Measuring your content marketing effectiveness can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. Here’s an easy plan for finding and analyzing metrics you can act on right away.

A digital world is an overwhelming blessing for marketers. You can follow almost every interaction your clients and prospects have. But how do you use all those analytics to make smarter content choices? Here are 17 options.

The business value of content marketing cannot be measured by standard content metrics (views, time on page, shares, etc.) Value lies in the behavior change of the audience affected by the content. How can you measure real value?

One-dimensional views of a story’s effectiveness don’t cut it at Aon. Evaluating the impact of its brand journalism platform led its senior director of content to customize a scorecard. She’s a Content Marketer of the Year finalist.

If you want to be taken seriously as a content marketer, stop acting like a member of the PR team. If you want to show that content marketing is a distinct contributor to business results, stop using only PR metrics. Do this instead.

Want to know how to predict your followers’ behavior? Wonder how modeling techniques can describe your social media audience’s activity? Learn the three basic models and a powerful tool for each to execute your analysis.

It’s never too late to implement sound content tracking, measurement, and evaluation practices to prove the value of your content marketing program. The road to better content marketing measurement starts here.

If your marketing team is not working with a data scientist or at least thinking like one, you’re missing the ability to say “I know” instead of “I think.” The distinction matters to data-driven organizations – and budget approval.

Vanity metrics are helpful when they’re seen as optimization metrics. They are bellwethers for what your target audience finds valuable on that channel. Learn how to maximize their use and why they should not measure business goals.

Think of a piece of content your team published recently. On a scale of 0 to 100, how would you rate it? And how would your rating help your company? Consider the method that Red Hat devised for scoring content performance.

Invest in creating a social media strategy tailored to your content goals. And that begins with establishing the right social media KPIs. To help get started, read what the author of Going Social and Getting to Like has to say.

The bad news: If you fail to make an analytics-friendly website design, you won’t get the best analytics insight. The good news: It’s easy to make analytics-friendly design decisions. Here are five tips on how to do it.