Combine that with the need for “shareable content” and high traffic growth goals, and all of a sudden clickbait content starts to look quite appealing. But before you go write that next listicle, stop and think about the downsides to publishing content with little value.

Clickbait: You Know It When You See It

While Webster’s might not yet have a formal definition for “clickbait” in its hallowed pages, Wikipedia succinctly defines it. “Clickbait is a pejorative term describing web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks.”

More importantly, you know clickbait content when you see it. Frivolous listicle? That’s clickbait! Article contains nothing but gifs and memes? Check! Trend-driven piece that adds nothing new to the conversation? Sounds like clickbait, too!

How Clickbait Hurts Publishers

Think of clickbait like a drug; it may seem great in the present, but it has long-term negative consequences. Yes, you may be getting traffic, but what are those visitors going to think of your brand or site afterward? Are they really going to come back to you for MORE cat gifs, and how does that even help build awareness for your latest product? This hurts not just brand journalism, but any publisher that overly embraces clickbait tactics. After all, when’s the last time you heard someone mention Upworthy?

Worst of all, a mere click or pageview is inherently worthless to a savvy content marketer. To Buzzfeed or the New York Times, that page load means they get to serve an ad, and make a few cents of profit. But your brand’s content isn’t covered in banner ads. Instead, you’re telling stories to connect with your audience and make your brand resonate with them so that down the line they’ll be more apt to purchase your services or recommend you to a friend.

So, before you write “15 Awesome Gifs That Summarize Our Newest Software Update”, think about how your audience is really going to react to that story once they get beyond the headline.

The post Is Clickbait Content Destroying Your Brand? appeared first on Relevance.

That’s a huge question that brands are struggling with, as recent data shows that 78 percent of marketers struggle to measure the ROI of their content marketing. With bigger and bigger budgets being thrown into the brand journalism space, it’s important that companies have a real statistic they can rely on to prove that their storytelling is worth the investment.

Tell Stories That Connect with Buyers

At the heart of any good story is a narrative that your reader can connect with – this is true across any medium (TV, news, coloring books, B2B whitepapers, etc.). After all, if your reader isn’t engaged, they’re going to leave, maybe even with a bad taste in their mouth. As such, you don’t just want to look at how many unique visitors your content received, or what the total time-on-site for it was, or even how many people shared articles X, Y and Z.

Instead of measuring these surrogate statistics that just look at consumption, you want to survey how your readers actually feel about your brand and the stories you tell. You want to ask them, “How likely are you to purchase a [brand product] in the next six to twelve months?” or “How favorable is your view of [company]?” with a range of possible answers to capture consumer sentiment that let you see how your content is helping drive those (hopefully) positive results.

Measuring Relative Impact

Now that we know what to ask, we need to know how to gauge the impact driven by content marketing versus that attributable to your brand as a whole. Capturing this data cleanly is crucial to having useful and actionable information. In my next piece, I’ll look at how to accurately collect that data, as well as other types of records you may want to capture.

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Meanwhile, a million new metrics have sprung up to vie for your acceptance. While analytics firms like Chartbeat are pushing for engaged time and scroll depth, companies with more of a brand publishing focus are concentrating on measuring brand lift. But what exactly is brand lift, how can we break it down and which of its components are applicable to your content campaigns?

Breaking Down Brand Lift

Brand lift can mean a number of things depending on who you ask. At its heart, brand lift refers to how much more people want to do business with your brand as a result of your marketing campaign.

Google defines it as “… [to] understand how your ads are affecting consumers’ awareness of your brand and how well your ad is recalled, and using search data you can measure the lift in brand interest. “

Web strategy firm Viget characterizes it as “…an increase in interaction with a brand as a result of an advertising campaign, and is primarily used to identify a positive shift in customer awareness and perception.”

They go on, “Brand lift metrics typically include: awareness (of the brand, product, or offering), attitude (opinion on quality, value, and appeal), recall (ability to remember), favorability (likelihood to recommend) and intent (likelihood to purchase)–all of which can be a challenge to measure.”

That last phrase absolutely nails it – a challenge to measure. While all these questions get to the heart of what marketers want to know, they’re not nearly as easy to measure as something like page views and click-throughs.

Awareness vs Recall vs Intent

I’ve found that marketers are most keen to have their content affect three major factors for potential customers: awareness, favorability, and intent. In other words, they either want their storytelling to make the world more familiar with their brand, make them view their brand more positively or ultimately up the likelihood that shoppers choose their brand when it comes time to purchase.

Deciding which metric (or metrics) is best for you really comes down to where the company or product being promoted is at in its lifecycle. Is this a brand new offering that the world has never heard of before? Choose awareness.

Do people know about your brand, but underestimate its strengths? Consider measuring favorability.

Or maybe you’re comfortable with those former two but are really trying to push consumers to buy. Well then, you want to measure (purchase) intent.

Analytical Tactics

Unlike simple metrics such as unique visitors or Facebook shares, these new metrics can be more complicated to measure; you can’t just plug in Google Analytics, throw your office intern at it and call it a day. You need to understand what your content consumers are thinking and feeling, you need control groups to compare that to and you need to make sure you’re not contaminating your data. If you’re ready to get wonky, we’ll dive into some best practices for brand lift analytics in our next piece.

The post Can Content’s Effect On Brand Lift Be Measured? appeared first on Relevance.

So if stats like “time on site” no longer work, where do we go from here? Let’s take a look at how some of the world’s leading marketers and publishing platforms have decided to tackle this vexing question.

BuzzFeed and Brand Lift

BuzzFeed has always been on the bleeding edge of publishing, so it’s no surprise that their solutions for content marketers are innovative as well. Marquee brands like General Electric and Virgin Mobile do more than count shares to quantify the success of their sponsored stories on BuzzFeed.

Their biggest marker of success has been “Brand Lift,” whereby they see how much a BuzzFeed content campaign improves an audience’s perception of factors that include brand awareness, brand affinity, and purchase intent.

When Virgin Mobile launched a series of stories on BuzzFeed, they already knew they were going to get a lot of readers. What was important to them was whether or not those readers translated into interested potential customers. Through smart surveying, they were able to not only see that that was indeed the case, but also break down the results to see how that varied by customers who came in from different social channels.

Chartbeat, Average Finish & Engaged Time

Chartbeat has made waves for allowing publishers to respond in near real-time to trends they see across their networks. Is an article dropping like a rock? No problem. Replace it with your other story that’s captivating readers.

Two of Chartbeat’s most celebrated metrics are “average finish” and “engaged time.” The latter is the amount of active time readers spend looking at content. So if readers load a page in the background and never look at it, that doesn’t count toward quantifying the metric. Marketers and content platforms have flocked to this number and it’s been integrated by heavy-hitters like Medium, Upworthy, Coca-Cola and others.

Average finish, or scroll depth, complements engaged time on a more granular level, letting you see just how interested your readers are in any given article. If your average reader is only looking at 20 percent of your story before bouncing, that’s not a good sign. But if a high percentage of readers are getting all the way to the bottom, chances are they’re enjoying your content and will be coming back for more, maybe even with their wallets open.

Twitter Brand Surveys

While the obtuse word “micro-content” thankfully never took off, it is true that every thoughtful little piece of social media is indeed itself a form of content. Just as it’s important that your long form content measures up, a smart Twitter campaign should, too. Not only that, but wise content marketers can apply Twitter’s success metrics to their own medium.

What Twitter calls “Brand Surveys” tend to measure a few key metrics – message association, brand favorability, and purchase intent. It’s proven to be a hit with leading companies like PepsiCo, as it lets them know not only that are people seeing their content, but also that those stories are driving them to think more highly of Pepsi’s products.

Which Metric Is for You?

As you can see, there are many new measures of content success out there, each vying to be the one metric to rule them all. The truth is, there’s no single number that will work best for every marketer. While using a variety of performance indicators will give you a more nuanced look at your content success, different marketers will have greater success with a composition of different metrics. In our next piece, we’ll drill down further into each of these new measurements, and see which ones correspond best with the different types of content pieces.

The post Leading Marketers Embrace New Content Metrics appeared first on Relevance.

Let’s take a look at some of the commonly used content marketing metrics, what they’re useful for, and what they, unfortunately, leave out.

1. Old School – Pageviews and Unique Visitors

Ahh, a metric as old as the web itself. How many people looked at your content, and how many pages did they load up? That’s the simple beauty of these two metrics – making them universally understandable. That simplicity also leads to their strength in letting you compare Page X to Page Y; how many more people looked at this content piece compared to the other?

If you’re a “traditional” online publisher, anywhere from Yahoo to NYTimes.com, this was how you conventionally sold ads. If 100,000 people looked at a page, it meant you had 100,000 impressions on some banner to sell. Cha-ching!

But if you’re a brand publisher, a huge number of eyes on your content isn’t necessarily your goal. Let’s say you’re selling high-end jewelry to middle-aged American women. If 100,000 kids in Japan stumbled on to your microsite celebrating your latest bracelets, is that really a useful development? Do those eyes mean more 35-55-year-old women in the United States are going to pick up your latest product? Probably not.

2. Stat du Jour – Time on Site

With the rise of clickbait sites like Upworthy and EliteDaily, pageviews have only become more and more commoditized. This has led higher quality publishers to recognize that they need a new way to sell themselves and their inherent advantages to advertisers.

So where Viralnova might be able to claim a visitor looked at 10 different pages (of a slideshow of inspiring cats), The Washington Post can now say to advertisers that every visitor to their newest long-form journalism article spent five minutes on the page truly digesting it (and perhaps the advertising that surrounded it).

To content marketers, this metric does have some amplified value as well, especially if the goal is increased brand awareness. If someone spends 10 minutes perusing your content, they’re more likely to remember your company’s name than someone who quickly clicks through three pages and then leaves.

But unfortunately, that’s still just an assumption. Maybe they remember your brand, but maybe they just remember the story you told and never actually associate it with your products. That doesn’t sound like an effective use of scarce marketing dollars.

3. Feel Like Sharing? – Likes and Tweets

Another statistic that marketers sweat over is their social media performance. Thousands of companies and services now pore over the social universe to track down every last tweet that even tangentially mentions your content. Again, if you’re a publisher with a viral-based business model, like Buzzfeed, this is generally good news. More shares can lead to more clicks, which leads to more ads served (it always seems to lead there, doesn’t it?).

But if you’re a brand publisher, you’re still not trying to sell ads. You want people to like your brand, and then down the line be more likely to purchase your products or services.

What’s scary about social metrics is that what might look like good news for a content marketer could, in fact, be the exact opposite. People could be sharing your content because of how awful they think it, or your brand, is.

“Look at Company X’s deplorable new factory; this behind the scenes photo blog can’t mask the truth!” or “Isn’t it pathetic how BrandY has tried to co-opt celebrity bloggers to make them seem cool?”

Yes, those examples are a bit hyperbolic, but some social campaigns have been going that poorly for years now. Worse yet, for every disaster that we hear about, there are dozens of more mundane examples where content departments are patting themselves on the back because their latest meme-filled piece is getting a lot of Facebook love, even though inserting brand references into Game of Thrones photos isn’t really going to convert any of those “likers” into new buyers.

4. Loyal Listeners & Returning Readers

Here’s a suite of stats that can together tell whether or not your readers are enjoying your content and coming back for more: percent return visitors, frequency, and recency. These can be a bit more subjective than some of the other metrics (particularly numerator and denominator questions such as “Did my percent of return visitors increase because new visitors decreased, or because returners actually increased?”) but they give you a good sense of whether or not your audience likes what your putting out, and is coming back for more.

Unfortunately, enjoying your content and wanting to do business with your brand are two different things. This stat, like all the others, still leaves you guessing whether or not your readers are ever going to convert and become purchasers.

What We’re Missing

The real issue with all of these metrics is what they leave out. Combined, they give you a directional sense of consumption, but not what truly matters – whether your content is improving the market’s perception of your brand and increasing the likelihood that readers will one day buy what you sell.

Understanding this means looking at some deeper measurements, things like purchase intent, brand sentiment, and message recall. A few smart marketers have started to wise up to this, and are now attempting to measure this data. In our next article, we’ll take a look at which brands have taken this big next step, and what we can learn from them.

The post What Today’s Content Marketing Metrics Don’t Tell You appeared first on Relevance.