Marketing without measuring = throwing darts in the dark.
You might hit something, but you are very unlikely to be making the most impact when you don't know what you're aiming at.
By tracking content marketing metrics, you turn the lights on; you get all the information you need to make sure your marketing efforts (and marketing budget) never go to waste... or create a lil dart hole in your wall. 🎯
Here are some of the content marketing metrics you need to track if you want your content to:
- Hit the right audience
- Provide real value
- Get the very best results
15 content marketing metrics to track
-
Organic traffic
Tracking organic traffic is tracking the number of visitors content through unpaid search results—and boy, do we love when the budget isn't touched? Organic traffic indicates how visible your content is in the SERPs, and your content's SEO effectiveness.
Keep an eye on overall organic traffic growth and also traffic to specific pieces of content. -
Time-on-page
Time-on-page is the metric that tracks how long visitors spend reading or engaging with your website content. A longer timeframe typically means your users are finding your content valuable, engaging, and relevant. Less time? The likelihood is that you're going to want to read more about the next metric too...
However, make sure you evaluate time-on-page with context; a 2-minute read time might be great for that short blog post you did last week, but not-so-good for the in-depth guide you've been pushing. -
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who click off your site after viewing just one page. This is usually down to the fact that your content isn't meeting visitor expectations (eg. search intent or content quality), or you're attracting completely the wrong audience. Either way, it's something that will help drive your marketing strategy (in the right direction). -
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, which might be:
👉 Signing up to your newsletter
👉 Downloading an e-book
👉 Making a purchase
This directly ties your content to business results, which is certainly one way to get your CMO's attention. -
Email subscriber growth
Email marketers, this one's for you! Email subscriber growth is the rate at which your email list grows through your content marketing efforts—that might be through more 'Sign up for our newsletter' CTAs, creating a brand buzz on social media, some real good website design, or word of mouth just because you have a very readable newsletter.
This content marketing metric indicates how effectively your content builds a loyal audience; an audience that wants to hear about anything and everything you have to say as a brand. You're gonna want to track new subscriptions and unsubscribe rates. -
Social media engagement
Social media is a significant hub for content marketing, and how often your content is shared is an excellent way to keep track of how engaged your audience is with your content. Track likes, shares, comments, and clicks across all your social media channels to see how well your content resonates with your audience... and how far away you are from going viral, obviously.
A tool like BuzzSumo can help you identify which topics and articles are being shared the most, giving context to what is being shared and why and helping develop your social media strategy. Of course, what tools you use and what data you gather depends on the goals of your content marketing campaign but what content is being shared is a fast way to estimate your success on the platform. -
Backlinks
The number AND quality of other websites that link to your content is known to impact the SEO of your website. It gives Google (and other crawlers) a good idea of your website and general content authority, as well as how valuable it is to others in your industry. -
Page load speed
Page load speed is the metric for how quickly it takes for your website content to load for its users. It's a technical metric that impacts both user experience and search rankings, but is important to content marketers when considering slow-to-load content like videos or GIFs to pages. Each page needs to be built to take it! Aim for load times under 3 seconds, and if you're unsure, check out PageSpeed Insights. -
Return visitors
This one is about the number of users that come back to your site, indicating whether your content keeps people coming back for more. -
Unique pageviews
Like pageviews, this is a fundamental metric to understand how often your content is being engaged; however, unlike ordinary pageviews, this tells you only when you are attracting new visitors. So, although customer retention is more important, you still want to find out when you get unique views.
Presumably, an increase in unique pageviews means your new content marketing project is engaging. As new people visit your content, you have a hope of converting them into regular customers. -
Customer retention rate
While you always want to be adding new customers, it is even more important to keep your old ones coming back. Retaining old customers is much cheaper than getting new ones, so to get a good ROI, you want as high of a customer retention rate as you can get.
By looking at this metric, you’ll get an idea of how often a customer visits your content and how much time passes before they return. This information will help you decide when to add new content to keep your old customer coming back. -
Cost per lead (CPL)
Cost per lead is working out how much you spend on content creation and promotion or distribution, and diving it by the number of leads generated. This helps measure return on investment (ROI) and your content's efficiency. -
Pages per session
Pages per session track how many pages a viewer looks at in a given session. By looking at this number over time, you can understand how enraging your content is.
If your pages per session stay high, your content is being successful at engaging customers. If low, it might be time to switch up your content marketing campaign. -
CTR (click-through-rate)
CTR lets you know how your keywords and meta descriptions get people to click on your content. After all, your content marketing can’t succeed if no one can find it.
Creating meta titles and engaging descriptions is a skillet all on its own. If your CTR is low, you need to find someone who is better at getting people invested in your product. -
Content decay rate
Content decay rate is tracking how quickly your content's performance declines over time—that could be via traffic, engagement, and conversions. A super helpful metrics when it comes to working out which content needs a refresh or could be repurposed in some way.
Content marketing metrics: Other things to consider
- Traffic sources: Monitor where your audience comes from (direct, organic search, social media, referrals, paid, etc) to understand which channels drive the most valuable traffic, and what content works for different channels.
- Customer feedback: Collect and analyze qualitative data through comments, surveys, and social media interactions to understand how your content actually resonates with readers and identify optimization opportunities.
- Share of voice: Track how often your brand is mentioned online compared to your competitors to gauge your content's impact on industry conversations and brand visibility.
If you don't track, your content's whack
☝️ Lol, what they said. Start measuring, start improving, and watch your content marketing transform from a shot in the dark to a strategic powerhouse. Because at the end of the day, if you're not tracking, you're not just missing insights – you're missing opportunities to grow.
