Expert Q&A: Neil Stoneman on the challenges of measuring content performance

Performance measurement. It’s the closing chapter in the content production process. A chance to take a beat and reflect on the impact of your newly launched asset before you start all over again on your next piece.

Well, not quite. If you want to set yourself up for good data and a meaningful look at how your content is performing, you need to start thinking about measurement much earlier in the process. To help us pinpoint the right time to start planning (and answer a few probing questions about the pitfalls of content metrics) we spoke to performance marketing expert Neil Stoneman.

Radix: Hi Neil, thanks for talking with us! Let’s start at the beginning: when’s the right time to start thinking about performance measurement for content?

Neil: Working out an ROI figure for content isn’t the easiest thing in the world. So you need to have conversations about measurement at the very start of the content production process if you want to be successful. You need clear goals if you want clear metrics.

That means collaborating more closely than many organisations generally manage. If departments or teams operate as silos, they’ll deliver as silos. Everyone in the chain needs to invest time in understanding the other components of marketing and how they’re contributing to the whole.

Radix: What happens if marketers don’t do this prep work up front?

Neil: Marketing isn’t an exact science, but in my experience, the quality of the writing and design is pretty closely correlated to the success of a piece. Skipping the prep work puts these components in jeopardy.

Say you’re creating an ebook. If your writers know what it’s for, where it’s going to be deployed, and what the marketing team want to achieve with it, they can make decisions accordingly. Same goes for the designers, the web team, and everyone else involved.

You can’t apply metrics retroactively and expect content to perform well – it just won’t be set up for it. If a piece is out in the world and there hasn’t been a conversation and a plan for what it should achieve and what success looks like, that ship has sailed.

Radix: How can content marketing teams keep their goals front and centre during the creation process?

Neil: Goals have a habit of disappearing during the process, which can create a lot of chaos as the project diverges from the original plan.

Without the ultimate goal in mind, stakeholders can get distracted by the minutiae. And then they suddenly switch from worrying about the tone of voice to asking how many leads their content produced.

Your initial goals should serve as a guide for every decision you make throughout the process. Sometimes that requires careful stakeholder management or firm pushback to manage expectations and keep a project on track. Keeping marketers, SMEs, creatives, and other stakeholders on the same page throughout means you’re more likely to produce successful content.

Radix: Some types of content are harder to monitor than others. How can you measure content performance when it’s in a difficult-to-track format?

Neil: People often ask, “Is content a channel?” And many would say it isn’t, and that it can’t be used as a channel. But there are simple additions that help even static formats act as a channel.

To go back to the ebook example, even a PDF can offer useful metrics – if you make sure you include effective calls to action. CTAs shouldn’t just float at the end of the document; they need to be contextual, especially in long pieces that cover a lot of different topics.

If you mark each CTA with its own UTM tag, you’ll be able to see exactly what convinced your reader to move on to the next stage in the process. Anecdotally, some of my clients have seen three times more conversions on demos and contact forms from content readers versus non-content readers.

Radix: In performance measurement, there’s always a lot of talk about the negatives of ‘vanity’ metrics. Do you think marketers focus on the wrong metrics?

Neil: I don’t really believe in ‘vanity’ metrics. I think all metrics, even surface-level ones like views and open rates, are useful.

These days, marketing needs to deliver a commercial outcome, but proving that delivery is notoriously difficult. There’s rarely a simple way to link marketing activities to revenue, for example. But if you’re going to start a process with creative and content, the first thing you need it to do is to generate a response. And vanity metrics are generally the best way to track that initial response.

If you publish something on LinkedIn and it gets no vanity metrics, then it’s not going to achieve the other, more important goals either. If no one likes, shares, or reposts it, it’s definitely not going to galvanize a buying committee to spend $2.5 million dollars on your offering.

Say I was working with new B2B client with high revenue targets and a long sales cycle. I couldn’t say we’d achieve a revenue uplift in two weeks. It’s not possible. But I can use vanity metrics to start to show more audience engagement in that period – they might just be the only metrics you have for the first couple of months. They’re not the be all and end all, but they show we’ve taken the right steps towards solving the conundrum.

Get more expert insights in our B2B Content Marketer’s Handbook

This is just a small excerpt of the expertise Neil shared with us – and we’ve got even more advice to share from other industry veterans. If you’d like to explore the rest of the topics, ranging from content strategy to optimisation, get your copy of our handbook or read our other Expert Q&As.