“I don’t see how this kind of content is helping us sell more products. Why are we spending money on this?”
That’s a concern you’ve probably heard from business execs and CEOs at some point in your career when discussing top-of-funnel marketing.
And it’s true: it’s hard to figure out exactly how much revenue each piece of content in the upper funnel phase will generate.
However, the goal is not to convert leads into sales right away —instead, content should educate potential customers about the problem your business can solve so that they think of your company when they decide to buy something in the future.
That means you won’t be able to track bottom-funnel metrics like conversion rate or cost per lead (CPL).
This is where upper
What are top-of-funnel marketing goals?
The whole idea of upper
This means you have two main goals:
Create brand awareness
Your content needs to educate your target audience on how your product can solve their problems and help them reach their goals. Consider metrics like share of voice (SOV) to measure your business’s visibility against competitors.
Generate leads
You need to build trust with potential customers so they’ll be willing to share their contact information or visit your company’s store or site.
So, it’s simple: if your top-of-funnel content doesn’t bring sales or sign-ups, the problem is likely rooted in these goals.
For example, your piece might fail to convey how great the product or service is, or it may not properly explain how well the product or service solves a problem for your prospects, which leads to a lack of trust.
That’s why simply asking, “How can I measure my content to tell if it’s performing well?” is wrong.
What you should be asking instead is, “How can I track and measure KPIs with my content, given my constraints and the goals I have in mind?”
The answer to that question is much more specific and actionable.
1) Website Traffic
Website traffic is one of the most common metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your upper
How to measure
If you’re looking for an easy way to track this, you can use tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Semrush.
For instance, with Google Analytics metrics, you can monitor just about every aspect of your website traffic —from the number of users and sessions to the length spent on each page and the bounce rate.
When to use
These numbers can be helpful in analyzing how people are engaging with your content and determining whether your upper
Many of these metrics can be broken down even further by using Google Analytics filters.
For example, you can set up a filter to see how many users visited your site from a certain source over a certain period of time —or which pages they clicked on— to help reveal what content on your site resonates best with them.
The tricky part, though, is that it’s hard to attribute all that traffic to your specific upper
Visitors can come from a direct response campaign referred by another website, or they may have found you through a combination of online advertising (PPC) and overall brand exposure.
UTM Tracking
Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes are a way to help make the distinction. They are little bits of text that can be placed in links and URLs to track the source of visitors when they land on your site.
This can show exactly which strategy is bringing in what traffic and give you a more accurate picture of your overall marketing strategy.