Today I’m sharing about the content metrics I report on and my journey to switch my KPIs. With this read I’m offering a window for you to peek into my experience rather than a tutorial offering advice on what to do.
In short, here are all the metrics I look at:
Maybe 1-2 years from now I’ll follow this up in a guide format once I’ve lived and learned some more.
If my experience with content reporting at a startup that’s gone from 7 to 200+ people and 150K ARR to $15M+ ARR is interesting to you then keep reading to get the full story.
Reporting on content in the bootstrapped and marketing department-less days of VEED
I was on the growth team before we had the funding to hire a marketing VP and build a proper marketing function.
Historically, SEO has been a massive driver of VEED’s traffic. With the areas of focus set by the growth team, our content KPIs had to help VEED get more traffic and backlinks.
My blocker was we had too heavy of a focus on this. As a result, the way we looked at content was quite black and white which really frustrated me.
Does it drive traffic or help build links?
No? Then it’s not as important as the themes that do.
As a by-product of this, my KPIs didn’t paint an accurate picture of the not so black and white bits of content.
To be clear, I do firmly believe SEO is important. It’s not that I thought we needed to reject it but rather that we could expand to cover topics that might not have high search volume but that we know solves a problem our customers care for and pay for.
While I learned a lot about SEO during these initial years, there came a point where I felt stuck because I couldn’t get my POV across in the right “language” no matter how much I reframed things.
So until we got funded, hired a VP of marketing, and got a data analyst on the team, I reported on:
- Traffic
- Backlinks
- Bounce Rate
- Average SERP position
The birth of the marketing team, getting data support, and changing my KPIs
Here's what happened once we got funding and the marketing team was “born”.
Joining marketing and building the department
When Leila, my marketing VP and new boss, joined VEED I felt like finally my POV was understood (even though I still lacked the data dashboard to validate it with numbers).
Although at this point we had a data team, they were spread quite thin across multiple company needs. We needed someone to support us with data for our team.
So we hired a data analyst who helped not just me but others on the team get the analytics we needed to better explain the results of our work. We made several other hires and moved marketers out of other teams and into ours during this time such as:
- CRM lead
- Content marketing manager
- Copywriter
- Brand marketer
- Senior social media manager
- B2B marketer
These hires have not only helped form the marketing function but also helped our content “grow up” more in terms of the channels we can use for distribution and new native content.
Questions that led me to develop new KPIs
According to Google Analytics, our blog’s overall conversion rate for paid signups was .03%. Blogs historically don’t have high conversion rates.
But this was really bad.
It didn’t make sense to me how content wasn’t driving people to sign up and I had no way of seeing if at least it got people to click through to try our product.
So I wondered…
- SEO has brought us lots of traffic but what’s happening after people read?
- How can content help get more people to engage with the editor whether it’s a free or paid user?
- With a larger team to help with the repurposing and distribution of content, how can we diversify our traffic sources outside of SEO?
- How can VEED improve customer education and potentially improve retention as a result of the content we create and better distribute?
What the new KPIs are
While I do track signups to see the impact of content on revenue, I believe content should not be primarily accountable for how well the experience goes once inside the product.
That’s too far out of our realm of influence and more of a problem for product, design, and engineering to take the lead on solving.
What I can more directly influence is how engaging our content is and how I define engagement.
Here’s an overview of everything I measure and what it means.
The new KPIs are more centered around product and content engagement.
Overall we want to know if content is helping people get into our product or not. However we also need to recognize not every post is measured equally.
More top of funnel topics are more likely to be deemed successful in terms of metrics like traffic, emails captured, or the overall engagement rate (visits to clicks) with the internal links on the page.
We just got our data dashboard this Q3 so there’s still so much to learn (although we have already learned loads in the short time we’ve had the dashboard).
For example, here’s something I uncovered when trying to explain the importance of non-SEO content by comparing it to SEO content:
It turns out our conversion rate is not .03% and instead ~2%. The numbers are likely much higher because there are some things we can't (yet) track as elegantly as we'd like.
For example, content to product is likely much higher considering the nature of the content journey, all the marketing touch points, and time while going from labeling your challenge and making a purchasing decision.
But right now we can only measure what happens immediately after reading which for now works well for us.
What’s next in the content journey?
Here’s what we’re looking to do next now that we know how effective our content is.
🎨 Blog redesign
Email is a large distribution channel now for our content. Every month we now send the VEED Inspire newsletter to over 1M+ readers to help them not only maximize their experience using VEED but also help them become smarter video marketers.
Our blog is currently messy, hard to navigate, and it doesn’t have a place to invite people to join our monthly content and community newsletter.
Currently, we’re working on a redesign that’ll make the overall experience smoother and empower us to capture email signups.
💼 B2B Content
Up until now we didn’t have any support for B2B marketing. With the redesign and creation of custom pages for content falling into different categories, we’ll be able to have custom CTAs for B2B topics.
📈 Data Dashboard 2.0?
Because the data dashboard currently is blog-focused, next on my list is working on a dashboard for content as a whole.
Up until recently I was a one-woman team. Therefore, I could only focus on a few things.
Now that my team and department have grown I have the room to branch out and support more aspects of content.
One of my next goals is to have a dashboard that helps show the role of content as a whole with getting people into our product.
I was inspired to work towards this because of this article where Tracey Wallace talks about content-assisted MRR and, as of more recently, this podcast by Zapier’s Lane Scott Jones on proving content ROI.
Far too often content becomes like a factory.
👉 “I need this video for…..”
👉 “Make me a blog about ….”
👉 “Draft up some social posts for ….”
But instead it needs to be viewed less like a self-serve factory and more holistically as the interconnected “organism” it is. Now, how exactly I’ll approach this in terms of reporting well that’s something I’ll write about once I’ve gotten there.
P.S. Thank you to everyone who voted in last newsletter’s survey about the format. The winning vote was to keep these emails as a deep-dive rather than a variety of bite-sized segments.
P.P.S If you have a request for my next deep-dive you can always reply to my email or submit a request through this google form.