Yes, tracking and reporting on the performance of your content marketing efforts isn’t necessarily creative or sexy, but it’s critical. And whether you are an in-house content team or an agency helping clients generate great content, content analytics are your guide for determining what’s working and what’s not, and informing your future strategy and planning efforts.
Content marketing reporting can be complex for many reasons. There are so many different types of metrics, along with the struggles to collect and aggregate data.
If your team is facing problems with reporting, standardization can help. You’ll find that by developing templates that your analytics professionals can use to inform all other stakeholders of trends, opportunities, and anomalies, the process is a lot smoother.
Reporting Is a Time Stealer
Agencies juggle many clients and need to inform all of them about content performance. Often, the problem is the large amount of time it requires, which deflates productivity and efficiency. If it’s a purely manual process, it could take hours or even days to develop reports. That’s not sustainable or scalable. Automating reports on content marketing efforts reduces the time to create them.
To optimize the process and take advantage of automation, you’ll need the right technology tools, such as those found in content marketing software. But what kind of reports will provide the most meaningful information?
Next, we’ll look at marketing reporting templates that you can use to determine content marketing ROI (return on investment) and more.
Content Marketing Reporting Templates for Agencies
What matters most to your clients? It depends on their goals, but most businesses expect content marketing to:
- Increase website traffic
- Improve social media engagement
- Support the customer journey
- Convert users
- Build brand awareness and thought leadership
- Help them rank well organically in search engines
All of these goals require metrics to measure them. These metrics need to be understandable for your clients, no matter what their content marketing acumen is. Here are some ideas for assembling easy-to-comprehend reporting templates.
Traffic Reports
Your clients will want to know things like traffic quantity, growth, sources, and activity. Most of these metrics are foundational to Google Analytics, which can be confusing. So, you’ll want to create an accessible report on traffic. The template should include:
- Total traffic for the month and month-over-month comparisons
- Traffic sources and trends (increases and decreases)
- Duration of sessions for users and bounce rate with a historical glance
With each of these points, you’ll also want to offer context analysis. Are there reasons traffic increased or decreased? If a source’s referral rate goes up, why was that? It could be because you ran a campaign on social media or sent out an email with a content offer.
Topics and Format Success
When building a content calendar for clients, you want to deliver variety while also listening to users’ feedback. That feedback is in the data. To learn what topics and formats their audience appreciates, you can create a template to include:
- Most viewed content by topic and format
- Social media engagement based on topic and format
- Best topics and formats by conversions
From this, over time, you’ll have a better view of audience preferences. For example, you could discover that explainer videos on the features of their product have strong viewership, high engagement and generate conversions/leads.
Lead Generation and Conversion Reports
Speaking of…what content contributes most to lead generation and conversions? It’s a question your clients will be asking. To develop such a report, you’ll need to trace a buyer’s journey and their interactions with the brand. Additionally, when a conversion occurs, you need to know why.
Your reporting template may include:
- Number and type of conversion (i.e., contact forms, landing pages, social media), which you can track through goals in Google Analytics and other sources
- Content that “assisted” in driving the conversion (entrance pages, page visited before, ads, gated resources, or email campaigns)
- Tracing the buyer journey and aligning it with content consumption
Using funnel visuals with the report will help your clients connect the dots. They can learn things about what content provides value to their audience and how they respond to it. This data can help inform content planning down the road for future campaigns.
SEO Reports
Organic ranking is critical in content marketing since most buyers start with a Google search. SEO is competitive, always changing, and a long-term strategy. It’s a foundational element to traffic, conversions, and engagement.
A good SEO report template should include:
- Rankings for all keywords and their month-over-month changes in chart form
- Keyword stats (volume and competition)
- Keyword mapping (the URL that displays on the search engine for that keyword search)
When you have changes in ranking, whether positive or negative, you’ll want to understand why, and so will your clients. You may see bumps in ranking after an update to a post or because it had more social media clicks. Conversely, you may slip if the keyword becomes more competitive.
Social Media Reporting
Another critical aspect of reporting is social media activity. These sites are typically the most common distribution of content. The more engagement you have, the more likely you receive more traffic and conversions.
Reporting for each profile on social media should include:
- Monthly posts, followers, engagements, and clicks with month-over-month comparisons
- Top posts for each month
- Follower make-up
- Website visits from social posts
- Conversions from social referral traffic
Again, you’ll want to supplement the data points with analysis and granularity. Explaining why you saw more or less engagement would be critical for what to do next.
Automated Content Marketing Reporting Is Possible with DivvyHQ
Our content analytics module is powerful. It’s a way to streamline analysis and determine if you’re hitting the goals of your client’s content strategy. Our software offers pre-configured dashboards that aggregate multiple streams of data into holistic views. We have source data from over 100 unique sources. You can then turn your data into actionable insights.
See how it works by viewing the video below.
We make the process easy. And hey… Content marketing is hard enough; the way you measure it shouldn’t be. You’ll find this functionality and so much more with DivvyHQ. Try it out today for free.