For many of our customers, there are certain times of year when the pressure is on to bring their content marketing A-game.

Whether it’s a seasonal shopping rush, hosted event, or recurring campaign, these annual markers serve as marketing benchmarks — and nothing signifies progress more clearly than beating past performance. But what’s the best way to track performance over time?

In the TrackMaven platform, our visualizer tool makes it easy to benchmark against the historical performance of your own content. In this TrackMaven hack, we’ll show you how to create and use time-shift graphs to track and improve your content marketing over time!

Put Your Marketing Performance In Context: How To Use Time-Shift Graphs For Year-Over-Year Analysis

First, let’s walk through the value of time-shift graphs using Neiman Marcus as our guinea pig. For a retail brand like Neiman Marcus, the holiday shopping season is the time to put the digital pedal to the metal to drive consumer purchases.

And for retail marketers like Neiman Marcus, Pinterest is an especially viable channel. A study from Shopify found that not only are shoppers referred from Pinterest 10% more likely to make a purchase versus those referred from other social sites, but of those purchases, the average order value double that of customers coming from Facebook.

So let’s take a look at Neiman Marcus’ historical performance on Pinterest across the holiday shopping season. Using the TrackMaven platform, we can see in the graph below that Neiman Marcus’ Pinterest engagement across the 2014 holiday season (teal) underperformed when compared with the previous year’s Pinterest performance (orange).

In fact, Neiman Marcus’ Pinterest engagement dropped by nearly a quarter year over year, from 73,499 interactions in the 2013 holiday season (orange) to 55,565 in the 2014 season (teal).

And despite seeing drastically lower Pinterest engagement year-over-year, Neiman Marcus actually increased their volume of Pinterest content during the 2014 holiday season (799 Pins from October-December 2014 versus 633 Pins in October-December 2013).

By pitting Neiman Marcus’ Pinterest performance against itself season by season, we can see that there is room for improvement — especially with the 2015 holiday season looming on the horizon.

Ready to create your own time-shift graphs in the TrackMaven platform? Watch the video below for step-by-step instructions:

Not yet a TrackMaven customer? Contact us to learn more about our platform!