Many organisations don’t have a defined way to measure user engagement not least because there are a few ways of doing it. Parse.ly however has come up with a survey of digital publishing professionals that shows importance of varying user engagement metrics ranging from traffic at one end to shares at the other. Statista has put the findings into a handy chart.
The chart is particularly useful in that from BlogStar’s travels around the content marketing marketplace, the value of each of these measurements is seldom talked about. We’re often asked how best to measure the value of content overall, to which we’d usually say ‘sales’. Interestingly, when Jockey undertook their bootstrapping content marketing program social shares did indeed prove to be the quickest win in revenue terms with a 43% increase in assisted revenue.
In one sense the chart simply shows a logical progression from right to left – you need to build traffic first, to increase page views and comments and if the content is good enough, people will spend time reading it and if they really like it, share with their audiences.
Notable by its absence in this scale of user engagement metrics though is email acquisition. The number of email sign-ups to a newsletter or downloads of an ebook or white paper in exchange for an email is possibly the most meaningful engagement of all. There’s a good article here on why building an email list is so important (and why therefore a content marketing campaign ought to be built around it). See more statistics at Statista.
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