the pages of our site or our blog.
What should this percentage? It’s really hard to give a definite value because it depends on the web project. In short, everything depends on how much you want to see a public transit or build a community around your website or to your business blog.
For example, in this my business blog, the percentage of new visits is the beginning of the year 85, 9%. Be close to 90% is something that does not bother me much, because one of the objectives of the blog is to give me more possible visibility within the target I have chosen. Certain that, if I had a percentage of new visits well above 90%, I would begin to worry. It would mean that users do not ever come back on my blog, that I was unable to retain almost none of my visitors.
3. The residence time on single page
This you see is the post number one thousand and sixty-four of my blog. Some post are beds for ten minutes and more, other for about thirty seconds. It is clear that the former are posts that have hit the target, while the latter not. Obviously, the length of the single post also influences the reading time: There are more words in the content the more likely that users spend more time there – if the content is relevant and of value to their eyes.
However, in line Max, if you look at the statistics with some objectivity, it is easy to tell if content nailed readers in his reading or rejected them.
Here, if the time you visited your site or your blog is low – low in relation the length of material – is sounding the alarm bell. This means you’re doing something wrong in your content marketing. Perhaps you are targeting the wrong target? Or write low value content? Or even: you say unoriginal things, because they have already been said so many others before you, and you’re so out of time? Or it occurs more than one of these facts simultaneously?
So, these are the three parameters that, crudely but intuitive, they can give you the idea of how it’s going online projects of your company. Especially if the journey on the web has just started, I suggest you keep an eye constantly the indicated parameters. And remember that, after a while, you will have only one judge the effectiveness of your presence on the Net: ROI.
And you, how to monitor the progress of your website or your blog? What other parameters I can quote because, according to your experience, show how a project is going online?