6 Metrics for Measuring Your Content Marketing Performance

While content marketing has been around for some now and being used across several industries to educate and interact with the target audience, several companies are still not conversant with this tactic and how to measure success.

Most likely, these organizations rely on assumptions, but the birth of the digital world that provides metrics for tracking and measuring various aspects of content marketing will solve this problem.

With effective strategies and clear goals, you can successfully measure your content marketing efforts. The post will tell you about the 6 metrics you can use to measure how successful your content marketing strategy is.

The Objectives and KPIs of Content Marketing Strategy

It’s important to understand the objectives and the key performance indicators of your content marketing strategy or campaign. It’s these two elements that will help you to identify the appropriate metrics to use when tracking your efforts.

That involves understanding why your business exists in the first place. Answering the question about your higher purpose helps define the objectives and KPIs and establish your overall marketing goals.

Improve Your Share of Conversation

Brands communicate through marketing. Through such activities, they can create brand awareness, drive website traffic and online mentions. In the end, they are able to tell how popular they are compared to their competitors.

Content marketing was designed for this purpose. To create awareness and increase the share of conversation. It involves creating topics that add value to your target audience and increases the brand mentions both social and online. The ultimate goal is to grow that share.

Content Marketing Performance Measurement Metrics

1.    Traffic

Creating amazing content is important; however, without people visiting your site renders your efforts useless. So the traffic metrics is important because it gives you more insight about your site’s visitors.

Google Analytics will give you the total number of unique visitors or users of your page, the number of times a certain page was viewed or pageviews, the number of times one user has viewed a page, and more.

With such information, you can establish the amount of traffic individual pages are receiving on your site. Another information you can generate from this raw data is how people actually got to your content. They could have been referred to you by post from other sites such as social media or your monthly email newsletter, among others. It also reveals the users’ location, how they found your site and the type of device they use to access your site.

For instance, when your blog posts target the Asian audience but find out that most of your readers are from Europe, you have to adjust your future content strategy to your European visitors. Another way is tailoring your content based on the social media channel with many followers.

2.    User Behavior

This metric is not effective when used alone; however, it can give you a lot more insight when coupled with indicators such as traffic performance. The two can tell you about the content performance and reader engagement.

Google analytic is still a valuable tool to use to measure user behavior because it gives you data such as:

• Time on Page
• Pages/Session
• Bounce Rate
• New/Returning Visitors

According to this tool, good content brings users to your site organically, and they spend a significant amount of time reading the post.

3.    Keyword Rankings

Google Search Console can help review rankings of your content based on their core keywords. A ranking improvement indicates that your keywords are of high value and competitive. The rankings will also keep you excited about the progress and push you to continue moving forward.

Also, the SERP ranking gives you the position of your page in the search engine results based on a specific keyword phrase. Since these rankings are never static, good content originating from your site can make them stable or improving.

So continue using Google Search Console to identify the top keywords you’re ranking for and monitor how your ranking changes over time.

4.    Shares and Backlinks

The overall goal of your content marketing strategy is to provide value to your audience. Content shares and backlinks metric helps you tell whether your audience is happy with your content and if they are sharing it with others.

For instance, how many times was your recent post shared on social media or social shares, and whether your infographic picked up by leading publications in your niche or industry?

The number of backlinks tells you how valuable your content is based on the number of times it was referenced or linked to by other sources and sites. Further, the social media comments can tell you how people interact with your content and indicate that your future content might get more traction.

The shares and backlinks metric tells you whether you’re achieving your awareness-related goals, gaining authority and trust.

5.    Impressions and Clickthrough Rate

Google Search Console is an excellent tool that helps you to track the impressions and click-through rate (CTR). Keywords help your content to rank higher such that when a user searches for the information contained in your post, the search engine presents your site at the top of the search engine results.

Content with high impressions and CTR is doing well, while the ones with low impressions and CTR should be adjusted.

6.    Lead Generation

You want to generate leads using your content. Google Analytics can help you achieve that by setting goals that comprise conversion opportunities like contact us, demo requests, asset downloads, and submissions. These goals should be realistic, and you can adjust them progressively.

Further, you can qualify these leads so that you can tell what impact these leads have on your sales and subscriptions.

Conclusion

The list of these metrics can be longer based on your content marketing program goals. The 6 metrics discussed here should help you start your journey to measure your content marketing performance.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are some of the amazing tools you can use to track your progress.