5 bullshit metrics you need to stop using to measure content marketing success

They are:

1. Impressions
2. ROI
3. Bounce Rate
4. Benchmarks
5. The Funnel

The way you talk about them and the way you measure them is bullshit.

1. Impressions

What exactly is an 'impression'?

It's the metric you use to report the number of people who saw your content and didn't engage with it! That's what an impression is. In other words, it's the number of opportunities your content missed. When we consider a post with high impressions and low engagement, it could mean two things:

a) you targeted the wrong audience

b) your content was not good enough to stop someone scrolling

You say: "But impressions is how we measure brand awareness!"

To this, I would ask, how are you defining brand awareness? Are you separating the branded reach (caused by your paid campaigns) from the organic reach (organic engagement from secondary sharing and promotion of content from people outside your organisation)? More often than not, we don't look deeper than the collective number of both and that makes 'brand awareness' a subjective metric, not an objective one.

Likewise, an impression is only valuable if it impacts someone's mindset or feeling about your brand.

How much brand awareness impact to you really think your paid post on Twitter had on the person who saw it for 0.08secs as they scrolled on a mobile phone?

The Challenge:

Ask yourself this question - How much 'brand awareness' impact did the last post that you didn't engage with, have on you?

Do you even remember the last paid post that appeared in your feed? My guess is not, but you can bet that the marketer behind it is telling their superior that you do remember and is counting your 'impression'.

2. Bounce Rate

This is how bounce rate works. A person arrives on a page, they are on that page for an indefinite amount of time (could be one second, could be ten minutes) and then they leave the page without performing another action. 100% bounce.

This is how we read articles online. A person arrives on a page, they are on that page for however long it takes them to read the content (could be one second, could be ten minutes) and then they leave the page without performing another action. 100% bounce.

See the problem?

Bounce rate doesn't differentiate between those who read the content and found it valuable, and those who genuinely bounced.

Truth: A bounce is a completely normal type of behaviour for someone consuming content.

The Challenge:

You need to set up timed events in your analytics. The Riveted Plugin is a good piece of JavaScript for Wordpress. Set events to fire every ten seconds and that way you can see the real split between those who read the content, and those who really bounce.

3. Return on Investment (ROI)

Urgh! We still obsessed with this bullshit metric?

I'm just going to let Gary Vaynerchuck explain to you the issue with ROI.

The content consumer and the customer are rarely the same person. They are two very different audiences with different behaviours. One has informational intent, the other has transactional intent. You need to align your goals and expectations around these behaviours.

While sales do occur from content, the reality is, it is not a common action. This means the success metric (ROI) for most content should not be based on abnormal consumer actions. Instead, we should look for ways to monetize the content itself, because it is the 'product' that content consumers 'buy'.

The Challenge:

A customer is just one type of person consuming your content and often only convert at a ration of 1% or 2%.

Ask yourself, what is the value of the other 98% of people who consume your content, but don't buy your products? Perhaps, the product they want is the content, not what you are trying to sell. There is more Return to be had on a content Investment than just product sales.

I've written a blog post on how you can turn content into a new product. The Content Marketing Institute founder, Joe Pulizzi, also explored this with his '10 Ways To Make Money From Content Marketing'.

4. Benchmarks

All industry benchmark reports are bullshit.

You say: "But I want to see how well my content is performing against the industry benchmark."

Do you? Why?

Your competitors have more marketing budget, a larger marketing team, post more frequently, more diverse content, better SEO, more subscribers, more followers, a more active community, been doing digital for 10 years longer, are retargeting, have a stronger share of voice, have a better product.....

All these variables (and more) mean nothing in the context of how your own content will perform. Benchmarks only work when there are more controls than variables in the measurement.

The Challenge:

If you need to benchmark, only benchmark against your own previous performance. You only need to see how well your content is improving against how it was 6 months ago. Less variables, more controls, more reliable insight, better results.

5. The Funnel

Ok. This is a strategic framework, not a metric but...

We marketers like to tell ourselves that people move down the marketing funnel to a conversion. Customers will consume top of funnel content, then middle funnel, then bottom funnel.

It's bullshit. They don't do this.

Case in point, not everyone who downloads your whitepaper is a product 'lead'.

Most, I'd suggest, download the whitepaper because they actually wanted the whitepaper, not your product. Marketers make the assumption that such audience behaviours are indicators that the 'lead' wants to move down the funnel; but in reality, that is not the reason why they performed that action. They just wanted the damn content.

If someone wanted your product, they'd inquire about your product. Why would they drop subtle hints of their product interest with whitepaper downloads? No real customer has time to play hard to get.

The reality is not everyone who consumes your content will complete one of your business goals. And that should be just fine. Sometimes the content itself should be the 'conversion' and this action has value in its own right.

The Challenge:

Read my post on the new content marketing funnel. And realign your marketing expectations to actual user behaviours; not the behaviours you fantasize about.

Better metrics make better content. Ensure you are questioning the value of every metric you use and how it relates to improving the goals of your business.

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Update #1

As this article nears 50,000 clicks, I wanted to say thank you to all those who read it and provided feedback.

I wrote it with the intention to spark up a conversation and if you take nothing more from this article than a rethink about how you report on content, then I feel the article served its purpose.

Of course, not everyone agrees with me and that is really great. The tone and iconography of the post was designed to grab attention and challenge you, but even I will admit that my arguments are not 'totally' flawless. ;)

It is important we listen to both sides of any debate and for those that feel I got it wrong, let me point you to Stephen Tracy's intelligent counter-post: "We need to start having a more meaningful dialogue about measurement".

Dan.