Sophie Steffen, a self-described performance marketer, could not resist asking Tom Cox of Semrush Academy and Brian da Silva of Attio for the one metric they obsess over. Both refused to give her one, and the refusal is the most useful thing in the conversation. Here is how each of them actually judges whether a piece of content did its job.
The Baseline Nobody Should Skip
Tom starts somewhere deliberately unglamorous: page views. He knows it sounds basic, but he defends it as proof the word is getting out – and a surprising number of content teams forget to do that. He has a name for the failure mode: creation limbo, the state in which a team constantly pumps out new material without ever distributing it internally or externally. So his team sets distribution goals and finds ways to hit them, because content nobody sees cannot succeed by any other measure.
Measuring Whether It Actually Helped
Page views prove reach, not value, so Tom’s team layers on the experiential side, especially for courses. The mechanism is simple: a feedback form at the end of each course that captures a quick satisfaction score and answers the only questions that matter.
“Is it useful? Did you learn something? And is it clear?”
He is honest about the limit of his current model. He would love to tie all of this neatly back to retention – to prove that people who took a course stuck around – but he admits the team is not there yet with a robust enough attribution model. Building toward that is the long-term goal of the academy, with Skilljar as the system he hopes will eventually connect the dots. The honesty matters: he is describing a metric he wants, not pretending he already has it.
High-Value Versus Low-Value Engagement
Brian splits social cleanly into two jobs – driving awareness and driving traffic – and then makes the distinction most dashboards flatten. Not all engagement is equal. A like is cheap. What he wants is high-value engagement: saves, sends, and comments, anything that costs the user an extra step. The save is his favorite signal precisely because the platform makes it inconvenient.
“If you are saving a piece of content on LinkedIn, it’s because you really found it useful.”
A comment is similarly weighted, because the user has spent time consuming the content before contributing to it. Traffic, by contrast, he keeps simple: everything is tracked through UTMs so he can see social’s contribution to the site. And he is candid about scale – at Attio the social program is at what he calls level one, so he leans on the onboarding survey too, the “How did you hear about us?” question filtered by channel, to triangulate impact a young program cannot yet prove through a full mixed-marketing model like the one he had at a previous company with a legacy YouTube engine behind it.
Video Has Its Own Scorecard
The metric Brian is most animated about is video, because he thinks the current rush toward it is half-blind. Everyone wants content to be human-led, and video feels like the answer – your face on camera. But nobody, he argues, thinks about what video actually demands. So he judges it on watch time, average time watched, and drop-off, looking for exactly where viewers leave.
“If you make a one-minute video and people are only watching for an average time of 15 seconds, they’re missing the entire point of your video.”
Pressed by Sophie for a single benchmark, Brian held firm: it is the mix. One metric tells you little, and social is not just organic – it is the creator program, paid creators, and employee advocates together. A line like “we had 25,000 impressions last month” neither impresses him nor tells the story he wants the business to understand. The complete picture, assembled from several honest signals, beats one flattering number every time.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Tom Cox and Brian da Silva.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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