When you start a business, you engage in various marketing activities. These are categorized according to purpose and goals, such as performance marketing, brand marketing, content marketing, and growth marketing. The most familiar concept is likely "performance marketing.".
Performance marketing provides "performance data." Because it offers clear data, performance marketing is recognized as a powerful marketing activity. However, performance marketing has a fatal flaw. Brand exposure is impossible without paying advertising costs. In other words, marketing results cannot be achieved without investing in advertising.
Due to the downsides of performance and paid advertising, organic marketing, which generates continuous results without advertising costs,is receiving more attention.
Organic marketing requires essential activities such as website SEO and content marketing. However, a drawback is that it is difficult to measure results in the short term compared to performance advertising. Due to this difficulty in measurement, some question whether content marketing actually yields results. Elifunt believes that content marketing can indeed be measured and is a necessity.
Why should content marketing performance be measured?
Unlike performance marketing, where results decline if payments stop, content marketing sustains performance even when paused. However, the reason the importance of content marketing is diminishing is simple: finding the "performance data" relevant to a content marketing business must be done manually, and this process is difficult.
Due to the difficulty of measuring performance, most content marketing metrics focus on "traffic data." However, traffic has weak power as a metric because it is hard to determine its contribution to sales or key marketing conversion indicators. Consequently, no matter how much traffic is measured in content marketing, one faces the question, "Can we say that increased traffic contributed to sales?" As a result, content marketing is eventually pushed to the back burner. This leads to a recurring cycle of strengthening performance marketing, which allows for short-term results measurement.
But what if you could prove that content marketing contributes to key business metrics? What if you could measure the meaningful results of content marketing and verify data showing a gradual increase in performance? This would allow you to achieve high results with the same or even lower marketing costs while reducing or maintaining performance marketing.
Content Marketing: How Should Performance Be Measured?
So, how should we measure content marketing performance? And why have we been unable to track performance metrics such as conversions? In conclusion, measuring content marketing performance is difficult because most marketing metrics track results in a forward direction, from inflow to conversion. Conversely, however, if we conduct reverse tracking—identifying inflow based on conversions—we can measure content marketing performance.
The most ideal conversion method in all marketing is when conversion occurs immediately after entry. In the above case, forward tracking is possible. However, most customers view content, leave, and proceed with other activities. What about the case below?
🚶♀️ Customer Behavior Examples
- Customers first became aware of the service and were attracted to it through the content.
- Customers look for other services after leaving to compare similar services.
- Users check our service's promotional banner and are directed to the banner.
- After checking the promotion details, I leave again and seek advice from those around me regarding the use of the service.
- Users are directed to our service via search ads, and conversions occur.
In this case, content marketing played a crucial role in introducing our service to customers. By generating awareness and interest, it significantly contributed to conversions. However, due to various customer behaviors along the way, it becomes difficult to track content conversion performance. If conversions were tracked based on UTMs, the credit for the customer's conversion in the example above would go to search advertising, the final method of acquisition.
Therefore, we must trace back the behavior of customers who converted to identify the path and determine whether their awareness of our business originated from the "content."
How to track content conversion performance in reverse
A 'random user ID' is assigned to visitors to the site. Then, based on the user ID of the converted user, the customer's behavior can be traced backward. In this case, if tracing the user's behavior reveals a visit to the content and that the content played a key role, the content can be considered to have contributed to the conversion.
However, in the cookieless era, it is difficult to assign an ID to a user and subsequently verify whether a visiting user possesses the same ID. Therefore, utilizing external analytics tools makes it easier to employ this backtracking method.
✅ If you measure content marketing performance using an external tool, it is best to use GA4
Google identifies users based on signal data, and the majority of logged-in users have unknowingly consented to tracking. Therefore, Google’s analytics tools, which are backed by the Chrome browser used by over 50% of domestic users, are a good choice.
What should be viewed and utilized to enhance the effectiveness of content performance?
If you have started measuring content marketing performance, I recommend tracking content-related data in addition to "conversions.".
- Keyword search volume
- Average SERP
- Content exposure and clicks
- Average session time
- Conversion count
- Content viewed before conversion
- Inflow sources and media
The data mentioned above helps strengthen content that drives conversions. If conversions frequently occur with content that has a high SERP despite low keyword search volume, we can strive to achieve a higher SERP by utilizing long-tail keywords. What if customers view an average of two pieces of content before converting to a major event? We can add a content recommendation system to encourage them to read more. If the average reading time for content that leads to conversion is long, we can focus on improving the quality and engagement of that content.
As described above, by identifying and verifying the various data that make up your content, you can develop it to generate business results. This is what Elifunt calls "Content Growth Marketing." Content Growth Marketing involves tracking content conversion performance, identifying effective content strategies, and creating a business growth loop. If you want to move beyond traffic-based content growth and drive business growth through content, try Content Growth Marketing with Elifunt.
