Metrics
What gets measured, gets improved. Without a system to measure how your systems are doing, you are less likely to improve them. You should develop metrics for your operations, marketing and financial systems. Let us take a look at metrics applicable to content management, an important aspect of an internet business.
Content management metrics can be broken down as follows:
- Operational metrics
- Marketing metrics
- Financial metrics
Operational metrics: when talking about content management, operational metrics are the steps used to develop consistent and relevant content. Some activities you might want to measure are:
- Keyword database: to ensure you have a consistent theme, you should maintain a keyword database. This database will serve as a starting point for developing content.
- Content creation: how many pieces of content should you produce each week? You should set a schedule and use your keyword database to create the content.
Marketing metrics:
Your marketing metrics are successfully if your visitors do what you will like them to do.
- Traffic: Number of unique visits, page views, organic search, direct traffic
- Engagement: how engaged is my audience with my content. This can be measured by the number of repeat visitors or shares on social network
Financial metrics:
Conversions: I define conversions as the ability of your operational and marketing metrics to convert visitors to paying customers. It might be by clicking an affiliate link or by buying a product or a service from you.
Revenue due to content
The best way to measure content is to have a logical progression visitors follow (touch points). These touch points should be defined in your visitors guide. A visitor guide is a document that lists all the actions and sequence of actions you want your visitors to take. For example, let us say the primary way of bringing traffic to your site is podcasting (touch point 1), in your podcast you refer your client to a content you have written (touch point 2), the content refers the client to subscribe to your newsletter (touch point 3) and as a result they get your eBook (touch point 4). Eventually, the client follows one of your affiliate link or buys a product from you (last touch point).
The steps to figuring out revenue per content are listed below and illustrated in the accompanying image:
- Determine the total score to assign to all content on your site
- Divide this score between touch points and other content
- Next determine the total revenue for the period you are examining.
- Assign an interaction score: Your interaction scoring is based on the following factors:
- Objectives: what is the purpose of your site
- Engagement – what actions do I need my visitors to take
- Measurement: how do I measure if my customers are taking these actions
For simplicity, your interaction score should be given a ranking of 1 or 0. A score of 1 means the content has met the minimum requirement and a score of 0 means the minimum was not met. The minimum requirement is pre-determined beforehand.
- Compute the content revenue for each touch point
Content revenue = Interaction score * content ranking * revenue for period
Any new content you develop plays a supporting role to the main touch point content. As you develop new content, you will have to determine how to divide the pie. See an illustration in the image below.
The more content you develop the less importance any one particular piece of content has on the overall customer experience. However your touch point will still be responsible for majority of the conversions you witness. If you optimize certain pages, be sure to have a system of referring visitors back to your touch point system.
As you measure your revenue per content, you can write more content around those one generating higher impact and give less attention to those not producing. You want to go after those assets giving you the highest revenue.
This article is part 6 in the building financial freedom from your lifestyle business series