5 Ways to Measure The Effectiveness of Your Content Repurposing
Although your content repurposing strategy might be on fire and bring a lot of traction and engagement your way, there’s really no telling how it’s impacting your business’ bottom line without monitoring the numbers. You need to measure the impact of content repurposing.
In this article, I wanted to respond to some feedback I recently had when I asked my audience on Instagram what they wanted to know about when it comes to content repurposing.
I had a few people say that they wanted to find out more about tracking and measuring content repurposing. It’s only to be expected that you would want to measure the effectiveness of your content repurposing.
So, that’s exactly what I talk about in this blog post, which is all about how you can measure content repurposing.
Why should you track your metrics and what should you measure?
There’s an age old saying, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.
I think that was first said by Peter Drucker, but there are quite a few people named as being the person who came up with that saying so don’t quote me!
When I worked in ‘big corporate’ as a management consultant, terms like ‘data-driven decision making’ and ‘data driven insights’ were frequently used. In fact, I attended training courses on data-driven decision making and come to think of it, I taught others on the topic too!
There’s no doubt that when data and analytics are available, you are in a good position to measure the effectiveness of something. Although, I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t put all your trust in the data.
The data only tells one side of the story. Also, just because something can’t easily be measured does not mean that it’s not worth pursuing.
Nonetheless, you can look at available metrics to review if there is an impact.
When you are going to work out how to measure the effectiveness and results of content, ask yourself:
- What really matters to you?
- What do you want to achieve?
And therefore, what do you want to measure?
Don’t track everything — track what matters to you and what will help you in pursuit of your goals.
For example, say all of your content repurposing efforts have two main goals:
- More website visitors
- More email subscribers
Then obvious data to track and measure includes your website analytics and your email subscribers. However, it can be difficult to directly work out what results are due to content repurposing vs something else, but not impossible.
1. Google Analytics & goals
Website traffic
Website traffic is essential because we all want as many of the right people as possible to find our website. There’s also lots of actions that we’d like them to take on our website:
- Signing up to services
- Downloading free content
- Purchasing a product
BUT it doesn’t matter how good our website is if no one visits it!
Therefore, a lot of the time, when we create repurposed content, our big goal is to drive traffic to our website.
You can use Google Analytics to find out how much traffic your website gets. But also, what you want to do is measure content is bringing in the traffic i.e. what are your most popular landing pages.
Plus, pay attention to where your traffic is coming from. This is really important. For example, say you are spending a lot of time repurposing your content onto social media with the intention of driving people from social media back to your content on your website. It makes sense to review analytics and see if it’s working.
Website leads from social media
Are people coming to your website from social media?
If they are not, then you might want to review your social media strategy.
Bear in mind that just because your content on social media is not driving a lot of traffic to your website, that does not mean that you should consider it a waste of time.
Whilst my repurposed content on social media does not always directly link to website traffic, I do not consider the efforts to be a waste of time.
There may be other benefits of your social media content as well as generating website traffic.
For example, for me, social media is largely about building brand awareness, particularly my personal brand. Whilst my repurposed content on social media does not always directly link to website traffic, I do not consider the efforts to be a waste of time.
For example, I see a lot of benefits of social media when it comes to engaging with my audience. That engagement may not lead to them immediately going to my website, but they may in time, the more they engage with me and the more they get to know me socially. This has happened to me many times in fact.
Conversions
Whilst generating website traffic is very important, when you get people to visit your website, your job is not over.
You want them to stay on your website and take the action you want them to take. Remember, you also want conversions and sales.
Speaking of conversions, we’ve got a podcast episode all about high converting websites. So, if you want more tips on how to convince website visitors to convert, tune into episode 55 of our podcast.
Bounce rate
If you are a dab hand at Google A nalytics, or if you have someone in your team who is, then you can set up specific goals in order to see what content led to visitors taking a certain action.
But, Google Analytics can do so much more than track, monitor and measure. If you want to identify what content will have the most impact when it’s repurposed, check out episode 50 of our podcast, “ How to Use Analytics to Decide What Content to Repurpose .”
In this instance, you decide what the goal is for visitors to your site, it could be:
- Filling in a form
- Looking at a particular webpage
- Staying on a page for a certain amount of time
- Signing up to your newsletter
Whatever action you want visitors to take that you can define as a ‘goal’.
Then you are able to track the goal within Google Analytics. For example, you can see what pieces of content helps you to achieve the goal. You can also understand what traffic sources are leading to the achievement of your goals.
There’s no doubt that you can find a lot out through your website analytics. It’s really useful in order to measure whether your content repurposing is having an impact.
2. Search
When I talk about the benefits of content repurposing something that I often refer to is that creating more content, if done in the right way, will help with your SEO. This in turn, will lead to you being found by the search engines.
Therefore, when you are working out whether your content repurposing efforts are having an impact, one thing that you may want to measure is how well your content performs in search results.
As I mentioned above, your website analytics provide you with a view of how people are finding you via search. But there is more that you can do to measure this.
Today, with our smartphones by our side pretty much every waking hour of the day, we no longer spend much time at all pondering the answers to our questions. We reach for our phones, ‘Google’ our question, and get the answer to pretty much anything we need to know.
However, whether it’s the right answer, or even if there is a right or wrong answer, is a whole other matter that we won’t go into right now! We are in the information-age or perhaps the information-overload-age.
So, given people are constantly searching online, and, given most people click on the first search results. Or at least the results on the first page! It’s important to try to ensure your content performs well in search.
To review how you perform against the keywords that you want to rank for:
- 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 embark upon content repurposing with the goal of improving your SEO against particular keywords, then this is something that you could measure over time.
Perform a review of your performance against your keywords
Then, when you are repurposing your content, for example, creating written content based on your videos or your podcast episodes, focus on optimizing against those keywords.
It will really help if you gain links to your content from respected sites as well. This will increase your website’s authority online.
Can you repurpose your content into guest articles and features on respected sites, which will link back to your site?
Review how you perform against your desired keyword searches over time, I suggest your review this every 30 days.
It takes time to gain authority online and rank high against particular keywords, don’t expect overnight magic. But if this is one of your key focusses for content repurposing, then devise a plan to make it work and measure the results. Be patient.
Want some help when it comes to repurposing your videos or audio content?
- Have a listen to episode 70 of our podcast, which reveals 3 Smart Ways To Repurpose Video & Audio Content To Written Content .
- Or…check out episode 36, “Epic Podcast Repurposing” for an avalanche of tips and strategies to help you repurpose your audio into an arsenal of powerful content. To listen to this episode, click here.
3. Social Media
There are lots of goals that you may have on the various social media platforms when it comes to repurposing content.
I’ve already discussed, when talking about website analytics, that if you repurpose your content onto social media with the intention of driving more traffic to your website, then you can measure this in Google Analytics.
You can directly see how many people are coming to your website via the social media platforms (in Google Analytics look at Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals).
Remember that data only tells one side of the story though. So , whilst it’s very important to know whether your content on social media is leading to website visitors, that may not always be truly reflected in Google Analytics.
For example, someone discovers your content on social media, perhaps starts to follow you. But , they don’t immediately go from social media to your website. They might make a note to visit your website later. They might find you on social media on their mobile device but then go to their desktop computer to look at your website. There’s all sorts of behaviour that cannot be tracked.
There may be other goals that you have when it comes to content repurposing and social media, that are measurable, including:
- The number of followers
- Statistics on the number of likes and shares
- Engagement on your posts
You can measure all of this within the social media platforms themselves, via their built-in analytics . But, you can also measure your content marketing success on social media platforms via lots of different 3 party tools.
For example, if you post your social media content using tools like:
…to name a few, they all provide you with data and analytics on how your content performs.
For insights on user behaviour across the various social platforms, tune into episode 85 of our podcast to discover some important Key Findings From The Infinite Dial 2019 Report.
Personally, for me, when I started my podcast and at the same time I started repurposing my podcast content, my accounts completely changed.
I went from being fairly unsure about what to post on my social media accounts, to having a firm plan every week.
I created lots of repurposed podcast content for each platform. I found it to be really important to pay attention to what worked on each platform, and tailor content accordingly. This approach enabled me to stay consistent on the platforms that I wanted to focus on and grow an audience.
It’s important to keep track of what is working and not working. You can measure the success of your content repurposing by looking at the following:
- 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 that really does mean someone loved your content if they went to the effort to share it with their network/audience
Make sure that you are dynamic with your repurposed content, so that you’re measuring what is working. Then, if required, change your approach to do more of what is working and less of what is not working.
On social media, it’s not about having thousands and thousands of followers, especially if many of them don’t engage with you (or if they are fake accounts and bots).
On social media, it’s about having an audience of people who care about what you say. A small but highly engaged audience is far better than a large, unengaged audience.
Make sure that you bear that in mind when working out what metrics matter to you the most.
We’ve got lots of great episodes that take a closer look at all the ways you can repurpose content for the major social channels.
Here’s just a few to get you started:
- Episode 48 — “How To Repurpose Your Content On Instagram With Jenn Herman”
- And, Episode 59 — “Repurposing Twitter Chats With Madalyn Sklar”
- Or, Episode 75 — “How To Repurpose Content On Facebook: What’s Working In 2019? With Liz Melville”
4. Podcast, Video and Email/CRM Data
If you are repurposing content for purposes of getting more podcast downloads, then, of course, the analytics provided by your podcast host is going to give you the data you need to measure (or wherever you are reviewing your podcast download numbers).
You can review if all of your repurposing efforts are increasing your podcast downloads by comparing your download stats before repurposing and after.
Did you know that downloads are not the only metric you should look at though?
It’s one thing for people to download your podcast, but ask yourself:
- Did they actually listen to it?
- Did they listen to all of it?
That’s what really matters isn’t it? It’s a bit like social media, it’s good to have lots of followers but do they actually care what you post, and do they engage with you?
Podcasts and Average Consumption
Apple Podcasts present a metric called Average Consumption in their analytics. This metric 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 to be quality.
It answers this important question: ‘Did they listen to it?!’
Video content & audience retention
Similarly, if you create video content, and you are repurposing your content in order to get more video views, then you can review at your video analytics.
Look at how many views you are getting, but also, be paying attention to the audience retention statistics too.
Email list metrics
If your ultimate goal, with all of your repurposing efforts, is growing your email subscribers, then that’s the metric that you need to be measuring.
Website analytics can be useful in helping you measure the effectiveness of content on whether people sign-up to your email list. You can set a goal whereby, for example, if someone lands on the ‘Thank you’ page for your email list (or whatever your lead magnet/freebie is) then that is the ultimate goal.
You can track how many people achieve that goal and obtain more 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. All of this really matters.
5. Less quantifiable indicators
When it comes to measuring and tracking the effectiveness of your content repurposing efforts, it’s not always in the analytics and data. As I mentioned previously, data-driven insights can be great, but data doesn’t always tell the whole story.
There may be many other benefits of content repurposing that simply cannot 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/listening.
Your content could result in being invited onto podcasts and video shows. This has happened to me many times and it’s all due to the content that I create.
You may be asked to speak at events. This may not be everyone’s goal, but if it is, then speaking at events can really do wonders for your credibility and your personal brand. I have been invited to speak at events as a result of my content. Event organisers have reached out to me because they saw my content on LinkedIn, or they listened to my podcast, or read my blog post…etc.
You can build your brand, get in front of more people and gain opportunities all as a result of your content. These opportunities, such as speaking at events and being a guest on other people’s podcasts, all have business benefits.
It all leads to more awareness of who you are and what you do, which in turn results in more leads, more conversions, and more sales.
In Conclusion
When it comes to tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your content repurposing efforts, it all comes down to working out what really matters to you.
To understand what really matters to you, you need to have goals that are clearly defined. Plus, your goals need to align with your overall business goals.
Your goals may be quantifiable and therefore you can determine what data you can track and measure, and how you will do this.
However, remember, your goals may be less quantifiable and more qualitative, in that case you’ll need to work out other ways to determine your success factors.
I’ve said it before, don’t track everything — track what matters to you and what will help you in pursuit of your goals.
Thanks for reading!
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Originally published at https://www.content10x.com.
