06-19-2025
Today we have access to more data than ever. Determining which data points are most important to measure success can feel overwhelming. Often having the ability to sift through and dive deep on any and all data can lead to data paralysis.
There is a simpler way. To confidently answer how you measure success, it’s important to first understand your "why" — the purpose behind your content program.
Having a clear and present “why” helped ground our strategy and led to a meaningful goal and key performance indicators (KPIs) that demonstrate success for the Mitch Daniels School of Business Graduate Programs Blog.
In one year*, the Daniels School Marketing & Communications team launched and optimized the Graduate Programs Blog using this framework and achieved:
*January 2024-December 2024
There are two essential questions to uncover your “why”: Why does the content program benefit the business? Why does the content program benefit the audience?
For the Daniels School, both perspectives shaped a clear hypothesis.
Business Why: The Graduate Programs Blog filled a gap in the prospective graduate student journey. When I joined the Marketing & Communications team three years ago, our strategy favored outbound tactics: sponsored content, digital ads and email marketing. Inbound tactics like search engine optimization (SEO) were underutilized.
Adding SEO to our strategy ensures our content is discoverable, sustainable and cost-effective. Creating an owned content platform makes our website a destination for our audience. Owned content programs provide more security. At any point in time external platforms like Meta, LinkedIn and X could go away, taking your discoverability with them. Often, to even get discovered on these external platforms, brands have to pay-to-play. SEO lends itself to being a low-cost tactic. Aside from employee-related costs, SEO relies on the value of your content for visibility and reach.
Audience Why: Through persona research and development, we’ve arrived at a place of deep understanding of the motivations, challenges, objections, interests and questions of prospective graduate students. Many of the concerns and thoughts that go into making a decision didn’t have to do with any specific graduate program. Rather, they include barriers to entry, career outcomes, finances and funding, unique student experiences, work-life-balance, and more important considerations.
Previously, our website primarily was focused on product information: the graduate programs we offer. The Graduate Programs Blog allowed us to address student needs more holistically. It’s a wonderful companion to our core website that prioritizes personas first and links to program details only when relevant.
By combining both "whys," we formed a clear hypothesis: The Daniels School of Business will increase website traffic from prospective graduate students through search with educational, persona-based content.
Once you have a hypothesis, it becomes easier to define a measurable goal and supporting KPIs. In our case, the main goal or action we want the audience to take is visiting our website following a Google search. To determine if we’re achieving this goal, we’ve chosen to monitor the number of pageviews from organic search. Since our audience is prospective graduate students, we use a bonus metric to keep track of new users. This tactic is most effective when it consistently attracts more new users than returning ones, signaling expanded reach of our target audience.
KPIs gauge progress toward your goal. Tracking them helps identify issues and opportunities early, providing chances to pivot when something is off or optimizing when a quick win is apparent. We focused KPIs on our SEO strategy to increase visibility and audience reach.
SEO is a long-term strategy. Tracking total ranking keywords helps assess growth and identify the search trends of your audience. While you may occasionally lose some rankings or positions, what matters most is whether your trend line is moving up. Over time, this helps you align content with audience needs at different decision stages of the customer journey.
At a renowned institution like Purdue, branded search traffic is expected and likely drives website traffic from individuals already familiar with the university. The biggest opportunity for SEO growth and obtaining new website visitors comes from non-branded keywords — long-tail keywords and queries that are aligned with your persona. By addressing topics relevant to prospective graduate students, even those unfamiliar with our programs, we provide value and earn trust early.
Ranking for hundreds of keywords is great, but not if they’re only linked to a handful of posts. Tracking the number of blog posts earning rankings shows whether your creation efforts are working — is the content we’re publishing performing as we intended?
When a single blog post ranks for multiple keywords, specifically ones that are different (but hopefully related) you can take two courses of action. First, there may be a benefit to expanding the existing blog post to better address the related keywords. Or your strategy may benefit from creating new posts for each grouping of related keywords to further expand your content volume. Either way, you’re continuing to provide your audience with the information they need, as indicated by their search behavior.
It’s tempting to dig into dozens of data points — and we often do. But without a defined purpose, even rich data can be misleading. There are many other metrics not noted in this blog post that help uncover insight, and ultimately that’s what data is here to do. Without that north star, it can be confusing and overwhelming to align your work with outcomes, create consistency in reporting and avoid data paralysis.
Also, goals and metrics can evolve. Content programs and tactics like SEO are long-term strategies, and as they mature, new hypotheses will emerge, leading to different goals and KPIs. For example, now that the Graduate Programs Blog has increased traffic, our next focus is lead generation. How can we guide a new website visitor to converting via a request for information form or downloading a resource?
Goals and KPIs may also need to be reviewed as technology changes. I’d be remiss not to address how artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting search behavior and SEO tactics. Moving forward, metrics like keyword or blog post position in the search engine results page (SERP) top 10 will have to consider or include features like Google’s AI Overview.
Again, a sound framework — built on purpose, goals and KPIs — turns data into insight, activity into progress and foreshadows what comes next for continuous improvement and scale.
Shannon Hess is a seasoned marketing leader overseeing brand, content, and creative strategies for the Daniels School of Business at Purdue University. Her proficiency in leveraging data to inform decisions and her drive to continually improve, break silos, and test hypotheses has led to an estimated $7M+ in revenue growth. She is committed to combining creative thinking with emerging technologies and fostering a culture of curiosity, transparency, and quality to solve complex problems and deliver imaginative solutions.
The Graduate Programs blog earned a bronze award from the North Central Indiana chapter of the American Advertising Federation in 2025.
