Most content marketers are measuring the wrong things. Here’s how to tell the difference.
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC
Content marketing metrics are the quantitative and qualitative measures used to evaluate whether a content program is achieving its intended business objectives. They include audience growth, lead generation, search visibility, and revenue attribution. The distinction between meaningful metrics and vanity metrics is critical: vanity metrics (page views, social media likes, follower counts) may look impressive but reveal little about business impact, while meaningful metrics connect content activity directly to outcomes that matter to the organization.
Every content marketer I’ve worked with has felt the pull of the vanity metric. The blog post that got 2,000 views. The LinkedIn post with 150 likes. The social media following that crossed a round number.
These numbers feel like progress. They’re easy to report. But they’re often meaningless.
Continue reading “The Content Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones to Ignore)”
One of the persistent challenges for marketing departments is the ability to determine a reliable and justifiable return on investment for their marketing spend. One common reason given for this challenge is the difficulty in attributing revenue to specific marketing activities. But in an 
Marketing has long been faced with a perception that its results are difficult to accurately measure. Consequently, many business leaders are skeptical of investing money into marketing efforts, because they aren’t convinced they can tie the dollars they put into marketing to their bottom line. When it comes to online marketing, in particular, a lot of metrics have been developed to help evaluate the effectiveness of marketing efforts in the absence of the ability to measure a concrete ROI.