Which Content Marketing Metrics Should You Track?

The right content marketing metrics provide business owners with the information they need to thrive in the digital marketing world. These data points offer precise insights that shed light on a company’s marketing strategies. Using them correctly makes it easy to adjust marketing efforts so that the different forms of a brand’s content perform as effectively as possible. 

However, knowing how to utilize the right metrics for a company’s specific goals can be complicated. 

In this article, we’ll cover a few of the most commonly used content marketing metrics that business owners use to enhance the production of their content.

What Are Content Marketing Metrics?

Content marketing metrics are both quantitative and qualitative pieces of data that business owners can use to enhance their marketing strategies. Analyzing these data points can make it easier to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. A great number of these metrics exist, so it can be challenging to know which ones to look at for an accurate snapshot of your performance. Different metrics can be helpful when it comes to understanding various aspects of your brand’s success. As such, it’s important to monitor the right metrics and analytics so that you can gain valuable insights into your content marketing strategy.

Following the right metrics can enable business owners to:

• Determine how well their existing content performs
• Discover which types of content are most favored among their audiences
• Optimize their strategies by promoting content that works and making improvements where they’re most needed
• Ensure that their content marketing endeavors remain aligned with their overall brand goals

Crucial Content Marketing Metrics to Track

There are an impressive number of different analytical tools out there that can help you monitor different marketing metrics. Fortunately, you don’t have to become an expert at tracking all of them. Depending on what you want to learn and accomplish in terms of growing your brand, there are a few important metrics you should know about. 

In this section, we’ll go over a few aspects of your brand management and cover a couple of key metrics to follow for success. By discovering the basics, you’ll have what you need to expand your knowledge and explore a greater number of metrics as you learn.

Let’s take a look at common content marketing metrics for website traffic, social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, and customer conversions.

For Website Traffic

Your website is going to serve as one of the prime destinations for your audience members and customers to visit. As such, you’ll want to keep track of how well your website attracts and engages visitors. These metrics should help.

• Page Views: As the name suggests, your page views record the number of times a specific page on your website has been visited during a certain time period.
• Unique Visitors: When your page receives unique visitors, this means that brand-new people are taking a look at your website rather than having repeat visitors checking out the same page several times.
• Bounce Rates: Bounce rates measure the number of people who initially visit your website, but leave too early to really explore the page they access.
• Time on Page: This metric records the average length of time that visitors spend on specific pages. The longer your visitors spend on your pages, the better they’re engaging with the content that’s on those pages.

For Social Media

Social media is one of several channels you can use to grow your audience and draw visitors to your store or website. To make sure that you’re creating the right content for your audience, try tracking the following metrics.

• Engagement: Engagement metrics can include the number of likes, shares, and comments that your social media posts receive. Keep track of these so that you can gain awareness about the sort of content your audience resonates with.
• Follower Growth: Follower growth is the measured increase that occurs in your number of social media followers between two points in time. You can review your follower growth by the week, the month, the year, or a timespan of your choosing.
• Click-Through Rates (CTR): Click-through rates refer to the percentage of your content’s viewers that click on specific links provided in your social media posts or ads. These links usually lead to your website or store. The higher the rate, the more successful the ad or post has been in drawing a crowd to your links.

For Email Marketing

Effective email marketing can be a great tool to add to your marketing arsenal, but it’s important to make sure that the content you send appeals to the individuals on your mailing lists. To track your email marketing success, you might want to make use of the following metrics.

• Open Rates: Your open rates refer to the number of people in your email list who actually open your emails. It’s important to compare these rates against your email bounce rates so that you can get a good idea of how many people are reading your emails.
• Click-Through Rates: Like your click-through rates for social media, your email click-through rates determine how many times your email recipients are clicking on one or more of the links in your emails.
• Subscriber Growth: This metric is also referred to as your “List Growth Rate.” It records how quickly the list of people who subscribe to your mailing list grows. The higher the growth rate, the more people who are interested in receiving your newsletters or marketing emails.

For SEO

Part of attracting an audience involves making sure they can easily find your content on search engines. A well-developed SEO strategy is essential when it comes to bringing organic traffic to your pages and staying relevant to your audience. To enhance your search engine optimization efforts, keep an eye on these metrics.

• Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is the number of page visits that come from non-paid clicks, meaning the content that appears in organic search engine results.
• Keyword Rankings: This metric refers to your website’s position in search engines when it comes to the use of specific keywords. The higher you rank for a specific keyword, the more trustworthy your website tends to be to search engines in terms of providing information on that keyword.
• Search Visibility: Your search visibility is the percentage of clicks on your website that come from all of the keywords you track. This metric helps to determine your brand’s visibility among your competitors.

For Conversions

Turning audience members into loyal customers is what every business owner hopes to achieve through the provision of high-quality content. To keep an eye on your conversions and fine-tune your approach, take a look at these conversion-related metrics.

• Conversion Rates: A conversion rate is the number of visitors to your website that complete a goal you’ve set for them. For example, if someone on your email mailing list clicks a link to your store and makes a purchase, that person has been converted from a reader to a customer.
• Cost per Conversion: Also called “Cost Per Acquisition,” this rate covers how much it costs to obtain a new customer. If you’re using paid ads to attract customers, your CPA or CPC will refer to the cost of the ad content that earned you a new customer.
• Customer Loyalty: This rate keeps track of your repeat customers and records the number of loyal customers your brand has earned. Because it’s far harder and more expensive to secure new customers than it is to keep current ones, keeping an eye on this metric is a must.

Content Marketing Metric Tools

Monitoring your content marketing metrics can be time-consuming and challenging, but fortunately, there are a plethora of helpful tools you can use. To get started with tracking important metrics, try familiarizing yourself with the following programs.

• Google Analytics: for website performance metrics
• Google Search Console: for search engine performance metrics
• SEMrush: for SEO and keyword performance metrics
• Hootsuite: for social media management metrics
• HubSpot: for measuring the performance of your marketing campaigns
• Mailchimp: for managing your email marketing campaigns
• Hotjar: for monitoring and improving user experiences on your website

Content marketing is an incredibly dynamic process, and achieving success isn’t a one-time thing. Growing your brand is going to require continuous efforts and adjustments, so be sure to give yourself the time you need to frequently monitor your brand’s performance. Familiarize yourself with the metrics that are most appropriate for your needs and use them to carefully construct a constantly evolving plan that yields you the results you’re looking for.

If you’d like assistance improving your content marketing efforts, we invite you to reach out to Content Cucumber. Our experienced team of marketing professionals can help you take your content to the next level. Schedule a demo with us today!