5 New Content Marketing KPIs




Tips From How Content Gets Shared


My friend and fellow Internet marketer Phil Buckley (@1918) paid me a nice compliment this morning:


I'm always impressed by the different ways +Martin W. Smith slices and dices his data to find the actionable nuggets.

Thought it would be interesting to share how I created the Content Marketing Social Mentions Study Phil was complimenting. As we wind our way through the journey of the post on MartinMartySmith.com we will discover some new ways of thinking about content marketing. This post is a step-by-step HOW To Create five new critical content marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).




Topsy not GA


Google Analytics under counts social by up tot 30%. I like Topsy.com for social analytics. Here is Topsy's graph of ScentTrail's social mentions for the last 30 days:














Content Marketing KPI #1: Daily Mentions


Your content must spring legs and walk around the social world. This chart proves that is happening for ScentTrial. I don't create or curate 30 pieces of content a day (ScentTrail's average) no matter what my friends think :). Use Topsy's free chart tool: http://analytics.topsy.com/.



If you really want to get depressed put your name or your company's name in and then load an Internet marketing luminary such as Seth Godin (ouch!). Don't get depressed. Every day is a new day online. Some mentions are better than NO mentions (always) and you are working on it.



Content exists in layers. Today's posts may get traction tomorrow. Sometimes content way out in your website's long tail of content pops back into popularity. Don't stop at knowing your daily mention number find out WHAT content led the way. Topsy helps with this too as they indicate the content that got the most attention.




Content Marketing KPI #2: Content Type


Content has segments or buckets you define to create content groups. Infographics is a common and, as it turns out very viral, bucket. SEO, ScentTrail Daily Paper.li and Content Marketing are three of my most popular segments:











I moved Topsy's data into a spreadsheet and then cut in a column to define content types. You can see a copy of that spreadsheet on Content Marketing Social Mentions Study if you are that geeky :).




Content Marketing KPI #3: Tools


In the spreadsheet I also note what tool used to produce the daily winner. Come in each day and add yesterday's Daily Mentions, Content Type and Content Tools (the one that was used to win the day) in your spreadsheet.



When you want to analyze tools sort by the Tools column, create subtotals and graph. Here is ScentTrail's tools graph:








Content Marketing KPI #4: Top 10


Not all content is equal. Some  content is more likely to generate shares than others. You NEED to know this. ScentTrail's Top 10 Content in the last 30 days generated 50% of the shares. Sort by mentions with the largest to smallest filter and then isolate your Top 10 content.








Content Marketing KPI #5: LEI


LEI stands for Link Efficiency Index. LEI judges how FAST your content is generating the all important inbound links. Go to Alexa.com and type in your URL. How many inbound links do you have? Note that number. Now head over to Google and use the site:yoururl.com (remember to test with and without www.). ScentTrail only has 87 inbound links (not good).



ScentTrail has a PageRank of 4, high for so few links. Pagespread, the number of pages in Google, may be helping since ScenTrail has 3,230. To create LEI divide inbound links (L) by PageSpread (PS) or L/PS=LEI.



ScentTrail's LEI is currently .026. Another way to think of LEI is for every page ScentTrail creates .026 of a link. As an Internet marketer my job is to increase LEI, so I should think about link intensive content such as contest and games, guest posts and Infographics.

Cool thing about LEI is you can create it for anyone with FREE tools such as Alexa and Google's site: command. I know my LEI is weak because I've looked at LEI's for many websites. Easy to create a comparison set to benchmark against too. I created LEI and I am NOT a quant (not even close), but new content marketing times require new ways to measure success, trend progress and know if you are eating the bear or he is having a feast at your expense.


5 New KPI Summary


Hope this post helps you see into HOW I "slice and dice" to find golden nuggets. Scary right? What about you? Do you have cool new content marketing KPIs? Share your discoveries in comments and I will link across my little growing social net.




You In?


Here are helpful links so you know I'm not crazy, just in a hurry :).



Martin W. Smith, Director Marketing Atlantic BT



Martin Marty Smith on Facebook



Martin Marty Smith on Linkedin



Martin W. Smith on G+








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