Using tools such as Google Analytics and features offered by your Content Management System (CMS) and social media, you can get a clear picture of how content marketing helps SEO, generates leads and drives sales.

Why are these insights important?

Analysing the impact of all the marketing content you put out, from blogs to videos and podcasts, will reveal what type of content is working for you and what isn’t.

Don’t forget that content marketing is all about helping you achieve your business goals. Finding out which content is most successful enables you to focus your marketing strategy on what works, producing more valuable content and avoiding wasting time and money on less successful content.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, that’s the best place to start to gain insights about how content marketing is working for you. But it shouldn’t be the only tool you use.

What are the most important metrics?

Analytical tools let you measure your content’s success from so many different angles, it can be overwhelming at first. Not all of these metrics are equally important however, and narrowing your focus to what is important will give you a clearer picture of how your content is performing where it matters.

These essential metrics can be broken down into four categories, answering the questions:

• who is consuming your content?
• who is sharing your content?
• how does content marketing generate leads?
• how does content marketing drive sales?

1. Consumption metrics

These are the simplest metrics to measure, because it usually comes down to a number – how many people clicked on your blog post, watched your video or downloaded your file.

If you are publishing content to your own site, your CMS will inform you how many people viewed each piece of content. Many popular CMS platforms like WordPress also provide a more detailed breakdown of your audience, such as their location and the search terms that brought them to your site.

If you are publishing content to other sites, these often provide tools that can give you similarly detailed information on who is consuming your content, like YouTube Analytics for videos and Slideshare and Scribd for documents.

2. Sharing metrics

Measuring the success of content marketing doesn’t end at counting page views. You also need to know if people are sharing your content, as this will help it to reach a much wider audience and bring more traffic to your site.

Google Analytics is still the best tool for monitoring how your content is performing in the wider world, but you can gain more specific insights into the behaviour of your users by signing up to the social media sites where they are most likely to share your content.

If you’re not sure where your content is being shared, you can track inbound links through your CMS to find out how people are arriving at your site. If you’re new to social media, see our guide to Australia’s most popular social media sites for ideas where to focus your attention.

All the major social media platforms have tools that allow you to see how many times your content has been Liked, Retweeted, Pinned or +1’d, and you can encourage users to share your content by adding these social buttons wherever it’s published.

Of course, when it comes to encouraging people to share your content, the most important thing is to make sure you’re producing quality content that people will actually want to share.

3. Lead generation metrics

Content marketing isn’t a popularity contest, and it doesn’t matter how often your content is being shared and consumed if it doesn’t produce leads for your business.

Your CMS should include lead generation metrics that let you see how many people took further action after consuming your content, such as completing a web form, signing up to your newsletter, downloading an eBook, leaving a comment, subscribing to updates and other trackable activities. Google Analytics can provide further insights into less obvious ways your users’ behaviour can lead to conversion.

Comparing the conversion rates of your content marketing to your overall conversion rate will make it clear which types of content are the most successful and which are not performing.

4. Sales metrics

Finally, metrics can also tell you how content marketing is driving sales and making you money. Your ecommerce platform should make it simple to track the origin of online sales, and your CMS could also reveal what content users consumed before completing offline sales.

An effective way to trace sales back to individual content pieces is to include a unique Call to Action (CTA) and URL for each piece you publish. If you want to know whether more of your sales come from new or existing customers, you can offer your existing customer base exclusive or first access to content and monitor how it performs compared to public content.

Is content marketing helping you achieve your business goals?

Success is relative, and even if you are seeing leads and sales as a result of content marketing, you can evaluate whether this strategy is achieving the level of success you need by measuring its ROI.

This will tell you whether the investment you’re making to produce regular content is delivering as you hoped, or if your content marketing strategy needs an overhaul to help you reach a wider audience and convert more customers.

Read our crash course in content marketing to find out how to write winning content that will benefit your bottom line.

WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites share a lot of similarities, but there are also a few key differences to consider when setting up your site (or trying to fix a problem). Knowing those differences can prevent a lot of frustration further down the line.

Price

Both versions of WordPress are free to use for your website, but things such as your domain name, hosting and add ons may cost extra. On WordPress.com, free sites come with ads (with revenue going to WordPress, not the site owner).

While the basic, and most common, form of WordPress.com is free, you can also pay for Premium ($129/year) or Business ($399/year) plans too. These allow you to have extra functions on to your site, but nothing that you can’t get for free with .org.

Domains

With .com sites, you have two options for your domain. You can choose to pay for a domain of your choosing, or you can sign up for a free account that follows this basic structure: civicwebmedia.wordpress.com.

For .org, there’s only one choice and that is that you need to pay for your own URL.

Hosting

WordPress.com includes free hosting when you sign up, as well as automatic data backup. For WordPress.org, you need to arrange your own hosting which can cost anywhere from a few bucks a month to hundreds a year, and you need to create backups to your site yourself.

Themes

Both versions of WordPress work with themes, where you install a ready-made site and then customise it to fit your needs.

WordPress.com themes are more limited in a few ways. Firstly, by number. Currently there are 375 themes to choose from (194 are free, 181 are premium – or paid – themes). While this gives a bit of choice, it pales into comparison with what’s available for .org sites – ThemeForest, a popular marketplace for templates, has more than 21,000 premium themes available.

WordPress.com themes are also a lot more restrictive. While you can still add your logo and change the colour scheme, with .org themes you can do a lot more. For more experienced users, you’re able to edit the theme coding directly – meaning you can make small tweaks or huge changes to the way your site looks. You can also install plugins, which can dramatically alter your site’s appearance and performance.

Plugins

Plugins are only available for .org sites, and they give users a lot of power. There are currently more than 40,000 plugins available, and most of them are free or have a free option.

Plugins can be used to make your site do almost anything. Whether that’s improving your SEO, cutting down spam comments, creating an online store or adding in a reservation system. Almost anything you can think of for your site has already been created, and most plugins can be installed and set up in just a few clicks.

WordPress.com does offer some of these options, but only if you pay the recurring annual fee.

Conclusion

Overall, WordPress.org is the better option for businesses. While you do have a small fee to pay upfront for hosting, after that you have a lot more control over your site and a lot more flexibility in what you can do.

WordPress.com offers a great service for people setting up personal blogs or photography portfolios, and because updates and security are handled for you, it makes things simple. However, because of its limitations (and its high price to upgrade) it might not have quite the same power to create exactly the type of site you want.

WordPress is by far the most popular content management system today. According to W3Techs, almost a quarter of all websites and 59% of websites with a CMS use WordPress.

The greatest benefit of using WordPress is the flexibility it offers. It can be used to create simple blogs, content-rich websites, e-commerce stores, forums and more. Because it’s open source, people can add their own tweaks to improve sites and there is a wide range of templates and plugins to help customise and improve your site.

WordPress is fairly easy to pick up. Pages and articles can be added, edited and formatted easily and with more than 31,000 free plugins to choose from it’s simple to add functionality to a site. Because it’s so widely used there are plenty of resources online to help if you get stuck, including the official help files and sites like WPBeginner.

Used by: Civic Web Media, TechCrunch, Time, Wired.

Behind WordPress in usage is Joomla, with around 7% of all CMS sites and 3% of the total web. Joomla isn’t as intuitive as WordPress but for those who are tech savvy the system can be learned quite easily, with many tutorials online to help overcome small problems. Once you know how to use Joomla you can make sites that are a bit more powerful than those on WordPress but still aren’t too hard to manage. If you’re creating a social media site or e-commerce store there are lots of benefits to using Joomla and plenty of community help available for each.

Of the three most popular sites, Joomla has the fewest number of free themes and plugins, meaning you may have to do a lot of the work yourself.

Used by: Guggenheim, Harvard University, Linux, UNRIC.

The third most popular CMS at the moment is Drupal, with 2% of the web and 5% of CMS-enabled sites. It is the hardest of the three to learn, often requiring a lot of web experience and knowledge, but it’s capable of creating more complex sites than either Joomla or WordPress. It’s not usually recommended for small businesses setting up their own sites, but for bigger organisations that want a more advanced website and are happy to pay someone else to make and look after the site, it can have huge benefits.

While WordPress and Joomla come with standard admin systems, to make edits easily to a Drupal site a system needs to be created or installed. As there’s no official choice, ease of use will vary from program to program.

Used by: Australian Government, Bruno Mars, Oxfam, The Prince of Wales.

Rounding off the top four is Magento, a CMS that powers more than 1% of the entire internet and around 3% of sites with a content management system. Like WordPress and Drupal, Magento has been increasing in popularity recently.

Magento is purely for e-commerce sites as it lets you set up an online store and cart system. The community version of Magento is free but the enterprise edition, which has more features and functionality, has a fee to use.

Many people talk about a steep learning curve when beginning to use Magento but once you get over the initial hurdles it can be straight forward to use and update. For businesses expecting to make sales in multiple countries, Magento is a great choice as it offers multiple languages and currencies.

As a guideline, some say that unless you’re expecting to make at least $1m a year in sales then Magento is not the right choice for you. Unless you’re tech savvy it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to set things up yourself and the company only gives support to those with the paid option – which costs more than US$14,000/year. Because of the size of the software you’ll also need a dedicated server to handle things smoothly.

Used by: Bing Lee, Liverpool FC, Nike, Olympus.

While each CMS has its benefits, for small businesses that don’t have a dedicated IT specialist or a huge budget for web development, WordPress seems to be the best choice.