Website Actions that Drive True Business Outcomes in Content Marketing

For over two decades many brands have relied on measuring impressions, clicks and traffic as KPIs across the digital landscape. This was all well and good when we didn’t have the technology to look deeper into website actions. That’s not the case today. Our technology offerings allow marketers to go much further into more meaningful website actions that are more likely to drive better optimized business outcomes. It’s the below KPIs marketers should be pushing outcomes towards to maximize the ROI on digital efforts.

Website Action

Tracking the on-page actions a user takes on a website can be very valuable data. When assigned a lead score for each action a brand can focus its resources on users who are familiar with the company. Thus, not wasting time, money and effort on bounced users. These actions should be measured by B2C, B2B and ecommerce-only companies.

In addition, where a user goes on a website matter. Each page of a website should be assigned to top, middle or bottom of the funnel. These are the different stages of the buyer’s journey. The more time a user spends lower in the funnel that person should get a larger lead score and be targeted online more aggressively.

Time on Site

According to Chartbeat Analytics, two out of three users that view an article or video bounce before 15 seconds or less. As a result, up to 66% of advertising budgets to amplify this content is wasted. There’s also waste associated with producing and researching the content in the first place if it doesn’t get engagement.

This is important to recognize in any content strategy because 70% of users that spend 15 seconds or longer with content consume 80% of it. Shouldn’t marketers optimize and measure towards this KPI as a priority?

Brand Consideration

This category is more challenging to measure, but it’s ultimately viewed through the lens of the buyer’s journey. Users who consume top-funnel content in a significant fashion and then move down the funnel to digest content on things like product/service resources, surveys, offers, and webinars probably have some consideration to do business with said brand.

Brand consideration is calculated through a combination of time on site, content’s position in the funnel, lead scoring and scroll depth, if that capability is available. Impressions and traffic have no direct correlation to the brand consideration KPIs mentioned above, based on our own data. Just because a marketer can drive a lot of traffic to a website doesn’t necessarily mean they’re driving brand consideration.

Lead Generation

This is the calling for most B2B marketers – looking for leads. Some B2C brands seek out leads, too, but this is, perhaps, one of the most mature KPIs in content marketing today. Once a user fills out a form and shares their information (email, company, role, etc.) marketer’s can use it for better targeting, as content feedback, personalization and email.

Google recently announced that it will drop third-party cookies in the next two years on its browser. Meaning, the Digital Management Platforms (DMPs) brands use today to mix various third-party data segments in order to target their ideal prospects won’t work as they do now. Once third-party cookies go away so will a brands’ ability to target these audiences.

The only thing that will remain is retargeting off their own data (i.e. visitors to a brand’s website) as that is first-party data. Brands will need to rely exclusively on first-party data and will be forced to start building their own data bases of prospects because they will no longer be able to rent third-party data.

This makes building a lead pool, regardless of business type, more important than ever. The more leads generated the greater the revenue over time and the lesser the impact of third-party cookies for tracking goes away.

The above KPIs have a very deep correlation with actual business outcomes in digital marketing. Whether its earned, owned or paid media. These are the things that need to be optimized towards to maximize online revenue. There are several specialized software brands out there that help deliver this end state. Artificial intelligence helps with the deployment of what’s described. It’s time to move away from clicks, impressions and traffic to more meaningful KPIs which drive the most optimized business outcomes.

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