What KPI to measure the effect of B2B content?

Mikkel Settnes Updated by Mikkel Settnes

In this context, content is understood as viewable content (i.e. an event with a url) on a domain that is tracked through Dreamdata.
What KPI tracks the effect of your content on pipeline stage?

The overall goal of any go-to-market content strategy is to assist the generation of pipeline. Answering the basic question: are the readers of my content turning into leads, prospects and new business?

An essential KPI to measure is therefore the amount of pipeline (e.g. Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Leads etc.) that are influenced by the content. In other words, for each content piece or category, we want to measure the number of Influenced Leads

Obviously, different content pieces have different amounts of traffic, so to compare the performance across pages, we therefore consider the rate at which sessions turn into an influenced lead i.e. Influenced Leads per Session:

This is similar to the maybe more familiar metrics of conversions and conversion rate (= conversion per session). However, moving from only considering conversions to considering the pipeline influenced, gives a much more detailed picture of how the content is performing. 

The conversion metric suffers two main drawbacks:

  1. Conversions only represent a single point i.e. we lose information on how the rest of the pipeline is influenced.
  2. We end up measuring the point of conversion and not the path leading up to it.

In this way, Influenced Leads and Influenced Leads per Session are used in the same way as conversions and conversion rate, but provide a much more true and fair view on the actual performance of a content piece.

A detailed description of the difference between conversion rates and influenced pipeline can be found here .

Identifying what content that influences your pipeline - why should you care?

Identifying what content influences your pipeline is an essential part in understanding your audience and improving your content marketing strategy:

  1. Allowing you to know what is working and what is not.
    Iterate and double down on the content that influences your business goals, while improving things that does not contribute.
  2. Generating an actual snapshot of the topics that have more demand among readers that turn into leads, allowing you to understand and predict which topics are trending and which are not.
  3. Making predicting your audience’s behaviour easier and helps you craft more interesting and predictable content marketing and user acquisition strategies.

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