Lauren
When you read blog posts about improving your B2B or B2C content marketing, you’ll often see advice about tracking key marketing metrics.
While this advice is solid, it is not very helpful if you do not know which marketing metrics you should track.
What qualifies as a key metric?
Should you spend all your time and effort pouring over every single data point available to analyze? Should you just focus on one specific metric and make all of your decisions based on that set of data?
If you don’t know which metrics will be most important for your business to track, you will miss out on the advantages of tracking this data in the first place.
Fortunately, we have you covered!
Here are five marketing metrics you should track to take your content marketing to the next level:
1. Traffic by source
If you want to drive traffic to your website, or even simply maintain a steady stream of traffic, you need to know where your website visitors are coming from.
Are consumers coming to your website through your social media pages? Your cold email marketing campaigns? Your podcast?
When you know the main sources of your website traffic, you can adjust your content marketing strategy to optimize these sources and bring underperforming sources up to par.
If your Facebook posts are driving the majority of your traffic, for example, that is a good indicator that your Facebook content is compelling and engaging enough to attract consumers. However, if your Facebook posts are barely getting any traffic, it’s a sign that you need to step up your social media marketing efforts.
One of the best tools for tracking your traffic sources is Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can see which of your website pages, blog posts, or other content drives the most traffic.
2. Social media engagement
If someone likes, comments, saves or shares one of your posts on social media, there is a good chance that they found your content engaging, entertaining, or useful in some way.
It’s important for you to track social media engagement because it will let you know what type of social media posts resonate with your target audience.
If the quote images you post only get a small handful of likes and shares on Instagram, but the video content you post gets hundreds of likes, shares, and comments, then you should spend less time and money on creating quote images and more on developing high-quality video content for your audience.
Social media can be an incredibly valuable tool for your business if you are able to use it effectively. By tracking your social media engagement, you can see which parts of your social media marketing strategy work and which ones don’t.
3. Bounce rate
Your website’s bounce rate can tell you a lot about the quality and relevance of your content.
The bounce rate is the percentage of consumers who immediately leave (or bounce) when they see your landing page.
A high bounce rate can occur for a number of reasons. If you post a misleading link or promise content that you can’t deliver, your consumers will leave your website. You may also notice a high bounce rate if your content isn’t relevant or your content isn’t optimized for mobile users.
If you notice a page on your website has an alarmingly high bounce rate (over 75%), scour that page and see how you can improve it. While the bounce rate may be to user experience issues like slow loading speeds, it could also indicate that there are issues with your content that you will want to resolve.
4. Conversion rate
Your conversion rate refers to the number of consumers who completed a desired action on your website after viewing your content.
This action can be anything from downloading an ebook to subscribing to an email newsletter to clicking on a video.
If you have low conversion rates for certain aspects of your website, you should be mindful of the content on these pages. You might need to make structural and formatting changes like splitting larger paragraphs into smaller, more digestible sections so that your website visitors can see your call-to-action without getting lost in a wall of text. You might need to use stronger action words and more compelling headlines to attract your online audience and encourage them to take action.
Monitoring your conversion rates helps you stay on top of which parts of your website might need to be changed in order to push your traffic through your sales funnel.
5. Return on Investment
The best way for you to determine whether or not your content marketing efforts are successful is to track your content marketing return on investment (ROI).
A high return on investment indicates that you are getting your money’s worth when it comes to the content you are putting time, energy, and money into creating. However, a low ROI shows that your content marketing strategy is not yielding results.
If you are worried about whether or not your content marketing strategy is paying off, keep an eye on all of these marketing metrics.
If your ROI is low, consider working with professionals who have the expertise necessary to help your brand reap the full benefits of content writing and content marketing.
