Content Marketing Metrics To Look Out For

Content marketing is a tactic used across industries to create awareness and educate audiences, but many organizations are still figuring out how to truly measure success. Content writing services in India use metrics to check the performance of your website.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, a promising 80% of respondents do use metrics to measure performance, but that number drops to 65% when asked if they have KPIs to measure performance, and even further to 43% when asked if they measure content marketing ROI.

As any marketer will tell you, the time and resources required to drive success with content marketing are significant. Producing the product is just one part of the puzzle. You also need to consider the costs associated with distributing, marketing, and selling the final product.

Marketing teams need to justify the investment to produce high-quality content. It is important to have metrics and be able to measure against established KPIs. This post will discuss metrics that can help you and your team show the value of content marketing. It also explains why setting goals is important.

Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood for online content. No matter how great your blog posts may be, if nobody visits your site, they won’t do you any good.

Traffic is the most important metric to measure if you want to get it down to its essence. You can also split this traffic into different categories. The metrics that you should be tracking in Google Analytics are:

• Users- The total number of unique visitors to your site
• Pageviews — The total number of times that a page has been viewed on your website
• Unique pageviews calculate the metric, a pageview is a page that a single user has viewed multiple times.

These metrics can be used to give you a rough idea about the traffic to each page of your website. The data can be broken down to show where your traffic comes from, how they found it online and what device they used to view it.

These data can help you plan your content strategy for the future. If you have a U.S.-based target audience but are getting significant traffic from the U.K., you can tailor your future content to appeal to U.K. users. You can also tailor your content to your social media followers’ data if you get a lot of traffic from one of your social channels.

Conversions

Your site is being visited by many people who enjoy reading your blog. What else do they do after they finish reading? Are they reading your newsletters and clicking on the links? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Are they completing an e-commerce transaction.

B2B companies are best if they can convert leads into sales. A few buyers won’t buy from an article that isn’t about them. B2B companies should monitor the buyer journey, from click-throughs and subscriptions to more complex conversions such as offer registrations.

You decide what constitutes a conversion. Some content may be designed to sell physical products, while others might increase awareness and authority. You might consider focusing more on engagement metrics and social shares if this is the case.

If your blog is used primarily as a sales tool, it’s important to track the number of sales it generates. This can be done by activating eCommerce in Google Analytics. You will see the page value for all your content under “Behaviour”.

This gives you an average revenue for each page based on the number of users who have visited that page to purchase something or meet another goal.

Engagement

Sometimes, the traffic to your site is more indicative of how effective your efforts are at getting people to click on your links than your content.

You can track how long people spend on your website and which pages they visit each session to really see if they are engaged with your content.

The goal is to keep them on the site for as long as possible so that they can read more of what you have to offer (unless, of course) you want them to go to a sales page as soon as possible.

This information can be viewed under Audience Overview in Google Analytics. You can also see your total sessions and visitors.

You want content that is easy to read. This means you need a lot of pages per session and a long session time (depending on how long your content is), as well as a low bounce rate.

Keyword Rankings

Keep track of your core keywords and monitor rankings on a monthly basis. This requires keyword research to identify your priority keywords targets. While we prefer to use SEMRush for keyword tracking, there are other tools available.

Ranking improvements can be a great way of communicating how your content program performs, especially if you have high-value keywords or competitive terms. Stakeholders will be more excited to see the improvements and encourage them to continue moving forward.

Here are some tools to use: SEMrush, Google Search Console

Lead Generation

Last but not least, content marketers should be looking at the number of leads their content generates. Many marketers believe that content is crucial to securing funding.

This is the first step to measuring it. Common conversion opportunities include demo requests, contact us submissions, and asset downloads. Analytics segments can be used by teams to calculate how many conversions were made from the blog or resource hub.

With CRM integration, marketers can also review the quality of leads and converts. A certain amount of qualified sales leads or marketing leads will be more important in measuring success.

A great way to gauge your content engagement is by analyzing how it performs on social networks.

There are many metrics that you can track, but the most important one is how often your content has been shared across multiple social media networks. Shares indicate that other people find your content valuable.

Google Analytics doesn’t provide this information, but social sharing buttons placed on content will display the number of times it has been shared across different platforms.

BuzzSumo, another tool to track social media shares, is an easy way for you to quickly identify the most popular content on your website.

Metrics for retention

You can see how well your website retains visitors by using retention metrics.

Rate of return: You can see the return rate by comparing how many visitors you get from new users to returning visitors. Each group will be different, but you should have a balanced mix.

Pages per visit: How many people visit your page and spend time exploring it before leaving? This measure shows how valuable and engaging the bulk of your content, not just the section that brought you to it.

Rate of bounce: The bounce rate of your website is the percentage that visitors leave after viewing the first page. The bounce rate is generally lower. This means that visitors tend to spend more time on your website. To repurpose and update content with a higher bounce, identify it.