Found this great article from the Content Marketing Institute. 

When putting your measurement program in place, start by deciding on how frequently you’ll collect your data. A good schedule to start with is measuring marketing effectiveness on a monthly basis. Then, you will want to create a spreadsheet that documents and tracks the following:

1. Your marketing goals. If you have several, it may help to put them in order of priority. (By this point, you should have agreed on goals with your management team; but if you haven’t, now is the time to get on the same page.)
2. The key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure marketing effectiveness of your content.
3. Your plan for gathering this performance information.
4. Who will be responsible for collecting and reporting this data.

I can’t stress enough that everyone who is working on content marketing needs to know what the core KPIs are for measuring the marketing effectiveness of your content. Whether or not they are directly involved with your content analytics, it’s critical that content creators understand how their work impacts overarching company goals.

Here are some examples of KPIs you may want to track:

Getting started

Measurement can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. Don’t measure simply for the sake of having some numbers to present to your upper management. If you aren’t certain what you should be measuring, ask yourself these two questions:

• Do these metrics support my key goals?
• Can I take action on these metrics (i.e., will they provide me insight into how I can improve my program)?

Unless you can answer “yes” to the questions above, you likely don’t need to be collecting the data — at least at first.

Some tips:

• Make measurement a priority. Measurement processes are constantly evolving, and it definitely takes time to track, analyze, and report on performance. This essential cycle of measurement and optimization is key to being successful with content marketing on an ongoing basis.

• Track conversions. While some vanity metrics (e.g., Twitter followers, website traffic) are easy to track, they are rarely that insightful independent of other data. Track your social growth, which allows you to look at trending and anecdotal information on where you are getting the most shares and social conversation. However, it’s more important to track conversions to email and topics of interest. This helps you adjust a content marketing plan accordingly so that you confidence that you are delivering on our readers interests and expectations — efforts which certainly help your own bottom line.

• Collect actionable metrics. Only collect data you want to use and have the ability to take action on. .

• Talk to and learn from industry peers. 

• Be ready to adapt. What you track over time will likely shift, so evaluate your list of metrics quarterly, bi-annually, or annually to make sure you’re capturing the data that will best address your key questions. Review your metrics on a quarterly basis to make sure they continue to align with missions and goals as they evolve along with the industry.

• Automate data collection. Think about how you can automate data collection with reports. You can automate dashboards within Google Analytics, Salesforce, and our marketing automation system. You can look at these dashboards each week, and then have a simple way each month to update the KPI document. However, if automated data collection isn’t an option, consider additional resources and team members you can tap into if you need help evaluating your content performance. Since many team members touch our marketing processes at various points, assigning oversight responsibilities for each KPI has improved ownership and accountability.

• Take time for analysis. It’s not enough to just collect data and add it to a spreadsheet. The data needs to be analyzed so that you understand where the opportunities for improvement lie — and what the best path may be for achieving those improvements. For example, if data shows that our blog posts on content marketing strategy all have high numbers of Facebook shares, LinkedIn posts, and tweets, proper analysis of these data points can help show us the best ways to leverage these high-performing topics across our other content platforms.

I can’t stress enough how critical it is to measure the results of your content marketing activities so you can continually learn what your audience likes and use that information to continually improve. The result? Happier prospects, happier customers, and happier management.

What analytics tips and tools do you have that help you track and measure your content performance?

Rachel Oliver

Original: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/07/simple-plan-measuring-marketing-effectiveness-of-content/