What’s the main focus for KPIs?

As you can see by the following chart, there’s an even split between revenue and engagement.

It should be noted that those that focus on engagement also see revenue as a likely by-product of providing good content. If your customers or followers are happy with your content and are sharing it across channels with a positive message, then revenue won’t be far behind if it’s linked to a relevant product.

Revenue is a goal for every ecommerce team, but there is a split in the intention behind creating content. However does this really matter if engagement eventually leads to the same outcome? These engaged customers will also be more loyal to your brand and tend to come back to you for repeat purchases.

There’s a delicate balance to get right when it comes to putting your content under the control of an editorial team. If your focus is on engagement through providing useful and entertaining content, it’s great for the consumer but the reality is that commerce still needs to dictate a certain amount of editorial control. A commerce journey needs to occur from the content for it to be a viable and worthwhile endeavour.

Here’s an example from Mr Porter. This is a nice lengthy piece, full of wit and insight that would happily exist in a non-ecommerce publication.

It’s a perfect synthesis of editorial, relevance and ecommerce. There are direct links to the product pages of all the clothes that Murray has been dressed in by Mr Porter’s style director underneath each header image.

There’s also a direct link to shop all the products at once on the ‘front cover’.

The balance comes from not making content look too commercial based, and putting off potential customers.

A dilemma your ecommerce team may be facing right now is agreeing the actual criteria for success. The criteria determines your KPIs, and your KPIs will be dependent on whether you’re using content marketing purely for revenue, engagement or as a brand-building exercise.

To take an example from the report, The Wine Society’s primary focus is on member engagement, so they prioritise page views and dwell time for its KPIs. The ecommerce team then maps this back to value metrics like conversion and revenue, but the focus will always be on member satisfaction. Content is created with a focus on what its members want to read.

The four categories of KPIs

To finish, here is a list of KPIs that can be used to measure performance, split into relevant categories.

Revenue and conversion 

  • Conversion rate (basket-to-order and visit-to-order) 
  • Average order value 
  • Revenue 

As mentioned above, the Mr Porter editorial campaign worked to increase sales for products featured in its articles. 

Traffic 

  • Total visits 
  • Unique visitors 
  • New vs. return visits 

You can measure the total number of visits from social media from content that is posted to a respective social channel. Each post can have campaign tracking parameters added to its URL, so the impact of social links can be measured using analytics tools. 

Engagement 

  • Dwell time (time on site) 
  • Pages per visit 
  • Bounce rate 
  • Social shares 
  • Comments and ‘likes’ (including ‘favouriting’ individual content assets) 
  • Product reviews 
  • Banner click-through rate 

Only four of the companies we spoke to mentioned using customer reviews as a KPI for content marketing. However product reviews are proven to increase conversion rates as they provide social proof to amplify brand messaging.

Offline 

  • Visits to store (hard to track accurately) 
  • In-store purchases 
  • In-store content usage (e.g. scanning a QR code for a product to watch a video) 
  • Call tracking 

Unfortunately the integration of online and offline data was cited as a key barrier for building the single customer view and understanding the full impact of content marketing. 

For much more on content marketing KPIs and to understand content marketing inside and out, download our full report Where Content and Commerce Collide.