Content marketing metrics are designed to help you determine whether your strategy has the intended and desired effect. Your metrics are data points that help you gauge how well your content is doing and can be descriptive (qualitative) or numeric (quantitative).
Here’s what you need to know about making sure your content marketing metrics measure what you want them to.
Why Is It Important to Track Metrics in Content Marketing?
Data is a big part of making better decisions about where to put your marketing dollars. The right content marketing metrics can help you understand your strategy’s effectiveness and provide you with information you can use to tweak your approach and boost your return on investment (ROI).
Here are some reasons why understanding content marketing metrics can help you make the most out of your content:
- Understand whether the content engages the target audience.
- Find out how to modify your content to meet audience needs.
- Improve search engine rankings.
- Identify areas where you can grow.
- Adjust your content strategy in response to what you learn.
Once you know which metrics you want to use and you have a plan in place, you can make regular improvements to your content to make it more effective and profitable.
How Do You Build a Content Marketing Measurement Strategy?
When developing your content marketing measurement strategy, take an approach that will help you measure the most relevant data points. Here are the steps to take:
- Identify your objectives: You should have a clear idea of what your content marketing is designed to accomplish. For example, do you hope to generate leads? Do you want to increase traffic to your website? Are you hoping to improve brand awareness? Have you identified a sales target? Be clear about what different campaigns are meant to accomplish and which pieces of content are designed for specific goals.
- Pick relevant metrics to measure: Measure the right things so the information is useful. For example, if your goal is to boost sales, you want to use metrics like conversion rates and revenue attribution. Brand awareness metrics include tracking metrics like social media shares and referrals.
- Establish benchmarks: Identify your baseline for how content is performing. Then, review industry information and competitor data to come up with targets that make sense. These benchmarks can provide you with something to aim for and help you assess whether your strategy is working to help you reach your objectives.
- Use tracking tools: Content marketing metrics aren’t effective if you aren’t tracking them. You can measure website traffic with the help of Google Analytics. Various social media monitoring tools can help you track mentions and shares. Find out which CRM systems are likely to offer the insight you need.
- Implement changes based on analysis: Once you have information, you can adjust your strategy based on what you learn. You can see what’s working and tweak your content and marketing approach so that it’s more effective in helping you reach your objectives.
Key Metrics for Measuring Operational Efficiency
Operational efficiency metrics are designed to give you an idea of how well a company is managing its cash flow. It’s about making sure you remain profitable while still delivering a high-quality product or service.
Net Income
Pay attention to how much income is from your content marketing efforts. Take the revenue received and subtract what you pay in marketing. This can help you determine the ROI of paid placements, social media ads, and the effort it takes to generate earned media.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Ratio
It costs money to convert a customer. You spend money in various ways using your content marketing strategy, including cost-per-click (CPC), referral costs, advertising spend, and lead generation services. Divide your CAC by the value of the new business. You want a ratio below one, indicating that it costs less to bring in a new customer in relation to how much revenue that customer generates.
CAC Payback Period
Similar to the CAC ratio, this operational metric is designed to help you determine the overall customer acquisition cost. In this case, you measure how long it takes to recover the cost of bringing on a new customer. The longer it takes to recover the cost, the worse your content marketing strategy works.
Key metrics for measuring SEO and paid ads performance
If you want to know how well your search engine optimization is working and how well your paid ads are performing, some key metrics can help.
Organic Traffic
Visitors who come to your website without paid search results are considered organic. You can see this metric on your Google Search Console. You can use information about who clicks on your content from unpaid search results to determine which pages are effective at drawing people in.
Click-Through Rate
This is the number of people who click on your website after seeing the results. You can see this metric on your Google Search Console and use it to determine whether your page is compelling.
Your click-through rate is also valuable for paid ads. You can see how many people click on an ad after seeing it promoted on social media or in other spaces.
Keyword Ranking
Measure how well your site ranks for keywords that you target. You can use tools like Semrush and Moz to see where you stand and get an idea for keywords that might make sense for you to target. When you focus on keyword ranking, you can improve your visibility in search engines.
Key Metrics on the Origin of Your Audiences
Understand where your audiences are coming from to get a handle on where you should improve your efforts and where it might make sense to deprioritize a platform.
Incoming Traffic
Pay attention to where your traffic is coming from. You can use special links to determine which social media platforms send traffic to your website. These links can also help you track affiliates and other sources to see whether you’re getting referral traffic.
Unique Visitors
Find out how many visitors are unique to your website and how many are returning. Unique visitors vs. returning visitors can give you an idea of how well your content is doing to get new people on your website, as well as how many people return.
Key Metrics for Analyzing Engagement
Audience engagement lets you see how much people like your content and stick with it. Understanding whether they’re sticking around can help you decide how to make more compelling content. You can find many of these measures using Google Analytics.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the number of visitors that leave after seeing only one page. A high bounce rate may mean that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for on your website, but it might also mean that they were satisfied with the content on one page and didn’t need to navigate to different pages on your site. If your website consists mostly of landing pages where transactions are completed, a high bounce rate may not be a bad thing. But if your website is a marketing funnel that requires users to navigate through more than one page, a high bounce rate could be a red flag.
Session Duration
Session duration is a metric that measures how long someone stays on your website during a visit. The longer they stay to poke around, the more engaged they are. Related to this metric is pages per session, which lets you know the average number of pages viewed during a session.
Pay attention to how long people are on your site and the time they spend on different pages to determine which are more likely to convert to sales.
Key Metrics for Checking Audience Growth
If you’re trying to gauge how well your content marketing strategy promotes growth, you can start with your baseline metrics and work to improve them to match your stated benchmarks.
Pageviews
Measure the pageviews your site gets in a month. This can give you an idea of an overall trend. Do more people visit your site and see your pages than before? This can be a good metric to consider if you’re trying to drive traffic to your website.
Impressions
This can help you see how many people are looking at your ads and promoted posts. This gives you an idea of how your audience is growing on social media as well.
Engagement Rate
Some platforms offer insight into how many people actually engage with your content rather than just seeing it. If an increasing number of people take steps to engage, that might be an indication that you really are approaching your goals.
Key Metrics for Tracking Conversions and Sales
Consider whether your content marketing approach is driving revenue-generating activity. Measuring this activity can help you decide which strategies are profitable and have the highest ROI.
Conversion Rate
Understanding the percentage of people who consume your content and then take the desired action is a big part of knowing what works. Conversion rate is expressed as a percentage, and the higher your rate, the more effective your content is.
Cost Per Lead
If you’re trying to figure out where the best leads are coming from, this metric can be helpful. Determine how much you spend to buy leads, get referrals or engage in other activities designed for lead generation. Then, divide it by how many leads you get. The lower the cost, the more efficient your marketing is.
Tools for measuring content marketing metrics
Various tools can help you set goals, determine metrics and measure progress. Here are some suggestions for content marketing measurement tools:
- Google Search Console: Learn what terms people are searching to find your website, as well as get insight into organic search.
- Rockee: A free widget that allows you to collect user feedback. Learn directly from those who visit your site.
- Semrush: Designed to help you find keywords, track conversions and identify trends.
- Salesforce: Provides data related to conversions and marketing campaign metrics.
Best Practices for Effective Metrics Tracking
Once you start tracking metrics, make sure you’re using best practices to get the best information.
Connect Metrics to Objectives
For best results, your metrics should match your objectives. They should measure progress toward the outcome you’re striving for.
Set Realistic Targets
Understand your current position and set realistic targets for your outcomes. Once you reach a target, use the data to set a new objective. As you reach achievable goals, you can build on your success by using metrics to determine the next target.
Review Metrics Regularly
Create a structure for reporting. A regular meeting to review metrics and progress can promote accountability and get your team used to taking ownership of their areas of responsibility.
Key Takeaways
If you want better content marketing, you need to measure your results. Pay attention to relevant metrics and use that data to tweak your campaigns. Once you get the data involved, you’re more likely to experience better results.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What are KPIs in content marketing?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are designed to help you measure the results of your content marketing efforts. They are metrics you choose to help you measure progress toward your objectives.
What are the 5 Ps of content marketing?
The 5 Ps of content marketing are plan, produce, publish, promote and prove. Metrics are used to prove the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.
How to measure content marketing ROI?
Measuring content marketing ROI involves understanding how much revenue your content marketing strategy has generated and how much you spend to make it happen. One formula is to subtract your spend from your revenue and then divide it by your spend. For example, if you spent $100 to generate $150, it would be like this: ($150 – $100)/ $100 = 0.50. Multiply by 100 to get 50% ROI.
