Measuring the effectiveness of copywriting is hard. It’s not as clear-cut as assessing the performance of a salesman, for instance. What data sets do you use to measure whether words are compelling enough?
If you’re a business owner who has invested in copywriting, you naturally want to know if you’re getting your money’s worth. Making data-driven decisions about your expenditure is important – but to do that, you need a framework for KPIs.
What is a KPI?
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. It’s a measurable value that shows how well a company achieves its main business objectives.
Tracking Key Performance Indicators is like keeping a scorecard for your business. They help you measure progress, identify areas for improvement, and optimise your content. Just as you’d use sales figures to gauge your business’s financial health, you can use KPIs to assess your marketing performance.
In the context of copywriting, KPIs should aim to answer questions like:
- Is our copy attracting attention?
- Are readers taking the actions we want them to take?
- Is our copy contributing to our business goals?
Why Measuring KPIs for Copy Isn’t Black and White
Measuring the success of copywriting isn’t straightforward. While the metrics we’ll go over can give valuable insights, no single metric can paint the full picture alone. Good copy might not always lead to immediate sales, but could build brand awareness or trust over time.
I was reminded of this recently as a consumer. For years, I’ve been seeing HiSmile ads – the Australian dental start-up – on my social media feeds. I’ve never clicked on them, but they stuck in my mind. When my toothpaste tube started to dry up, I thought of them. I looked for their brand in the supermarket and bought it.
That kind of awareness-to-purchase funnel is hard to measure, but it’s impactful content that ultimately drove me to make a purchase.
It’s Hard to Directly Attribute Success
Copywriting aims to persuade, inform, and often, prompt action. But the path from reading to action isn’t always direct or immediate. A reader might see an ad today and make a purchase weeks later. How do we attribute that sale to the copy?
Ultimately, It’s Up to Your Good Judgement
While metrics and KPIs are useful tools, you might never be able to fully quantify the value of good content, and that’s okay. Often, copywriting serves a larger and more long-term goal: building a brand. Good copy can create a lasting impression, build trust, and shape how people see your business. These effects are hard to measure but can be incredibly valuable.
Always trust your judgement. Consider how the copy fits with your brand voice, speaks to your audience, and supports your overall business goals. Sometimes the most valuable aspects of copywriting are the ones you can’t put a number on.
With that said, let’s get into some metrics that can help you measure the success of your copy.
Common KPIs to Measure Copywriting Success
KPIs people often use to measure the success of copywriting include:
- Conversion rates
- Click-through rates
- On-site engagement metrics
- Average sales price
- SEO performance
- A/B testing
Conversion Rates
Conversion rate is the percentage of people who take action after coming into contact with your business. This is one of the most important KPIs for digital marketing. Conversion rates are a direct measure of how well your online presence works to achieve your business goals.
However, it’s important to note that conversion rates can be influenced by other factors, not just the quality of the copy.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
To calculate conversion rates, you first need to define a specific action you want readers to take. This could be:
- Making a purchase
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Downloading a resource
- Filling out a contact form
Next, you track how many people visit a webpage or open an email. You then track how many of those people complete the desired action.
The conversion rate is the number of people who completed the action divided by the total number who saw the copy, expressed as a percentage. For example, if 1000 unique visitors see your landing page and 50 make a purchase, the conversion rate of that landing page is 5%.
You can also use analytics tools like Google Analytics to automatically track conversion rates.
Does Conversion Accurately Represent the Effectiveness of Your Copy?
A higher conversion rate can mean your copywriting efforts are working. However, conversion rates don’t paint the full picture. Keep in mind that conversion rates can vary widely depending on your industry, product, and the specific action you’re tracking.
Other factors besides copy can influence conversion rates, like design, pricing, and the overall user experience your website provides. If your conversion rates are low, it doesn’t always mean the copy is poor. It might indicate issues with other aspects of your marketing or sales process.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on a specific link, search result or call to action in your copy. It’s often used to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns, online ads, web pages and blog posts.
How to Calculate CTR
To calculate CTR, you need to know the number of impressions your link or call-to-action has, and the number of times people clicked it.
The formula to calculate CTR is:
CTR = (Number of Clicks / Number of Impressions) x 100
For example, if your email was sent to 1000 people and 100 of them clicked on a link in the email, your CTR would be 10%.
Plenty of digital marketing platforms, like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and email marketing software automatically calculate CTR and email open rates for you.
Does CTR Accurately Represent the Effectiveness of Your Copy?
CTR can be an indicator of how good your copy is at encouraging immediate action. A high CTR suggests that your headline, call-to-action, or overall message is resonating with your audience and prompting them to engage further.
But CTR doesn’t tell you everything about your copy. It doesn’t show what happens after someone clicks. They might click but then leave quickly if they don’t find what they want.
Other things can affect CTR too, like how your ad looks, where you put the link, or when you send your message. A low CTR doesn’t always mean bad copy. It might mean you’re talking to the wrong people or your offer doesn’t interest them.
Sometimes, a lower click-through rate isn’t a cause for concern if the people who do click are more likely to buy. For example, if your copy helps reach and engage the best customers, you might get fewer clicks but more sales.
On-Site Engagement Metrics
On-site engagement metrics show how people interact with your website. These numbers can help you understand if your copy, and website as a whole, keeps visitors interested and encourages them to explore your site.
After experimenting with lots of tools over the years, Google Analytics is our preferred tool to measure on-site engagement metrics. Getting data straight from the source, and for free, is a huge pro.
Some Google Analytics metrics to track are:
- Average Session Duration: This shows how long people usually stay on your site. A longer time often means your content is engaging.
- Bounce Rate: This tells you how many people leave your site after viewing just one page. A high bounce rate might mean your copy doesn’t match what visitors expect or want.
- Time on Page: This metric shows how long visitors spend on a specific page. More time usually means the content is interesting or useful to them.
- Page Per Session: This tells you how many pages a visitor looks at during one visit. More page views might mean your copy encourages people to explore your site.
- Scroll Depth: This shows how far down a page people scroll, and whether users are reading your whole page, stopping at a particular point, or just reading the start.
Do These Metrics Show How Good Your Copy Is?
These numbers can give you clues about how well your copy works, but on-site engagement metrics can be affected by a lot of other factors. For example, users spending a long time on your page could mean people find your content interesting – but it could also mean they’re having trouble finding what they need.
Similarly, a high bounce rate might mean your copy isn’t engaging – but it could also mean people found exactly what they wanted quickly and didn’t need to look further. A high bounce rate can also be completely unrelated to copywriting – it might be that your web pages take too long to load and users get impatient.
When you look at these numbers, think about what you want visitors to do on your site. Are you trying to give them quick information or do you want them to spend time reading in-depth content?
It’s also worth doing a site audit to assess the quality of your user experience and design on your website, including loading times and information hierarchy.
Average Sales Price
Average Sales Price (ASP) shows how much money people spend on average when they buy from you. For copywriters, this number can help show if their words are helping to sell higher-priced items or services.
To work out ASP, add up the total money from all sales and divide it by the number of sales. For example, if you made $1000 from 10 sales, your ASP would be $100.
Does ASP Show How Good Your Copy Is?
ASP can give you some ideas about how well your copy works, but it’s not a perfect measure.
If your ASP goes up after changing your copy, it might mean your new words are helping to sell more expensive items or that your copy is better at explaining the value of pricier products or services.
A higher or lower ASP might come from other things, like:
- Changes in your product range
- New pricing
- Different types of customers coming to your site
Sometimes good copy might even lower your ASP. For example, your copy might succeed at selling lower-priced items to new customers at a higher volume. This can be a great thing, even if the ASP goes down.
When you look at ASP to judge your copy, remember to think about your overall business goals. Are you trying to sell more expensive items, or do you want to bring in more customers with cheaper products? Your copy should match what you’re trying to do.
SEO Performance
SEO performance shows how well your website appears in search engine results. Good copy can improve your SEO by using relevant keywords naturally, keeping visitors on your site longer, and encouraging other sites to link to yours through informative content or thought leadership in your industry.
Common SEO Metrics
These metrics you need to track to measure your SEO performance:
- Organic Traffic: This counts how many people come to your site from search results, not including paid ads. More organic traffic often means your copy uses words people are looking for.
- Keyword Rankings: This shows where your pages appear in search results for specific queries. Higher rankings usually mean your copy matches what search engines think people want to see.
- Click-Through Rate in Search Results: This tells you how often people click on your site in search results. A higher rate might mean your page titles and meta descriptions are engaging.
- Backlinks: These are links to your site from other websites. Quality backlinks serve as an indicator to Google that your site is useful or interesting.
If you want to learn more about SEO metrics, read our guide to measuring SEO campaigns.
Does SEO Performance Show How Good Your Copy Is?
SEO metrics are a lot more well-defined than copywriting KPIs. If the main goal of your copywriting team is to increase search engine rankings rather than, say, building brand awareness, you have a much clearer framework for tracking success.
However, just basing copywriting KPIs on SEO success comes with caveats as well.
SEO isn’t just about keywords. Factors like internal linking, how fast your website loads, and how responsive it is across different also play a huge role in how well your pages rank on Google.
It’s also important to note that writing only for search engines can make your copy sound clunky or unnatural to real people. Even though you might rank higher, this can backfire and damage your brand’s reputation. The best copy balances using the right keywords and sounding natural. Good copy should not only bring people to your site but also help turn them into customers.
A/B Testing – Our Preferred Way to Measure the Effectiveness of Copy
A/B testing allows you to track the difference in performance between your original copy and new versions without so many other variables at play. This means you can quantify a copywriter’s impact while gaining valuable insights into audience preferences. For example, you might measure the percentage increase in conversions or click-through rates achieved by a new copy.
In A/B testing, you create two versions of your copy. Version A might be your current copy, while Version B has changes you want to test. You then show these versions to similar groups of people and measure which one achieves your goals better. This could mean comparing different email subject lines, landing page headlines, or product descriptions to see which leads to more opens, sign-ups, or sales.
Why A/B Testing Works for Copywriting
A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of something to determine which performs better. It involves showing two variants (A and B) to similar audiences and analysing which one produces better results based on a predetermined goal or metric.
What makes A/B testing so valuable for copywriting is its ability to isolate the impact of your words. A/B testing lets you change just the copy while keeping everything else the same. This means you can be confident that any difference in results comes directly from the words you’ve changed.
David Ogilvy, known as the ‘father of advertising’, was a big fan of A/B testing. He put it like this: “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
A/B Testing as a KPI for Copywriters
You can use A/B testing a KPI for copywriters by measuring:
- Improvement Rate: Track how often a copywriter’s new version outperforms the original. For example, if 7 out of 10 A/B tests show improvement, that’s a 70% improvement rate.
- Performance Lift: Measure the average percentage improvement in the desired action (clicks, conversions, etc.) across all A/B tests. A higher average lift indicates more effective copywriting.
- Consistency: Look at how consistently a copywriter produces winning variants. This shows their ability to consistently create effective copy.
How to Use A/B Testing for Copy
To do A/B testing for your copy, start by choosing what you want to measure and setting a clear goal. For example, you might aim to increase your email open rate by 5%. Create your two versions and split your audience randomly to show each version. After running the test, analyse the results to see which version performed better.
It’s important to test one change at a time. If you change multiple things at once, you won’t know which change led to the improvement.
Audience Feedback and Surveys
Directly asking your audience what they think can give you useful insights into how well your copywriter is doing. It provides direct information from the people who interact with your copy.
What to Ask Your Audience
When you ask for feedback, focus on how clear the writing is, how it makes people feel, and what they do after reading it. You might ask readers to rate how easy the copy was to understand, what main points they remember, and what actions they took afterwards. This shows if your copywriter is getting your message across and making people want to act.
How to Gather Feedback
You can get feedback in a few different ways: Online surveys after people read your copy, emails asking for thoughts on recent messages, or short questions on your website can all work well. For more detailed insights, you might want to interview some customers over the phone. Each method can tell you different things about how your copywriter’s work is being received.
Using Feedback to Check Performance
To use feedback to measure your copywriter’s work, set some goals for each area you’re looking at. Keep track of the scores over time to see if your copy continuously gets better results.. You can also compare different pieces of writing or different copywriters. This helps you spot trends and areas where your copywriter might need to improve.
Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Data
Surveys and audience feedback give you qualitative data, not quantitative. This means they tell you about people’s opinions and feelings, not hard numbers. While this information is valuable, it has some drawbacks.
Qualitative data can be harder to measure and compare than numbers. People’s opinions can be influenced by many things, like their mood or recent experiences. This can make the feedback less reliable than data from things like A/B tests or sales figures.
Also, the people who respond to surveys might not represent all your customers. Often, it’s the people who really liked or disliked your copy who take the time to give feedback. This can skew your results.
That’s why it’s important to use feedback along with other ways of measuring your copywriter’s work. Look at things like how many people buy after reading the copy, or how it performs in A/B tests. This mix of qualitative and quantitative data gives you a more complete picture of how well your copywriter is doing.
Strengths and Weaknesses of Different Metrics
Each metric has its strengths and limitations. Conversion rates can show immediate impact but might miss long-term effects. A/B testing gives direct comparisons but can sometimes oversimplify complex messages. Audience feedback provides rich insights but can be subjective and unrepresentative. SEO performance shows visibility but not necessarily engagement or persuasion.
If all these metrics have their pitfalls, what should you do?
Take a Holistic Approach
The most effective way to measure copywriting success is to use a combination of metrics. Look at quantitative data like conversion rates and A/B test results alongside qualitative feedback from your audience. Take both short-term impacts and long-term trends into account.
Copywriting is both an art and a science. While we can and should measure its impact, we also need to acknowledge the intangible effects that might not show up in our metrics.
