Measure the impact of your written content

Do you want to be successful? Then measure the results of your text. Make your statistics transparent, so you know where improvements can be made. Based on the customer journey, we tell you which statistics are important for measuring success after publishing your text. 

Write the right content at the right time

The customer journey is the basis of every content strategy. The potential customer goes through various stages before a purchase is made. The moment you focus your texts on one of the phases of the customer’s journey, you ensure that you are sharing the right content at the right time. So before you start writing your text, determine in which phase your customer is. This way you will know what questions your visitors have and you will make sure that your texts, products and services respond to these questions. 

Create KPIs per phase

Each phase has its own KPIs, because each phase serves a different purpose. Today, we use the model of Google. These are the following phases:

• See

• Think

• Do

• (Care)

See phase

In the See phase, the user has a particular need. This may be a problem, to which he/she does not know the answer yet. Suppose someone is sleeping badly. The person is looking for solutions to this problem and comes across various blogs and/or products on the Internet with tips on how to solve this. You answer their questions with relevant content that really helps them. The user now gets to know your organization for the first time. The seed has been planted!

So, now we know that the See phase has one main goal: attracting new users. Seeing from a company view, the See phase has several goals. The most common goals are to increase brand awareness and to establish or strengthen authority. 

Increase brand awareness.

If your customers don’t know you, there is no trust. That’s why it’s important to raise awareness of your brand name, product or service. You do this by – among other things- composing SEO-proof texts, in order to increase your visibility on the results page of Google. 

The KPIs that are important:

• Page view

In Google Analytics you can easily check the pageviews of a specific period and a page. (So before & after posting your SEO text). This statistic gives you information on how often your blog or product is viewed.

If you edit a text you want to see this number increase. If you publish a new page we advise you to set a goal for yourself. We recommend to do this, based on other SEO-proof pages on your website.

• Traffic

It is interesting to understand the distribution of organic and paid traffic. Is the organic traffic growing? Then it could be that your SEO texts are attracting more people. Verify this by checking the positions of your keywords and the click-through ratio. 

Increase authority

Customers like to choose the brand or product that is ahead of the competition. Therefore, it is not only important to share your brand name, but also your knowledge. When a company shares expertise, comes up with new insights, and is a pioneer in their field, it builds trust with the customer. This results in the brand gaining a preferred position in the minds of potential customers.

The KPIs that matter:

• Ranking

SEO-proof texts ensure a higher ranking in Google and an increase in organic website traffic. Determine your focus keyword per text and track the ranking on that keyword in Search Console. If your SEO text is properly written, you will see the ranking increase after publishing your SEO-proof text.

• Time on Site

The average time on page indirectly indicates (no surprise) how long someone has been on the page. In general, you can conclude; the longer someone spends on a website, the greater the interest. 

For blogs, this is perhaps the most important metric to measure the success of your content. A human reads about 200 to 250 words per minute. So have you written a blog of 500 words? Then you want to achieve an average session time of about 1.5 to 2 minutes. 

However, this metric is not only important for blogs. What about product pages? The longer someone spends on your website, the more interesting this user finds the content, but as with all metrics; don’t let it guide you too much.

• Scroll depth

Unfortunately, what Time on Site does not tell you is whether someone is actually reading the text or blog. To see if someone is viewing and reading a page completely, you need Google Tag Manager to set a scroll depth trigger. This will measure how far someone scrolls on your page and thus whether someone reads the entire blog.

Consideration and preference (Think)

In the Think phase, the user is already further along in the process and familiar with your brand. They have already read your blog or looked at your website before.A at this point, they are investigating whether you are the right organization to solve their problem or if they should go to another provider. This can be in the same session or in another session at a later time.

We divide this phase into two parts. Measuring reputation and measuring engagement.

Measuring image or reputation

As mentioned earlier, people have been to your website before. Now it is interesting to know how many people return, how they find you and what they do next on the website.

The KPIs that are important:

• The percentage of returning users

The potential customer has already been to your website and is again interested in your knowledge and/or product. The higher the percentage of returning users, the more people have remembered your brand.

• Direct traffic percentage

Direct traffic indicates how many visitors type your brand name directly into the search bar. Users who do this know your brand name by heart. We also call this unaided brand awareness.

Unaided brand awareness is very valuable. Direct traffic is cheap and super relevant because users choose you directly.

• Average number of pages a visitor views

If visitors click through to your website, it possibly means they are interested are. However, it could also mean that visitors are not finding what they are looking for, so don’t stare blindly at this metric. 

Pay attention to this when determining your ideal KPI. Also, your KPI depends on your industry. For a webshop, the ideal KPI will be higher than a website that sells services. 

→ Download the ultimate E commerce benchmark report here.

Measuring engagement

When customers interact with you, it increases the likelihood that they will purchase something from you. They build up a bond with you. Every contact is important, because every moment is an opportunity to positively (or negatively) influence the customer experience. 

Statistics that are interesting: 

• Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who only view one page and leave your website without interaction. 

An average bounce rate is approximately between 30% and 50%. For blogs

even higher (60%), but of course you want to keep it as low as possible and motivate people to continue visiting your website and motivate people to look further on your website.

• Soft conversions

As mentioned, the user is orientating whether he/she will use your services or product in this fase of the customer journey. To guide themselves in this choice, they will interact with what you offer on your website and gain more information that way. We call these soft conversions.

Examples of soft conversions:

• Newsletter subscriptions

• Downloading brochures

• Comment on blog

• Whitepaper download

• More than 2 pages viewed

Most soft conversions don’t measure Google Analytics by default. To provide insight into this data, you need Google Tag Manager. Do you need help with this? We are happy to help!

Sales or action KPIs (DO).

After the Think phase, we arrive at the Do phase. In this phase, specific actions are taken and the target audience proceeds to purchase the service or product.

The KPIs that are important here depend on the organization. Each company has its own soft and hard conversions. We provide a few examples here to inspire you:

Hard Conversions

• Request a quote

• Fill out a contact form

• Call

• Email

• Buying a product/service

These are just examples of conversions. An action may be a soft conversion for one company and a hard conversion for another. 

Just like soft conversions, you are able measure hard conversions with Google Tag Manager and read the statistics in Google Analytics. 

Track Measurements

Now that you know what you need to measure, it’s handy to keep a clear record of it. To do this, you can create a dashboard in Google Data Studio. This way you have all the important KPIs in view at once. 

Can you use a hand with setting up your measurability or building your dashboard? Then get in touch with our experts!