Important Content Marketing Metrics to Understand
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One of the best aspects of digital marketing in general is the fact that there is a metric for everything. Content marketing metrics are numbers you can track, study, and implement changes based on your performance.
If you’re not sure what metrics you should be looking for in your content marketing game, this guide will clear it up for you.
What are Content Marketing Metrics?
Content marketing metrics are essential tools that enable businesses to measure the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies.
It’s important that you have KPIs and targets to measure your performance against. These are crucial for your success and no matter how small or insignificant your content marketing efforts may seem, you want to treat it like a real business. Having metrics and data points help.
So, why do content marketing metrics matter and why should you measure how well your content performs?
By tracking metrics, you can identify what’s working and what isn’t, enabling you to refine your strategy. Metrics help you determine the return on investment (ROI) for your content marketing efforts. Knowing how much revenue or value your content generates compared to the resources invested is essential for making informed decisions.
In my eyes, one of the most important parts of measuring content marketing metrics is learning more about your audience. You can begin to understand what types of content appeals to your audience and what doesn’t.
This is also useful for Google. The ultimate goal is to outrank your competitors and by comparing your metrics against competitors, you can determine what steps you need to take in terms of keyword research or link building to outperform them.
Types of Content Marketing Metrics
Up to this point, I’ve been saying “metrics, metrics, metrics,” but what does that mean? How can you measure the performance of a blog post and what metrics are most important to our success?
Engagement
Engagement metrics measure how actively your audience interacts with your content. Common engagement metrics include likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates. These metrics indicate whether your content resonates with your audience and how well it encourages them to take action.
The best way to track engagement on social media is through likes and comments – it’s a little more challenging on your website.
I like to think bounce rate is a pretty good indicator of engagement. Your users are engaging with you by reading your content and sticking around long enough to scroll and click a little. The time users spend on your website will have a direct impact on your rankings.
Engagement metrics reveal how well your content connects with your target audience. High engagement signifies that your content is compelling and encourages audience interaction.
Awareness
Awareness is a little easier to measure because each time someone discovers your content, you can consider them to be “more aware” of your message.
For some companies like non-profits, awareness is their number one metric.
Use web analytics tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic and referrals. On social media, monitor follower growth and impressions. Measure changes in brand recognition through surveys or brand sentiment analysis.
Whether you’re trying to build a following, an email list, or grow an affiliate site, brand awareness is often the first step. People need to learn about you and your brand before they decide to buy or do business with you.
Creating valuable content using your platform of choice will help make people aware of who you are so you can expand your reach.
SEO
When it comes to SEO, there are a million and one metrics you measure. These determine how well your website performs in the SERPs. Some key SEO metrics are organic traffic, keyword position, and CTR.
Google search console is a great place to get this data.
Here you can see the total clicks, impressions, average click through rate, and average position. These are some of the most foundational SEO metrics that determine the performance of your content.
Make sure you’re creating valuable content, conducting good keyword research, and figuring out what your competitors are doing so you can mimic the top ranking results based on positive feedback from Google.
Lead Generation
Once you have people on your website, you need to capture their information if you plan to market to them in the future. Depending on the type of business, you may or may not choose to do this.
For example, a business that is selling solar panels can’t convert if they don’t have information about the visitors on their site. You need a way to capture that information through a form, download, or submission.
The content marketing metric here would be the number of completed forms. Each form or submission is a single lead.
Lead generation is a critical step in the sales funnel. These metrics show how effectively your content nurtures prospects and encourages them to provide their contact information, ultimately enabling you to nurture and convert them into customers.
Conversion
The ultimate metric is a conversion. The definition of conversion will vary depending on your business.
Here are some examples:
Affiliate Site – Affiliate sale
Local Business – Form or phone call
Ecommerce – Online sale
Non-profit – Form completion, share
Service – Sign up, contact form
So on and so forth…
Whatever business you’re in, it’s important that you understand what a conversion is to you. Using Google Analytics, you can set up certain actions to count as a conversion and it’ll track how many you get up to the minute.
Where to Find These Metrics
There are numerous ways to get this information using different tools. Some of these are free while others are not. It’s important to understand too that you won’t find a lot of data early on with your website – you need to give it some time to develop.
Here are some of the best tools to capture all of these content marketing metrics:
Final Thoughts
That’s it, it’s that simple. The bottom line is, it’s important to have metrics because that’s a big part of what makes digital marketing so great. You don’t have to blindly pour money and resources into something you’re not sure about.
You can track multiple data points every step of the way no matter what platform you’re using. Whether you’re using social media, websites, ecommerce, blogs, or even Youtube, you can track the data and see how your content is performing. Be sure to use the data wisely, pivot, and change as needed.