Content Score & Brand Rank
NATIVO
To demonstrate the effectiveness of content, we created a mid-funnel metric that aligns with key campaign objectives.
Objective
Create a mid-funnel metric that proves the effectiveness of content. That metric should:
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Be versatile enough to apply across most or all campaigns, ensuring consistency in evaluation.
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Have the potential to serve as a standardized 'currency' by which campaigns can be assessed and transacted.
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Provide a clear and straightforward way to measure the impact of content activation, allowing stakeholders to easily understand its value and influence on overall performance.
Common Challenges
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Measurement Challenge: Marketers need help measuring how mid-funnel content affects brand perception, making clients see campaigns as optional rather than essential.
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Lack of Clarity: With a single, all-encompassing metric, it's easier to understand campaign performance, its impact on how people view the brand, and where to make optimizations.
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Feasibility: Many existing brand lift, attribution, and other measurement solutions are limited in coverage based on the use of panels, deprecation of cookies, or other limitations that prevent direct measurement of content landing pages.
User Goals
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Clarity in Measurement: Users want a simple, intuitive way to understand how content impacts campaign performance and how they rank compared to their competition.
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Actionable Insights: Users need a metric that informs strategic decisions and optimizations.
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Consistency: Users desire a standardized metric that can be applied across various campaigns for easier comparison.
Business Goals
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Performance Measurement: The business seeks a reliable metric to evaluate the effectiveness of content marketing.
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Campaign Optimization: The business wants a metric that helps identify which content strategies drive engagement and conversions.
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Revenue Impact: By establishing this metric as a ‘currency,’ the business can potentially align campaign investments with measurable outcomes.
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Scalability: The business aims to implement a metric that works across multiple campaigns, ensuring streamlined reporting and analysis.
Research
The primary goal was to identify the most effective way to measure content performance in mid-funnel ad campaigns. The research aimed to uncover existing pain points, explore successful measurement strategies, and define criteria for a new metric that aligns with both user and business goals.
METHODOLOGY
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Stakeholder Interviews: Interviewed marketing managers and content strategists to understand their current measurement practices and challenges.
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Competitive Analysis: Analyzed leading digital marketing platforms to identify common mid-funnel metrics used in content evaluation.
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Data Analysis: Reviewed performance data from past campaigns to identify patterns in user engagement, content interactions, and conversion touchpoints.
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User Surveys: Surveyed content marketers to assess which metrics they find most actionable and valuable.
KEY FINDINGS
Pain Points:
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Stakeholders reported that traditional metrics like impressions and clicks failed to demonstrate content impact in deeper stages of the funnel.
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Marketers struggled to link content engagement directly to conversion outcomes.
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Conversions are hard to track and measure.
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Reporting inconsistencies made it difficult to compare content performance across campaigns.
Opportunities:
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Marketers expressed interest in a metric that tracks meaningful engagement signals, such as time spent on key content assets or interactions that indicate purchase intent.
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Competitor analysis revealed that successful brands often leverage metrics like a Content Engagement Score (weighted by factors like scroll depth, video completion rates, and repeat interactions) to assess mid-funnel performance.
Conclusion & Next Steps
The research highlighted a strong need for a clear, versatile mid-funnel metric that bridges the gap between engagement and conversion. In the next step, I work with product and engineering to develop a metric that combines key engagement signals with a weighted score.
CREATING A NEW METRIC: CONTENT SCORE
The Content Score quantitatively measures individual content campaigns' performance based on key engagement metrics in comparison to vertical benchmarks.
CREATING A NEW METRIC: BRAND RANK
The Brand Rank reflects the overall effectiveness of your content marketing efforts in influencing how your brand is perceived compared to your competitors.
How Does Brand Rank Work?
CONTROL GROUP: Survey on In-Feed Unit
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The control group is presented with a survey in an ad placement to rank the likelihood of consideration of the brand and its competitors
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The participants rank the brand in order of consideration likelihood
EXAMPLE
TEST GROUP: In-Content Survey
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The participant engages with the ad content
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After a specific content threshold (e.g., 4 story slides, 50% scroll depth, 15s of video, 20s on an article, etc.) the user is presented with a survey
EXAMPLE
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Solution
OVERVIEW
The overview section is a quick look at how your content is performing compared to your competitors.
CONTENT SCORE
Content Score is a proprietary and comprehensive metric designed to evaluate content performance across campaigns. It leverages key engagement indicators, such as click-through rates (CTR), call-to-action rates (CTAr), and average-time-on-content (AToC) metrics, comparing them to industry benchmarks. The score is calculated for individual ad formats and then aggregated at the overall campaign level using a weighted average. This approach ensures the content score reflects both format-specific performance and the broader campaign impact, providing a clear and actionable measure of content effectiveness.
BRAND RANK
Brand Rank is a metric that combines two key components: Rank and Lift. The Rank reflects the brand’s position within its industry or vertical, indicating how it compares to competitors in terms of consumer consideration. The Lift measures the impact of content campaigns on improving brand perception, particularly regarding the likelihood of consumers choosing your brand over others. By combining these elements, the brand rank provides a clear view of both the brand's standing and the influence of the content efforts on consumer attitudes.