4 Essential Areas to Measure for AI-Powered Content Success (with Step-by-Step Guides)

Are you worried AI tools don’t save you time?

Do you even know how to measure if AI has helped your content strategy?

Do you want to know how you can?

That’s what I’m here to talk about this week because I remember thinking to myself:

“How do I know it’s working?”

Luckily for you, I’ve already hit my head against the wall many times over (ouch). I’m going to give you all the knowledge I’ve gained from experimentation and iteration.

Before jumping into measuring an AI-integrated content strategy’s performance, let’s talk about how we can define success.

Content Strategy North Stars: Definitions of Success

When you’re making content, it’s important to have a North Star goal or metric that you use to determine the success of your strategy.

This could be:

• Number of new leads

• Number of newsletter subscribers

• Number of community members in your skool

• Time saved

You name it. It all depends on what your goals are, and it is important to reflect on this.

Why?

Because you can then reverse engineer your north star metric into actionable steps to achieve that outcome.

Once we’ve determined what outcome we are optimizing for, we have a framework to put our content strategy up against.

Then, we can start to think about how to implement these measurements through different categories:

1. Time saved

2. Content Quality

3. SEO Performance

4. Conversion rates

Let’s jump in!

1. Measuring Time Saved

This is probably the most obvious thing to measure first.

AI helps us be more efficient with our time so if we are saving time on our content creation processes, we can easily tell if AI is effectively helping us.

I used to write all of my threads from scratch ( do this still, but not 100% of the time), until I started utilizing ChatGPT and Claude to help me convert my newsletters into threads and tweets.

I observed a decrease in time spent writing threads and tweets decrease from 2 hours to roughly 45 minutes (a 65.2% decrease in time spent).

So clearly something was working.

If you’re curious about how you can measure time saved with AI integrated workflows, you can do what I did:

1. Create a spreadsheet with the following columns: Task, Time Spent, AI Workflow (Yes/No).

2. Record the time it takes to complete your workflows for a week with no help from AI.

3. Record the time it takes to complete your workflows for a week with help from AI.

4. Compare the results

This is a quick and dirty way to measure AI’s effectiveness on your content processes.

If you aren’t tracking your progress, it’s all just guess work.

Now that we know the why and the how for tracking time saved, let’s move on to the next category of measurement—content quality.

2. Measuring Content Quality

Let’s say you’re saving time with AI already.

You’ve got your process down to a science and spend far less time creating and repurposing content.

But…

Is the content actually good.

This is somewhat subjective but the best heuristic is to identify the engagement of AI generated (or assisted) content.

Here’s a simple way you can start exploring this:

1. Go to your analytics page for whatever platform you’re analyzing

2. Export analytics (to csv, json or whatever they let you do)

3. Prompt ChatGPT or Claude to prime it for analysis

4. Upload analytics file and see results

I’ve used this to understand what type of content performs better.

3. Measuring SEO Performance

Large Language Models (LLMs) are great at dealing with text—both analyzing and generating it.

So, we can use LLMs to first analyze our current SEO and also generate new keywords that are more SEO optimized.

Here’s some basic steps to get started:

1. Use an AI tool like Keyword Insights (powered by Google AI, link in header: https://seoai.io/ ) to analyze your existing content for SEO performance. This will help identify areas for improvement.

2. Prompt an AI model to generate new, SEO-optimized content ideas based on your target keywords and the insights from Step 1.

3. Create content based on these AI-generated ideas, ensuring to include the suggested keywords and phrases.

4. Monitor your search engine rankings and organic traffic for the optimized content over time—Compare this data to your previous SEO performance to gauge the impact of AI-powered optimization.

4. Conversion Rates

This category can apply to various parts of your content web:

• Website

• Promotional tweets

• Newsletter plugs

And how do we get people to convert?

Good copywriting—something that persuades the reader to take action.

And how can AI help with this? How can we measure its effectiveness?

AI can be used to generate better copy on all platforms you publish text. People say “Oh it’s not that good at writing” but I say their prompts for the language models are subpar.

If you want to learn more about writing better with AI, check out the free resources I have in my skool.

Assuming we know how to prompt the models to yield better output, that still leaves us with the question: how do we measure AI’s impact on conversion rates?

Similar to how you measure it now—by tracking the number of conversions before and after implementing AI-generated copy. It's that simple.

For example, let's say you're using AI to generate more compelling tweet copy to drive newsletter signups.

You'd track your newsletter signup conversion rate for a period of time before using AI, then track it again for the same length of time after implementing AI-generated copy.

Compare the two conversion rates, and voila! You've got a clear measure of AI's impact on your conversion game.

Here’s some simple steps to follow for measuring this area:

1. Identify a specific conversion goal (e.g., newsletter signups, product purchases, event registrations).

2. Track your conversion rate for this goal over a set period (e.g., 1 month) without using AI-generated copy.

3. Prompt an AI model to generate compelling copy for your website, social media posts, and email campaigns related to the conversion goal.

4. Implement the AI-generated copy and track your conversion rate for the same length of time as in Step 2.

5. Compare the conversion rates from the two periods to determine the impact of AI-generated copy on your conversion performance.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it, folks—four powerful ways to measure AI's impact on your content strategy. From tracking time saved to analyzing engagement, optimizing for SEO, and boosting conversion rates, AI can be a game-changer for your content processes.

But here's the thing: you won't know how much of a game-changer it is unless you're actively measuring its impact. So, take these measurement strategies and run with them. Start tracking your AI-assisted content efforts and see just how much of a difference it makes.

Trust me, as someone who's been in the content creation trenches, taking the time to measure AI's impact is worth its weight in gold. It's the difference between flying blind and having a clear, data-driven roadmap to content success.

So, what are you waiting for?

Go forth and measure, my friends!

Dive Deeper

And if you want to dive even deeper into the world of AI-powered content creation, be sure to check out the free resources in my skool.

I've got plenty more knowledge bombs to drop on you there.

If you’re looking for more hands-on guidance, check out my One-man Studio Bootcamp program here.

Until next time, much love and peace y’all 🤠