21 Content Marketing Metrics That Every Marketer Should Track

Businesses are using web content to market their products and services to a wider range of audiences and therefore, it is also important to understand the impact of these content marketing strategies to achieve overall success. Content marketing metrics are a set of measurements that help you gain an understanding of the success of your content marketing campaigns and whether they need to be refined over time or not! 

If you are in the field of digital marketing, then learning about all these metrics will be useful for you in developing a robust plan to keep track of your content’s performance such as articles, blog posts, videos, social media posts, etc. They help you to determine how users engage with your generated content, and share them with their friends, family & colleagues. 

This information can be utilized in reshaping your content strategies and creating content that is able to attract more visitors to your website. In this article, we are going to explore different types of content marketing metrics that you must keep track of! 

Here Are A Few Content Marketing Metrics That You Must Track:

1) Brand Visibility

It's quite difficult to measure brand visibility, isn't it? But there's one way you can do it! Yes, you just need to take a look at the number of people who are actively searching for your brand online. In Google Search Console, just go to the Search Analytics or Search Traffic and check the “queries” section. If the number has increased over time, then it is an indication that more individuals are searching for your brand online and they are getting to know about your company. 

2) Conversion Rates 

As a business, you might be investing true efforts and money into your content marketing campaigns, and therefore it is important to find out how these efforts are paying you off! You can know this by tracking the conversion rates — the number of individuals who are purchasing your products or services, filling up forms, signing in, or becoming supporters/contributors of your business.

To measure these analytics, you need to establish certain gold in Google Analytics and appoint a specific value to them. If you are struggling with a low conversion rate, then your CTAs (Call-to-action) might not be powerful enough or your content is not that compelling for the visitors. 

3) Lead Quality

Making use of your content to generate more & more leads is tempting as well as possible, but there's one fact that must not be neglected — lead quality, matters the most! You must cooperate and work with the sales team so that it becomes easy to establish an objective system for the goal of measuring lead quality such as estimating the level of interest and earlier knowledge. 

After this, you need to calculate the “average lead quality” that you are receiving via the conversions you have achieved in your content marketing activities. If your lead quality is poor, it signifies that you are not able to target the right people for your business and you must repurpose your content and the direction of your campaigns. 

4) Search Rankings By Specific Keywords

Search rankings as well as organic traffic, are heavily influenced by search engine optimization (SEO). That is why it becomes important for content marketers to gain a solid knowledge of different SEO metrics to improve the ranking of their websites. Keyword rankings give you an overview of the number of search terms that your website is ranking for! As an important aspect of your content marketing strategy, you might be focused on generating content intended for specific keywords in the expectation of achieving higher rankings. 

While you continue to develop content for your website, you might also want to track its progress and to get this information, you can use several tools available online that will help you to find as well as track search rankings. You can use SEMrush, Google Search Console, UberSuggest, and many more.

5) Bounce rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of individuals who leave a web page after visiting it in the first few seconds. For instance, if 50 people have visited your web page and 20 of them just leave your site after seeing the article, then it means that the bounce rate is 30 percent. Measuring bounce rate is a good practice as it gives you the overview and indication to keep it as low as possible. It also gives you the signal to level up your effort to entice users to stay longer on your web page. However, if your bounce rate is high that doesn't necessarily mean your content is of low quality. 

6) Location Of The User

You must take a look at the geographic locations of your site visitors or users to find out if they are all from a close place or are they from scattered places! If they are all coming from one spot, then it might happen that your content marketing strategies are getting too inclined in just one direction. 

However, a solution to this can be adjusting your content marketing strategy to target that particular segment, rather than overflowing them with your message. This can be a better option for small businesses or startups who have limited resources with them. 

7) Domain authority

Domain Authority (DA) is the major factor that has an impact on the ranking of your website in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Domain authority is one such content marketing KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that helps you to measure the quality as well as quantity of inbound links present on your website. Links that are from high-domain authority websites indicate that the content that you have created is genuine, factual, and valuable. 

In short, if there are more high-quality links present on your site, then that means it will have a better domain authority score! And if the domain authority is not increasing, then it might be that your content is not good enough to draw more inbound links. If you want to check your domain and page authority, then you must check out AHREFs or Moz. 

8) Organic Search Traffic

The content you generate on your website has an important role to play in SERP ranking and therefore, curating valuable content is essential! It also helps you to boost the domain authority of your site and generating targeted content regularly helps your page to rank for some specific keywords. 

The mixture of all these elements will help you to achieve higher organic search traffic with time, which is a measure of the number of people who have landed on your website via search. If the content curated by you can boost search rankings, then this ranking must continue to get higher over time. If you want, you can find the data for keeping track of organic traffic in Google Analytics. 

9) Time Spent On A Webpage By A User

Time spent on a webpage means how long an individual has stayed on that particular page of the website. It's an important metric to keep track of as it helps in measuring the engagement of your audience with your website, the subject matter of an article, or the strength of the blog post. 

To do this, you can have a look at every blog post and the time spent by users on those pages to make a comparison between them. Find out the page that is successful in keeping your audiences engaged for the longest time! Also, if there are any that tend to make your readers get bored, how to optimize the low-performing webpage. 

10) Referral Traffic

When it comes to referral traffic is primarily utilized for off-site content actions. In guest posting activities and off-site content efforts, your content will be published on different external sources, and in the body of the blogs, there will be links that direct towards your website. 

Referral traffic means the number of individuals who have clicked on these given links and it can give a complete breakdown of the traffic that came from different sources. Plus, you will be able to follow their total journey on your website to make your content marketing strategy more robust and concentrate on the sites that have given you the most meaningful traffic (users). 

11) Comments On Your Blogs

Comments are a great indication regarding the ability of your content to swirl up a reaction among your customers or audience. The comments that you might receive on your blogs might be a mix-up of a lot of things like compliments, agreements, disagreements, advice, anecdotes, etc. But whatever type of comments people have given, you have successfully managed to light up a conversation, thought, or feeling, which truly helps in building brand equity. 

To measure which articles should be optimized and repurposed, you can make use of the number & quality of comments received on every blog. You can even share the positive comments on social media and even emails making it a part of your content marketing strategy. 

12) Social Media Comments

It is an unsaid fact that blog comments are highly important but with that, the comments that you receive on social media posts are arguably more significant. This is so because they tend to attract more attention and show how people have engaged & given out their perspectives in the comment box. In addition, there will be a wider range of audience commenting on the social media posts, which might not include your customers, so you have the opportunity to capture the interest of the person. 

13) Shares On Social Media Platforms

One of the most important content marketing metrics is to measure the number of people who viewed your blog and shared it across social media platforms with their audience. Sharing blogs or articles on social media is quite easy because it just takes one click! 

This way it becomes easier for individuals to come across shared content because they just have to scroll through their feed, rather than writing & searching (doing those extra steps) to get their way to land on your page. In truth, this type of sharing content on social media allows the content to go viral sometimes! You must find out “how fast-how far” your blogs/posts have been shared. 

14) Social Media Likes

Apart from social media comments & shares, “likes” are one such factor that helps you to understand how your content has an effect on your audience on different types of platforms. But remember that it is not the only defining factor for considering your communications to be a successful one!

However, likes on the posts are a valuable marker because it is obvious that an individual won't like a post if he/she doesn't really get impressed with it! It is said that a post that has received 100 or more than that is generally more effective when compared to a post that has generated just 15 or 20 likes. And if your posts are not able to get more likes then you might consider putting more effort into creating the captions, using the right hashtags, etc. 

15) Subscriber Rate

You need to put a little concentration on the subscriber rate of your emails as well! Yes, if you see an increase in email subscribers in recent times, then it means that the content you are delivering & creating is performing great. It is helping in retaining food numbers of readers and also attracting new individuals to become your subscribers and be a part of your journey. And if you witness a downfall in your subscriber rate, then something might be going wrong which needs to be fixed ASAP. 

16) Subscriber Churn

Subscriber churn can be defined as the number of individuals who have unsubscribed from receiving your emails or newsletters. It means that people have changed their minds about not receiving any emails from you because they might not like the content you produce! It's important to track this metric and find out the reason why there has been a high number of unsubscribes. 

17) Click Through Rates

Click-through rate refers to the number of clicks that are received on your content. When links are used by people to navigate your website, they might also end up exploring affiliated webpages or making a purchase, and this tells a good level of engagement that takes place on the site. So, by keeping track of the click-through rates, you can gain a deep understanding of the impact of your content and find out which type of content boosts the interest level of your viewers. 

18) Page Authority

What is page authority? Well, page authority is quite similar to domain authority and it functions the same way except it just tells you about an individual page rather than the whole website! Web pages individually might have their numbers of highs & lows based on inbound links and internal navigation arrangement. Therefore, if you are trying to boost a blog post, or a page of content that is of high quality, then you can make use of the page authority metric to review how it's likely to be enacted from the perspective of a search engine ranking. 

19) User Demographics

In Google Analytics, you have the option to take a look at your audience’s information such as their age, gender, location, and much more. This specific content marketing metric will help you to have an understanding of how effective your content is in drawing in your target audience. 

20) Download Number Of Your Content

If your company offers content that visitors can download such as guides, e-books, infographics, templates, etc., then you need to track these numbers! The number of downloads must be known as these indicating an advanced level of interest in your audience. When people of your target audience download the content offered by you, it means that they want to save it for some kind of personal reference or share it with someone. 

21) Sales cycle duration

Knowing the length of time it takes for a viewer to make a purchase after initially viewing a piece of content is helpful for guiding your content strategy. For example, after a potential customer follows your social media page, they may view an average of five posts over the course of a week before clicking on one and making a purchase. Understanding this information can help you pitch campaigns to clients and project information about the results of your content plans.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, monitoring and analyzing content marketing metrics is quite essential for content marketers & digital marketers who are striving to maximize the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies. By focusing on key indicators such as bounce rate conversions, and subscriber rate, marketers can attain valuable insights into the performance of their content and make informed decisions to optimize future campaigns. 

It is essential to adjust and refine strategies based on the data gathered, enabling a continuous improvement cycle that aligns with the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing. Eventually, a robust understanding of content marketing metrics empowers marketers to not only measure success but also to improve their overall impact on target audiences, driving sustainable growth and long-term success.

Key Takeaways

• Prioritize engagement metrics like click-through rates and social shares to measure content resonance.

• Conversion tracking is crucial but you must also focus on lead quality, sign-ups, or sales generated by your content.

• It's crucial to have a deep understanding of your audience behavior through metrics like time on page and bounce rates for refined targeting.

• Regularly analyze and adapt strategies based on data collected through these metrics to optimize content marketing performance.

• A holistic view of content metrics ensures informed decision-making, enabling sustainable growth.