When generating thought leadership content, guest contributions are great, but it’s often difficult to track your return on investment. While the content can build up your customer’s trust, it’s harder to determine exactly what you are gaining from this guest content. Depending on where you’ve posted this content and how, you can build in easy to track metrics that should help decipher your ROI and make your company’s investors and business leaders happy.
To help you figure out the best ways to measure your ROI with guest content, we’ve asked 10 experts from Forbes Agency Council to share what metrics they think you should be using.
Members explain which metrics are best for measuring ROI for guest articles.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Post Interactions
This refers to how many times your article was shared and how many comments it got, as well as to who is interacting with your piece. It may be possible that a big name in your field finds your content valuable and shares it. It may also happen that your piece gets noticed by someone who works for a company that is looking for a partner like you. This shows that you are providing value. – Daniela Pavan, The Ad Store New York
2. Bounce Rate And Conversions
Regardless of what our job titles are, we are responsible for the bottom line. The way that each role does this is different. One thing that is key here is making sure that it is possible to always have the best ideas about how to show the number of users that were converted by a particular piece. Looking at the bounce rate and conversions will show the ROI. – Jon James, Ignited Results
3. LinkedIn
We often craft or ghostwrite original content for our clients. In additional to using a variety of media for dissemination and distribution, we also make sure our thought leader posts it on their own LinkedIn. This way we can measure both individual and company views. In addition, all of our emails state at the top, “Like this Article on LinkedIn.” LinkedIn is our measurement of choice. – Francine Carb, Markitects, Inc.
4. Referral Traffic
I’ve published dozens of guest posts in the last three months. In that time, I’ve found that the best way to measure the posts’ effectiveness is to analyze referral traffic. That’s the amount of site visitors you get from your guest content to your websites that you link to. But, it’s also important to remember that content marketing is a long-term strategy and that much of its benefit cannot be measured. – Adam Guild, Placepull
5. UTM
Remember to add a UTM code to any links back to your site so you can quantify traffic from external sources. Then, check the article after a week for social shares, comment count and promotion on the home page or most-read lists. Thought leadership is about awareness, not lead generation, but metrics like these can reassure executives they’re reaching the exact audience they want to engage. – Kim Charlton, PMG (Pinnacle Marketing Group)
6. Engagement Across All Channels
I find that the key is to measure everything individually. How many are reading, how many are commenting, what’s evoking debate, etc. The metric we look most for is engagement across channels — email, social, blog — for guest content. – Ajay Gupta, Stirista
7. Brand Mentions
Guest posting has many benefits, but measuring them is the hard part. Authority-building is a good place to start. Tracking brand mentions is a simple way to measure authority-building. BrandMentions and Mention are both tools that track brand mentions. Signing up for daily email digests is one way to stay on top of spikes and jump in to ongoing conversations as needed. – Mary Ann O’Brien, OBI Creative
8. Number Of Searches
If you are successful in placing guest content, the most important benefit won’t be clicks to your website; it will be the benefit of increasing brand recognition with your target audience. That’s why it’s so important to be choosy with where you place articles. If they appear in the right places, more people should be searching for your brand and the volume of searches should increase. – Scott Baradell, Idea Grove
9. Time On Site
One piece becomes fodder for sales conversations to drive leads, social posts to spread awareness and credibility, a blog series, podcast or webinar. There are also tools that can measure how long a person spends on a brand’s website after reading an article, as well as social shares and other similar metrics. – Kathleen Lucente, Red Fan Communications
10. Social Engagement
Simply put, the benefit of guest content on other sites is the interactions, engagement, traffic and links that you get back from them. If people are talking about your post, referring to you from your post, linking to your sites and other content because of your posts or simply getting more visitors to your sites due to that content, that’s a win. The ROI isn’t very direct, but it is trackable. – Sean Smith, SimpleTiger LLC
