5 Ways to recognize how engaging is your content
There is a huge difference between creating content and creating engaging content. Each piece of content you've created so far needs to be analyzed so as to recognize the content that is holding your audience's interest and connecting with them.
But how do you do this?
There are 5 easy ways to find out if your content is engaging:
1. Measure engagement through analytics
Are your readers reading the entire article? Or are they merely browsing and leaving?
To answer these questions, you need to look at the engagement metrics of your google analytics.
Bounce rate:
Bounce rate measures the percentage of persons that ended up on your website and left without taking any action. A lower bounce rate denotes that the readers found your information engaging.
Inspecting this metric will help you to find out if your content is engaging enough or any significant changes are necessary to be made.
Pages per session:
This metric measures the average number of pages browsed by a reader in a single session. More the pages scanned per session, higher are the chances of your readers engaging better with your content.
Heat Map:
Heat Map tells you which section of your page is most clicked by the visitors, this will help you understand, the sections most clicked and work your content around the habit of visitors. There are various tools that can be used to check heat map. HotJar being one of them.
Average session duration:
The time spent by a reader on a single page can be measured through this metric. If the time spent by a user in a particular session is high, then, it would indicate that the user stayed for a long period and read the entire article.
When a reader reads your entire post, stays on the page for a long time, and even browses other posts, your content has struck a chord with them.
2. Shares
Is your content being shared? If yes, that's great. Keep at it. If not, maybe you need to rethink your content strategy.
When readers read your content and share the same, you automatically know that they've derived value from the information provided therein. Highly shared article explains what is being liked by your followers.
While you do this, you might as well check what is most shared on your timeline, your competitors brand pages, your friends and family.
Understand what it takes for them to share a post, at what emotional sell do people connect.
You might also like to read: Why people share on Social Media?
3. Comments
Readers will take the time to comment on your article only when you have provided value for the time they spent on reading the same. If many people are commenting on your article, rest assured that your content strategy is heading in the right direction.
If not, you need to take the first step to encourage your readers to engage. Ask questions, show them that you're interested to get their feedback, and most importantly, respond to their comments.
On a funny note: Leave a spell error in your image, people often go bonkers with it.
4. Email subscribers
Would you subscribe to a blog despite having derived no useful information from it? I guess not. A healthy flow of subscribers indicates that your content is engaging. If the number of new subscribers is static or decreasing, there is definitely something that is going wrong.
You can read about common content marketing mistakes here
5. Inbound links
An inbound link or a back link is a hyperlink on a third-party website that brings people to your web page. If people are leading others to read your content, it means that your content has proved to be utterly useful to them and is highly engaging.
Various tools like Ahrefs, cognitiveSEO, SEO powersuite, etc. available through which you can check your inbound links.
Successful content marketing involves creating engaging content. If your current content marketing strategy is not bringing in favorable numbers, it is time you changed your strategy to resonate with what your readers are looking for.
