Most important content marketing performance metrics to track
It’s no secret that content marketing has become one of the most important tools in a marketer’s toolkit. It’s essential to measure the success of your content marketing performance to analyse its success. After all, you’re investing time and resources into creating content, so you need to know if your efforts are paying off.
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There are a number of content marketing performance metrics that you can use to measure the success of your content marketing. We’ll check the most important metrics you should track to determine how your target audience feels about your content.
In this article, we’ll go through 8 essential content marketing performance metrics that you can use to analyse and assess your content’s effectiveness and determine whether your business is reaping any tangible benefits from the content you’ve generated.
What are content marketing metrics?
Content marketing metrics are measurement standards that indicate how well your content creation is performing.
Content marketing metrics are data elements that help your marketing team track the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy to determine how it’s working in relation to your target audience. In other words, content performance metrics let the marketing team see how well the approach adopted resonates with the intended demographic.
It’s relevant to B2B or B2C, but it presents several challenges. Measuring content can be challenging, but the most critical metrics are simple to measure, relevant to your objectives, and actionable.
Content marketing metrics data will help you, for instance, to evaluate how well your content is performing on social media, the traffic it creates and if this traffic leads to sales or leads. Metrics and return on investment (ROI) for content marketing allow you to evaluate the results of your inbound marketing approach.
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First, set your content marketing goals
Before you start, make sure you establish your goals for the content marketing metrics plan. Ensure your client-focused efforts will be directed to the purposes desired by the business strategy approach.
With clear objectives in mind, you’ll be better able to determine what kind of content to produce, how often to post it, and how often to make necessary adjustments to your plan, like, for instance, increasing brand awareness, leading generation, customer retention, etc.
Google Analytics is one of the best free tools for analysing your site’s performance. With the use of analytics data, you may develop future strategies to improve your site’s performance.
The 8 most important content marketing performance metrics to track
1. Website Traffic
Traffic is what keeps online content alive. If nobody is landing on your page or reading your articles, it doesn’t matter how great your pages or blog posts are – nobody will see them, and they won’t do you any good.
In its simplest, traffic is one metric you must keep track of. It’s a measure of the strength of your brand (effectiveness of your website) because it measures the behaviour of your prospective customers, including total visitors, traffic sources, session duration, user engagement and changes in organic traffic.
In Google Analytics, the metrics you want to be looking at are:
- Users – the total number of unique site visits.
Assessing the number of unique users enables you to evaluate the size of your audience.
- Page views – the number of times the website page was visited.
It provides a general view of how your content performs compared to other publications of the same period and indicates which topics are most appealing to your target audience.
- Unique Pageviews – this measurement, according to Google Analytics, “aggregates the pageviews generated by the same user, on the same page, in the same session” and counts them as one.
Unique Pageviews indicate how many sessions the page view was viewed at least once.
These metrics allow you to locate where your visitors are coming from (geographically), how they found your website and the type of device they are using.
Use this data to focus your marketing efforts on the channels that provide the highest-quality traffic to your website.
2. Social Media Engagement
When used properly, social media can be a powerful method for expanding customer reach, attracting new visitors, and closing sales. User engagement (likes, shares, comments, etc.) on social media can help you evaluate the success of your efforts. For instance, on Twitter or Facebook, you may click on them to learn more about their reach and engagement.
When measuring user engagement, consider:
- Which mediums offer the greatest success in communicating with your intended audience?
- When do visitors seem to interact the most?
- What forms of media (infographics, stories, articles, videos, etc.) generate the most interest and participation?
You need to strategically design your social media material to reach your audience and provide them with the greatest value. Consider the intention of your visitors coming from social media and direct them to the specific pages where they will get the most value.Â
3. User Behaviour and Engagement
Engagement is not solely the result of social media sending visitors to your website. In addition to analysing social media engagement, you must monitor how long visitors spend on your site, whether they came from social media or search, and how many pages they see during each session.
Obviously, the goal is for them to stay on your site as long as possible so they may consume more of your content (and be funnelled to a sales page). Through Google Analytics, Audience Overview, you can see the total number of sessions and visitors, the average number of pages per session, the average session duration and your bounce rate.
Your goals are to have a large number of pages per session, a long average session duration (depending on the length of your content), and a low bounce rate for content intended to be read.
4. New Leads
New leads are the visitors who have provided their contact information through your contact form, downloaded bulletins or other sign-ups while interacting with your content. You will tend to have more leads when your content offers more relevance to your visitors. Getting new leads is the first step towards converting your website traffic into customers and, ultimately, revenue.
To track your leads through Google Analytics, you need to set Goals. With Goals set, you can easily monitor your website’s progress in meeting its goals and improve its performance when necessary to enhance the performance.
A warning: Ensure your goals are well defined to measure the leads that are coming through. You need to get your content in front of the right people. It’s easy to get leads from the wrong audience, especially those coming from social media.
You’ll need to convey your message to the right audience and evaluate how they respond to it – does it resonate with them? Otherwise, you run the risk of getting the wrong leads, which will only bounce because you are not answering their particular questions. Â
5. Conversion Rate and Sales Tracking
Great! Now you have some leads. How will you measure if those leads are converting? How many leads are turning into paying customers?
Conversion Rate measures the percentage of users who have accessed the content and taken action. Comparing sales and revenue to the total number of website visits is a simple way to determine whether your inbound marketing activities deliver genuine value to potential customers.
There are several kinds of conversion you may expect, according to your goals. The most common are:
- Leaving a comment in a post.
- Subscribing to a newsletter.
- Submitting a contact form.
- Downloading content, such as an e-book.
Tracking Conversion Rates lets you see which content drives the most conversions and purchases. Google Analytics also enables the creation of custom goals, which may be used to establish and track sales targets. This data will help you determine what percentage of site visitors actually complete a purchase.
6. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a straightforward content marketing metric for measuring the performance of landing pages and website content. Bounces are single-page viewing sessions, and your bounce rate is the total number of single-page watching sessions divided by the total number of visitors.
Several factors contribute to high bounce rates, including, low-quality landing pages, poor site structure, low-value visual or written content or poor loading times.
High bounce rates typically imply a poor user experience, whereas repeated page visits during a single session suggest a high-quality lead.
Use this measurement to reduce bounce rates and enhance conversions and your return on Investment (ROI) from inbound marketing.
7. SEO Performance
Another important metric to measure content performance effectively is your SEO performance. Several different metrics can be tracked here. Undoubtedly, your position on the search engine results page (SERP) for a given keyword phrase is the most significant factor. Rankings are not static and tend to fluctuate slightly; nonetheless, you want to see your tracking remain stable if you are in a good position or improve to a better spot, demonstrating that you’re acquiring trust and authority.
You can use Google Search Console to determine the terms you rank for and track how your rating fluctuates over time.
Better SEO will result in increased traffic, leads, and, ideally, sales and conversions. And don’t forget that superior SEO begins with quality content.
8. Authority
Unlike other measures, authority takes time to build, but it’s crucial to monitor because of its high significance.
Having high authority will not only improve your SEO, which means you will receive more search traffic, but it will also help you grow your brand, increase trust, and boost your conversion rate.
You can use Moz’s authority metrics as a general reference for how Google may evaluate the authority of your page and website. The domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority.
Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to the question of what is a “good” DA and PA to strive for; you merely want to outscore your opponents!
Strategic approach to content marketing performance
By effectively collecting and utilising content performance measures, you will be on the right path to understanding your clients’ user behaviour and reacting to it. If you want to remain in the competitive digital world, you must continuously adopt content performance metrics to understand why specific content gets shared and engaged. Start collecting the most fundamental metrics described in this post but don’t restrict yourself to them. As you acquire comfort handling each measurement, proceed to others. Google Analytics, Google Source Console and other analytics tools continuously evolve and enhance a holistic view of each area to ensure that you examine each one comprehensively. Â
I advocate balancing the value of each metric to incentivise your desired behaviour. When you are creating content, ensure to be very clear with the purpose of the content and make sure that whenever metrics you’re using for that measurement are aligned with the objective you have in mind.
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