Although your content repurposing strategy might bring a lot of engagement your way, there’s really no telling how it’s impacting your business’ bottom line.
That is unless you carefully monitor and measure its performance.
When you are repurposing content, it’s important to know that it’s having the impact you want. After all, content repurposing is not a quick and easy strategy. It takes a lot of time and resources.
If you’re repurposing ineffectively, measuring what you’re doing lets you dissect your content and figure out what you need to change.
Some time ago, we asked our audience what they wanted to know about content repurposing and many responded by asking about the best ways to measure its effectiveness.
So, in this episode and blog post, we explore how you can measure the effectiveness of your content repurposing.
You can listen to the podcast episode below...
or keep reading…
Why should you track your metrics and what should you measure?
As author and management expert Peter Drucker said, “if you can't measure it, you can't improve it”.
Large corporate companies value terms like ‘data-driven decision making’ and ‘data-driven insights,’ and for good reason. Using data and analytics is the best possible way to measure the effectiveness of something.
That said, you shouldn’t put all your trust in the data. It only tells one side of the story.
When you need to measure the effectiveness and results of content, ask what really matters to you? What do you want to achieve?
This will help you figure out what you want to measure. You don’t need to track everything – track only what matters to you and what will help you in pursuit of your goals.
For example, let’s say your content repurposing efforts have two main goals:
- More website visitors
- More email subscribers
The obvious data to track are your website analytics and email subscribers.
Sometimes it’s difficult to work out what results are down to content repurposing vs. something else, but it’s not impossible. In fact, there are 5 ways:
- Google Analytics and goals
- Search
- Social media
- Podcast, Video and Email/CRM Data
- Less quantifiable indicators
So, let’s take a closer look at the 5 ways to measure and track your content…
1. Google Analytics and goals
You can use Google Analytics to check whether your repurposed content generated the results you want by looking at four key metrics:
- Website traffic
- Social media leads
- Conversions
- Bounce rate
Website traffic
Website traffic is essential because we all want lots of the right people to find our website.
We want people to sign up for services, download free content, purchase products – but none of that will happen unless people find your website. You could have the best-looking website in the world, but it won’t matter if no one can find it!
Therefore, one purpose for repurposed content is to drive people to your site.
Google Analytics can tell you what content is bringing traffic – so you can replicate that winning formula and create similar content in the future.
But it’s also important to pay attention to where your traffic is coming from. For example, if you’re repurposing content onto social media to drive traffic, analytics will tell you if it’s working.
Social media leads
Social media can drive traffic to your website, but it can also help you build brand awareness and a dedicated audience. So, even if the data says your social media doesn’t result in much website traffic, that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time. Keep at it!
Conversions
While generating website traffic is important, once people are on your website, you want them to stay on your website and take the action you want them to take. Is your content convincing people to click on your BUY, SIGN UP or JOIN button?
For more on high-converting websites, tune into episode 55 – 7 Essentials of High Converting Websites with Matt Eldridge.
Bounce rate
Ever walked into a shop and known immediately it’s not for you and walked out?
When people visit your website the same thing can happen. Bounce rate represents a visitors overall session duration.
If you have a low bounce rate, it means that people want to stay around. A high bounce rate means they arrive on your site and leave very quickly…
Often a bounce occurs when the wrong audience is visiting your page. This means relooking at how it is advertised, your title tags and metatags. Alternatively, it could mean slow loading, poor quality content, an error message, no CTA or your page isn’t mobile friendly. There are a number of reasons for a high bounce rate, so doing your research to get to the bottom of it will be time well spent.
Or, it could even mean that your content is so good, that your visitor gets everything they need and leaves…
Either way, bounce rate is a very useful way to measure the effectiveness of content.
Setting goals in Google Analytics
You can set up custom goals and use the analytics from Google to measure how close/far you are to meeting them.
Your goals could be anything from filling in a signup form to downloading a free resource or staying on a page for a certain amount of time. You can then use the analytics to see what pieces of content are helping you achieve your goal, as well as where your traffic is coming from.
If you want to identify what content will have the most impact when it’s repurposed, you can refer to episode 50 of our podcast, How to Use Analytics to Decide What Content to Repurpose.
2. Search
If you create more content (in the right way), this will help your SEO, and your website will pop up more frequently in search engine results.
So, if you’re wondering if your content repurposing efforts are having an impact, one thing to look at is how well your content performs in search results.
Today, we no longer spend much time pondering the answers to our questions. We reach for our phones.
People are constantly searching online, and most will click on the first search results they see or at least results on the first page. That makes it important to get your content high up in those results.
To review how you perform against the keywords that you want to rank for:
1. Open an incognito window or private window in your browser and perform a search
2. Review whether you appear in the top 3 (amazing), first page (still very good), or other pages (you have some work to do!)
If you start content repurposing with the goal of improving your SEO against particular keywords, then this is something you could measure over time.
When you are repurposing your content, for example, creating written content from your videos or podcast episodes, focus on optimizing for those keywords.
It will help if you gain links to your content from respected sites as well. This will increase your website’s authority online. One way to do this is to repurpose your content into guest articles and pitch them to respected sites (hopefully with a backlink!)
Make this a regular part of your strategy. Check how you’re performing with your desired keywords every month or so. It will take time to gain authority online and rank highly for your keywords, but it’ll all be worth it. Be patient, measure the results, and tweak your content as necessary.
3. Social Media
If you repurpose your content onto social media with the intention of driving more traffic to your website, measure the results in Google Analytics (Google Analytics, look at Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals).
Remember that data only tells one side of the story. So, while it’s very important to know whether your content on social media is leading to website visitors, that may not be your only aim with social media.
You may have other goals for your content repurposing and social media that are still measurable. For example, the number of followers, number of likes and shares, the rate of engagement on your posts, etc. You can measure all of this within the social media platforms themselves via their built-in analytics tools.
But you can also measure your content marketing success on social media platforms via 3rd party tools. For example, if you post your social media content using tools like Buffer, SmarterQueue, CoSchedule, MeetEdgar or Agorapulse, you can see the analytics on how your content performs.
It’s important to keep track of what’s working and not working. What are people engaging with the most? Likes are great, and comments too – especially if you can enter into a conversation with someone. Shares are fantastic because it really does mean someone loved your content if they went to the effort to share it with their network/audience.
Social media success isn’t about having thousands of followers, especially if many of them don’t engage with you (there are plenty of fake accounts and bots).
A small but highly engaged audience is better than a large, unengaged audience.
4. Podcast, Video and Email/CRM Data
If part of your reason for repurposing is getting more podcast downloads, then that’s something analytics can help you with as well.
Your podcast host should provide that all important data you need to measure, which helps you assess whether your podcast repurposing efforts are working. For example, you can compare your podcast downloads before repurposing and after to see if it’s made a difference.
But downloads aren’t the only metric you should look at.
Podcasts and Average Consumption
It’s one thing for people to download your podcast, but these questions are important to answer too:
- Did they actually listen to it?
- Did they listen to all of it?
Apple Podcasts present a metric called Average Consumption in their analytics. This enables podcasters to measure how much time and attention listeners are giving to their podcasts. Spotify calls the same metric Episode Performance and Stitcher calls it Average Completion Rate.
Average Consumption percentages are great because they go beyond just the download, and help you work out whether people consider your content worth listening to.
Video content & audience retention
Similarly, if you create a video and repurpose it to get more views, you can review your video analytics. Look at how many views you are getting, but also pay attention to the audience retention statistics too.
Email list metrics
If your ultimate goal is growing your email subscribers, then that’s the metric that you need to be measuring.
Website analytics can help you measure the effectiveness of content based on whether people sign-up to your email list.
One way to set this up is to set a goal, for example, someone landing on the ‘Thank you’ page for your email list (or whatever your lead magnet/freebie is). You can then track how many people reach that goal and gather data on who they are, where they came from etc.
Your email service provider will also be able to provide you with data to track and measure. You’ll be able to determine which lead magnets brought in the most leads. Also, you can review email open rates to determine if the leads that you have are engaged.
5. Less quantifiable indicators
When it comes to measuring and tracking the effectiveness of your content repurposing efforts, it’s not all about analytics and data. There are many other benefits of content repurposing that simply can’t be measured by numbers, stats, and analytics dashboards.
For example, by creating lots of repurposed content, you are reaching more people and connecting with them in different ways. You never know who is watching, reading or listening.
Your content could result in being invited onto podcasts and video shows or to speak at events, which can do wonders for your credibility and your personal brand.
Our founder Amy Woods has been invited to speak at events as a result of our content. Organizers have reached out because they saw our content on LinkedIn, listened to the podcast or read one of our blog posts.
Building your brand, getting your content in front of more people, all lead to more awareness, which results in more leads, conversions and sales.
Check episode 192, How to Understand Your Audience Better with Rand Fishkin for more on those less quantifiable factors.
To conclude...
When it comes to tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your content repurposing efforts, it all starts with your goals. Content goals and general business goals.
If your goals are quantifiable, you can choose which data to track and measure your performance.
For those less quantifiable goals, you’ll need to work out other ways to determine your success.
We’ve said it before, you don’t need to track everything – track what matters to you and what will help you in pursuit of your goals. By doing so, you’ll be one step closer to fine-tuning your content repurposing and scaling your business.