How to Improve Customer Engagement with Content Marketing

Evaluating the outcome of your content marketing strategy is an important part of measuring its success. However, most businesses struggle when it comes to figuring out how, and what they should be measuring. There’s no clear-cut road to success with SEO and content marketing – the chances are you’ll find a number of professionals that all tell you different things. Typically, the best way to answer the question is to think about your specific objectives and goals. For example, bloggers might want to focus on sharing metrics, whereas e-commerce sites will benefit more from assessing conversions.

However, there is one aspect that should be on every measurement list for content marketers: engagement. Engagement metrics are one of the most reliable ways to determine how your readers feel about your content. Knowing your metrics for engagement help you to learn your audience preferences, target what they find most interesting, and shape your future content.

Here are some of the most commonly used engagement metrics in Google Analytics:

Pages per Session

In simple terms, this is the average number of pages that are viewed in any given visit. The higher your pages per session value are, the better the indication that the users engaged with your site will actively be seeking out further content. This provides a great indication of how well-targeted your content currently is, and where you should be focusing your editorial efforts. Obviously, this metric can’t quantify the various actions that a user can take on your website, which brings us to the next metric.

Returning Vs. New

This metric gives you the means to see how much of your traffic is “returning” and how much of it is new. The results are found through a cookie that is given to a user on their first visit. If you have a high percentage of returning visitors, then you will be able to determine how successful your content is at bringing users back to your website. It’s also a useful way of understanding whether your content marketing is currently providing a good experience. You can also analyze the differences between returning and new customers. For example, your returning customers may be more likely to make a purchase.

Recent and Frequent

The frequency metric breaks down your returning traffic and places it into sections depending on how many times they keep coming back. On the other hand, the “recent” metric lets you know the number of days that have passed between each of those visits. Your main objective for content marketing should be to create content that results in loyal readers who want to return frequently and often. Readers love to read fresh content and are less interested in encountering similar material found on numerous websites. If you want your content to stand out from others use a plagiarism checker before publishing content on your website.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate describes the percentage of single-page sessions that visitors access in your website. These sessions take place when visitors come to your website, but leaves before he or she progresses to do something else. For example, if you accidentally click on a website and then hit the back button, you’d be contributing to that website’s bounce rate. Bounce rate can be determined by a wide range of different factors, including your competitive landscape, content, type of business and more.

A high bounce rate could show that your visitors either didn’t want to be there or that they found what they wanted immediately and left. Because it’s so difficult to understand what generates a high or low bounce rate, it can be difficult to improve your strategy according to this metric – but it’s still worth looking at in context from time to time.