Is content measurable? Report of the Content Marketing Poland Association

Marketing professionals have long been convinced of the importance of content that targets the customers of the brands they work with. Content is of great importance for the quality of reception of the whole communication, however, not everyone is interested in deep research in this area. Against this injustice emerges a certain association, which made the first document in Poland showing the state of content in our country.

Information has always played an undeniably central role in our society No matter how you look at it – everything is information! However, not all data is public, for example due to not conducting research in its context. The article by Iab Poland, which allows us to get acquainted with the above mentioned study, also quotes the meaning of this study. As we probably know, the key for marketing is whether the recipients like the messages and whether they would be able to recommend them to others. It has a huge impact on the interest and image of the whole brand. It turns out that we can measure it with the help of e.g. the depth and speed of scrolling or looking at content sharing in communicators and social media. This knowledge should improve the performance of marketers by drawing appropriate conclusions that are a synthesis of user behavior when interacting with our content.

Apart from showing the results based on data analysis, this report aims to show potential for conducting research in the area of content, which will certainly result in increased interest in researches in this marketing domain.

According to Agnieszka Gajzler, i.e. President of the Association of Content Marketing Poland, the way content is measured in Poland is not yet as deep as it should be. Recognizing this unfathomable aspect has allowed us to look at it a little more closely than before.

Do you have a system for measuring content?

German companies were the most likely to answer “yes” to this question. ICMF International Study Report of the Association of Marketing Analysts from this year showed, that within this country as many as 69% of surveyed companies declared having such a system. For Poland this result reached less than 41% of! The Content Marketing Association’s analysis in cooperation with Islay showed, however, that 76% of Polish companies answer affirmatively to having analytical programs for content, which allows us to reassure our audience – we are not lagging behind at all!

The level of users’ engagement in reading the content on the website

The study showed that for Poles the most important to measure are Time spent on a page and the number of page views. Over 78% of respondents chose these two indicators as the main. About 50% of respondents suggest the number of reactions and comments. More than 45% judge user engagement by the number of shares.

Scrolling – engagement indicator?

The report also cites that a new trend in content research is measuring the depth of scrolling. This indicator is used to determine the engagement measurement based on the moment on the page where users stop. Researchers emphasize that it is this marker that shows the actual engagement. After all, what’s the point of having a lot of people visit your site if no one reads it even halfway through. The study of the depth of page scrolling is declared by more and more marketing experts, and now their number is estimated at 40% of the participants of the study. Scrolling itself has already become established in the minds of marketers, but not everyone measures its speed. Survey shows only 17% of respondents.

Insufficient measurement

The responses of up to 80% of the respondents show that they assess engagement by simply checking if the site has been visited and how much time the user has spent on its panel. The report indicates that this is not a reasonable measure and does not provide any meaningful results. This is due to the omission of other variables that better illustrate user behavior. There is too little research into the area of messaging and sharing, 95% of which is limited to social media. If scrolling is measured, it’s not across the board either. It follows that experts have a picture of the behavior of their customers, but it is not a complete and fully optimized picture. The key channel for sending links, i.e. instant messaging, is studied by only 9% of respondents, which is a devastating result, but as a consolation we get the information that already 46% of respondents measure sharing via e-mail.

Artificial traffic is a desirable phenomenon!

Marketers treat this phenomenon with great apathy due to limited ad revenue through it. Artificial traffic should not be feared, however, as it ensures the existence of our website, because thanks to it it can be indexed. The more valuable our content is, the more often it is visited by bots and pushed up by algorithms. The study of the occurrence of bots and their frequency on our site should be the ideal feedback for what content is desired by the search engine itself, which in this aspect is guided by their uniqueness, authority and, of course, the involvement of the audience. Unfortunately, the report tells us that only 34% of respondents are interested in this aspect, as 66% of them do not study the occurrence of crawlers and bots visiting their sites at all.

He who asks does not wander, unless it is a user on the site!

Not only people make mistakes. They also often appear in search engines. They may result from changes in the structure of the site, bad code, not implementing xml maps, etc. Briefly, we can narrow it down to poor indexing of a page, resulting in an error message of a particular type instead of content.

iSlay, following a study of more than 2 million web domains, has shown that when executing marketing strategies, it is very likely that our content turns into errors. In as many as 60% of submissions, a problem with the site was identified, consisting in e.g. lack of content, lack of page – 404 error or other errors that prevent active use of the site. Surveys digging deeper into this segment also proved that nearly half of marketers are not interested in measuring this type of information. This is really puzzling, as errors on a website have a significant negative impact on its online positioning.

Conclusion?

Marketing is quite innovative in its approach to research, although not on every level, rather selectively. The Content Marketing Poland Association report shows, however, that there is a general awareness of the need for such tests, and more and more institutions are already using them. Despite the selective treatment of their content, we can look optimistically to the future, especially in the face of such publications, which will certainly inspire many experts!