Top 12 Content Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Are you struggling to measure your content marketing success? Knowing the right content marketing metrics to track is crucial. This article highlights the top 12 metrics to monitor for better visibility, engagement, and ROI.

Key Lessons

• Tracking content marketing metrics is essential for evaluating effectiveness and making data-driven decisions, avoiding the pitfalls of relying solely on gut feelings.
• Key metrics include visibility, engagement, conversion, and ROI, each providing specific insights that guide content strategy and optimization.
• Tools like Google Analytics and custom dashboards help monitor these metrics efficiently, facilitating a better understanding of audience behavior and content performance.

Understanding Content Marketing Metrics

Content marketing metrics are the lifeblood of your content marketing strategy. They give you concrete numbers to measure and make decisions. Without them, you’re flying blind, relying on gut feeling or anecdotal evidence, which can lead to bad decisions.

These metrics help you evaluate and make data-driven decisions. For example, you can adjust your content or distribution strategy if you’re not seeing the results you want from a specific blog post. However, measuring ROI in content marketing can be tricky because it’s a long game and often takes time before you see exponential growth.

You need to use relevant, actionable, and measurable metrics to overcome these challenges. Tools like Google Analytics can be super helpful in measuring content relevance and performance across channels. Avoid the trap of vanity metrics, as they offer no actionable insight.

Breaking down content marketing metrics into categories like visibility, engagement, conversion, and ROI will help you identify the most relevant metrics for your business. This will be our framework to review the top 12 metrics you should track for content marketing success.

What Are Content Marketing Metrics?

Content marketing metrics are the quantitative and qualitative data points that help you evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. These content marketing metrics provide invaluable insights into how well your content marketing strategy performs, allowing you to understand what’s working and what needs improvement. By diligently tracking these metrics, businesses can optimize their content marketing strategy, enhance performance, and justify spending.

Content marketing metrics can be categorized into several types:

• Consumption Metrics: These metrics measure how much traffic your content is generating. Key metrics include page views, unique visitors, and time on site. They help you understand how your audience is consuming your content.
• Retention Metrics: These metrics track how well you retain your audience after their initial visit. Important metrics include return visits, repeat visitors, and email open rates. They indicate how engaging and valuable your content is to your audience.
• Sharing Metrics: These metrics measure how often your content is shared on social media platforms. Metrics like social media shares, likes, and comments show the reach and popularity of your content.
• Engagement Metrics: These metrics gauge how engaged your audience is with your content. Metrics such as comments per post likes per post, and social media engagement rates provide insights into audience interaction.
• Lead Metrics: These metrics track middle-of-the-funnel activities, such as lead generation, lead conversion rates, and lead quality. They help you understand how well your content drives potential customers down the sales funnel.
• Sales Metrics: These metrics measure the effectiveness of your content marketing in driving sales. Key metrics include sales revenue, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs.

By tracking these diverse metrics, businesses can comprehensively understand their content marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to refine their strategy.

Setting Goals and Objectives for Content Marketing Metrics Efforts

Setting clear goals and objectives is foundational to any successful content marketing strategy. By defining your aim, you can create a focused direction for your content marketing efforts and measure your success effectively. Here are some essential tips for setting goals and objectives:

• Identify Your Target Audience: Understanding who you are trying to reach with your content is crucial. Define your target prospects based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, then tailor your content accordingly.
• Determine Your Content Marketing Goals: Clearly outline what you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts. Common goals include increasing website traffic, generating leads, and driving sales.
• Set Specific, Measurable Objectives: Establish specific metrics to measure your success. For example, increase website traffic by 20% in the next six months or generate 50 monthly leads. These objectives should be realistic and time-bound.
• Align Goals with Business Objectives: Ensure your content marketing strategy aligns with your business goals. This alignment ensures that your content marketing efforts contribute to the broader objectives of your organization.

Setting clear and measurable goals and objectives allows you to create a focused content marketing strategy that drives tangible results.

Visibility Metrics

Visibility metrics are your first checkpoint in seeing how well your content performs regarding reach and exposure. These metrics measure how far your content is seen across different platforms, organic search, and social media.

These metrics give you insights into impressions and reach, but remember, high visibility doesn’t mean high engagement.

Below, we’ll get into specific visibility metrics like organic search traffic, page views, and keyword rankings.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is the foundation of content marketing. It’s the visitors to your site from unpaid search results, so it’s a precise measure of your SEO. Measuring this will give you insight into how well your content attracts visitors through search engines.

Tools like Google Search Console are super helpful in tracking organic search traffic. Looking at the page views from unpaid search results will help you see how well your SEO works and what you need to adjust to improve search rankings.

Page Views

Page views are the ultimate metric for measuring your content’s popularity and performance. Analyzing the page views of each blog post can help you understand which topics resonate most with your audience. This metric shows the total number of times your pages are visited, including unique and repeat visits.

Page views help content marketers see what type of content resonates with their audience. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the tool for this. It shows you how many times a page is viewed regardless of the same user visiting multiple times. This data will help you focus on creating more of what your audience loves.

Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings are key to understanding your website’s visibility in search. They tell you how your content is ranking for specific search queries.

My two favorite tools are SEMrush and Ahrefs to track keyword rankings and see changes in your average position on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is gold for SEO opportunities and optimizing your content to rank better.

Audience Source Metrics

Audience source metrics show you where your audience is coming from. These are key to your content distribution strategy and traffic potential. Knowing where your web traffic is coming from is fundamental to content marketing success because engagement and conversions won’t happen without it.

Visibility metrics can help you measure your content’s performance in organic search social media and ads. Below, we’ll look at traffic sources and brand mentions, two of the audience source metrics.

Traffic Sources

Traffic sources are the different ways users get to your website, like search engines, social media, and direct visits. Knowing and understanding these is key to optimizing your content distribution and maximizing how much traffic.

Google Analytics can help you break these down to see which channels work best for your website traffic. Then, you can allocate your resources more effectively and focus on the ones that work best.

Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are when your brand, product, or service is mentioned online. Monitoring these is key to tracking what’s being said about your brand and public opinion and engagement.

Prowly’s Brand Monitoring app can help you with that. You can customize filters to focus on the most critical mentions and see how your brand is perceived online.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics are key to seeing how well your content lands with your audience. These metrics measure comments, shares, and time on the page to give you a clear picture of engagement.

These metrics show what content is converting visitors into customers. In the following sections, we’ll look at specific engagement metrics like average time on page, click-through rate (CTR), and social media engagement.

Average Time on Page

The average time on page metric shows how long users are on a page and how engaged they are with the content. More time on the page means the content meets user expectations, and less time means the content isn’t delivered.

Google Analytics tracks this metric so you can see how engaged users are. Look at the pages with the highest engagement times to see what’s working so you can use that for future content creation.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on a link out of total views. This is key for content marketers as it’s a lead gen and audience interest metric.

Low CTR with high impressions means you need to tweak titles or descriptions. A/B test title tags and meta descriptions to get your content in front of the right people.

Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement metrics track likes, shares, and comments on social media posts. These are key to measuring your content marketing metrics on social media.

Social media engagement metrics show you how your audience is interacting with your content what works and what doesn’t. This data will help you create content that resonates with your audience.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics are the bottom line of content marketing metrics—these measure how your content converts, sign-ups, purchases, etc.

Tracking conversion metrics helps you see how your content moves prospects to conversion. Below, we’ll look at conversion rate and lead generation.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the number of people who do what you want them to do (sign up or buy) as a percentage of visitors over time. This shows how well your content is moving potential customers to action.

The conversion rate tells you if your content is working towards your goals, so it’s a key metric for content marketers. To learn more about conversion rates check out our deep dive on converserion rate optimization.

Lead Generation

Lead gen metrics measure how well your content is converting visitors into leads. High lead gen metrics mean your content is on point with your audience, so it’s a key metric for content marketers.

ROI Metrics

Content marketing ROI is key to measuring the success of your content marketing efforts. They help you measure effectiveness. They help businesses see how their marketing is working and make adjustments. Knowing ROI allows you to justify your content marketing spend and plan for the future.

Below, we’ll look at content marketing ROI and goal value.

Content Marketing ROI

Content marketing ROI is the percentage of revenue from content marketing vs cost over time. This can be calculated by (revenue from content marketing – cost) / cost. This gives you an idea of how profitable your content marketing efforts are.

A good content marketing ROI varies by industry, but anything above 0 is a break even. This helps businesses make informed decisions.

Goal Value

Goal value puts a dollar figure on the specific goals you hit with content marketing so you can measure performance. This helps you know your content marketing worth and what to do next for better ROI.

Retention Metrics

Retention metrics measure how well your content keeps people coming back. These metrics show if your content keeps them interested and brings them back.

Comparing consumption and retention metrics lets you see how well your content works. Below, we’ll dive into specific retention metrics like bounce rate and pages per session.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page page visits. If your bounce rate is high, it means your content isn’t relevant or optimized. Google Analytics will show you where to improve. Reducing the bounce rate means more user engagement and your content being viewed.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session measures user engagement by calculating the number of pages viewed in one session. More pages per session mean users find your content interesting enough to keep exploring, so your content strategy is working and engaging.

This shows user behavior so you can optimize your content to get users to dig deeper and retain better.

Sharing Metrics

Sharing metrics is key to knowing how often your content is being shared and how well it’s performing and engaging with your audience. These metrics will help you understand the reach and popularity of your content and inform your content strategy and distribution.

Getting shares is a good sign your content is being well received. Below, we’ll look at sharing metrics like social shares and backlinks.

Social Shares

Social shares are the number of times your content is shared across social media platforms. This is key to knowing how popular and well-received your content is.

Tools like SharedCount can help you track social shares and see how far and wide your content is reaching. Tracking social shares enables you to create more shareable content.

Backlinks

Backlinks are the number of external sites linking to your content. These links increase content credibility and ranking on search engines. Ahrefs and Moz can show you the total backlinks and referring domains. Good backlinks from good sites will get your content seen and heard.

Production Efficiency Metrics

Content production metrics measure your content creation so you can optimize your content strategy. These are key to understanding your content production process so you can allocate resources and budget better.

Measuring content output and production cost will help you spot operational issues and improve your content marketing. Below, we’ll look at content output and production cost metrics.

Content Output

Content output is the amount of content produced in a given time frame. This can be measured by counting the number of articles or words published over time.

Measuring content output helps you see how your content team is performing and where to improve. By tracking content output, you can ensure your content strategy meets your audience’s needs.

Production Costs

Production costs are the costs of content creation, resources, tools, and people. Tracking these costs helps you manage your budget better.

Looking at production costs will show you expensive content that gets little traffic so you can adjust your budget accordingly. Managing production costs will boost your content marketing efforts.

Optimizing Content Marketing Strategy

Optimizing your content marketing strategy is an ongoing process that involves analyzing metrics, identifying areas for improvement, and making data-driven decisions to enhance performance. Here are some practical tips for optimizing your content marketing strategy:

• Analyze Your Metrics: Regularly review your content marketing metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not. This analysis will provide insights into the effectiveness of your content and highlight areas that need attention.
• Identify Areas for Improvement: Based on your metrics, pinpoint specific areas where you can improve your content marketing strategy. This could involve increasing engagement, driving traffic, or enhancing lead generation efforts.
• Make Data-Driven Decisions: Use the insights gained from your metrics to inform your content marketing decisions. Avoid relying on intuition or guesswork; let the data guide your strategy.
• Test and Iterate: Continuously test different approaches and iterate on your content marketing strategy. Experiment with various content types, distribution channels, and engagement tactics to find what works best for your audience.

By consistently optimizing your content marketing strategy, you can improve performance, drive more traffic and leads, and ultimately achieve your business goals.

Using Metrics to Optimize Content Marketing Strategy

Metrics play a pivotal role in optimizing your content marketing strategy. By analyzing these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance performance. Here are some ways to use metrics to optimize your content marketing strategy:

• Identify Top-Performing Content: Analyze your metrics to determine which types of content are performing well. This could include blog posts, videos, infographics, or social media posts. Understanding what resonates with your audience allows you to create more of the content they love.
• Identify Areas for Improvement: Use your metrics to identify areas where your content marketing strategy can be improved. This might involve increasing engagement, driving traffic, or improving conversion rates.
• Measure the Effectiveness of Different Channels: Analyze your metrics to understand which channels drive the most traffic and engagement. This could include organic search, social media platforms, email marketing, or paid advertising. Focus your efforts on the channels that yield the best results.
• Measure the Effectiveness of Different Content Types: Use your metrics to understand which content types drive the most engagement and conversions. This insight allows you to prioritize the content types that are most effective for your audience.

By leveraging metrics to optimize your content marketing strategy, you can improve performance, drive more traffic and leads, and achieve your business goals.

Historical Performance and Content Relevance

Tracking historical performance and content relevance is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. Here’s why these metrics matter:

• Historical Performance: Analyzing historical performance helps you understand how your content marketing strategy has evolved. This analysis can reveal trends, patterns, and areas for improvement, allowing you to make informed decisions about future content.

• Content Relevance: Content relevance measures how well your content resonates with your target audience. By tracking content relevance, you can identify which types of content are most engaging and effective, ensuring that your content strategy aligns with audience preferences.

Standard metrics used to track historical performance and content relevance include:

• Bounce Rate: The percentage of site visitors who view only a single page before leaving. A high bounce rate may indicate your content isn’t meeting user expectations.
• Exit Rate: The percentage of site visitors who leave the site from a specific page. This metric helps identify pages that may need optimization.
• Average Time on Page: The amount of time users spend on each page. Longer time on the page suggests that users find the content valuable and engaging.
• Pages Per Session: The number of pages users view during a single session. More pages per session indicate that users are exploring your content further.

By tracking these metrics, you can better understand your content marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve your strategy.

Custom Dashboard Creation

A dashboard to track key metrics ties your content marketing to business outcomes. Ahrefs and Google Analytics are essential for measuring your content marketing strategy.

Automated marketing analytics tools can make creating content marketing dashboards a breeze by pulling in data from multiple sources. Below, we’ll go into how to choose key metrics and use analytics tools to build a custom dashboard.

Selecting Key Metrics

Choosing the right metrics is key to tying your content marketing efforts to your overall business goals. Metrics at the top of the funnel, like retention and engagement, will appear in the dashboard.

Finding the most critical metrics will help you focus on the data that matters and guide future efforts, so your content marketing strategy is aligned to your business goals.

Using Analytics Tools

You need analytics to measure and track your content marketing strategy. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide valuable insights into key metrics like impressions, clicks, sessions, and conversion rates.

These tools help you track user behavior and engagement and provide data points to inform your content strategy. By combining data from multiple sources, you can create a content marketing dashboard that shows you how your content is performing.

Conclusion

In summary, tracking the right content marketing metrics is essential for understanding your audience, measuring engagement, and driving conversions. By focusing on metrics like visibility, engagement, conversion, ROI, and retention, you can optimize your content marketing strategy for success. Please start tracking these metrics today to ensure your content marketing efforts are on the right track and achieving the desired results.

Frequently Asked Questions