We’ve often heard “Content is king”, —but you need to consistently ensure that the content you put out is relevant to your marketing goals. If your content is not so relevant, then you need to take steps to improve it. However, you can hardly improve or effectively manage what you do not measure and track. The impact of relevant data and insight on informed decision-making cannot be over-emphasized. Still, it can be a challenge to know what content marketing metrics to track out of the many out there. The right content marketing metrics offer critical data for informed decisions, boosting ROI and improving strategy. Below, we discuss six essential metrics for tracking success.
Why You Should Track the Right Content Marketing Metrics
Data overload can confuse marketing efforts. It can be difficult to know what data to act on if you are not tracking the right metric or tracking too many of them. Besides, you may get overwhelmed with too many metrics or find it difficult to set them up and track them accurately.
You may ultimately receive data that is vague and unlikely to give good results. This is especially true for vanity metrics and false positives. For example, you may be tracking likes and comments that are not relevant to the right demography or are relatively inconsequential to the actual growth of your brand.
Zero in on the core metrics tied to your objectives to better quantify performance and set actionable goals.
Top 6 Content Marketing Metrics
Your choice of content marketing metrics to monitor may depend on your goals. However, the following top six content marketing metrics are important for content marketers to track:
Conversions and Acquisition Costs
For most marketers, conversions top the list of priorities. Your priority is most likely to improve your bottom line and drive the growth of your business. While the other metrics may ultimately lead to more conversions, you do need to particularly measure and track conversions no matter how complex the customer journey gets.
For example, it is important to determine whether your blog posts bring in more sales compared to your email newsletters. If that is the case, you may decide to produce and optimise similar blog posts.
Conversion rate is a metric that tracks the percentage of qualified leads from a specific action. Examples of desired actions include actual sales, email list signups, and surveys. Your objective is to increase conversion rates and move prospects down your sales funnel.
Here are options for measuring and tracking conversions:
- Set up Google Analytics tracking (your web developers can help you out) to allow you to track conversions and identify high-performing content. You can then optimise your content strategies.
- Use customer journey tracking services such as Oribi and Ruler Analytics.
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Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC calculates the average cost to secure a new customer. While you’re paying attention to conversion rates, you would do well to consider at what costs they come.
You can derive it by dividing your overall content marketing expenses by the number of new customers that you acquire. Of course, you would want to keep CACs low for cost-effective content marketing.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The Click-Through Rate metric describes the percentage of users who click on a specific link in your content whether it is a blog post, social media post, or email. When you record a high CTR, it indicates that your content is garnering good attention and people are encouraged to take action.
- One way to measure CTRs is to make use of link-tracking tools such as ClickMagick and Bitly. You can also use them to optimise calls to action (CTAs) and thereby improve CTRs.
- Optimise the title tags and meta descriptions of your blog posts to make them appealing. This can lead to higher SERP rankings. For example, you may include main keywords, use structured data, and keep the titles between 15 and 40 characters.
- Perform A/B tests on title tags and meta descriptions to identify copies that perform better. You may use a content optimisation tool here.
- The use of a tool such as Ahrefs can help in identifying top-performing posts and pages by traffic.
- You can also use Google Search Console to track the CTRs of your posts.
Social Media Engagement
The social media engagement metric indicates the level of engagement that people give to your content on various social media platforms. This can include shares, likes, comments, and retweets.
The amount of social media engagement that your content receives can be an indication of its quality and relevance. They can also contribute to the search engine ranking and reach of your content. Moreover, social shares can help drive traffic to your website.
- Social media analytics tools that you can use to track social shares across various platforms include Sprout Social, BuzzSumo and SharedCount. Use these tools to learn what content types get the most shares and what platform they’re on.
- Then, you can use the gained insights to tailor your content and optimise your distribution strategy. For example, you may make titles more compelling or use eye-catching images.
- Always respond to interactions for deeper audience connections. You can also engage with those who share your content.
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Traffic
Traffic-related metrics reveal how many visitors your content attracts and their overall experience. Key indicators include:
Organic Traffic
This measures the number of site visitors from search engines. You would want to sustain consistently high and relevant organic traffic in order to keep attracting visitors that would convert into leads and sales. Sustaining high organic traffic means:
- Use Google Analytics to check the trends and performance of various content. You can check for content types or topics that generate consistently high organic traffic.
- Take steps to create content that relates to such successful themes.
- After identifying relevant keywords, optimise content for relevant keywords.
- Do not forget to optimise content that is not performing well.
- It is also important to update your website content to stay relevant.
- Remember to keep the technical SEO of your site in a sound state. For example, ensure that your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.
- Make good use of tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush to monitor rankings for target keywords.
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Referral Traffic
Referral traffic shows how many visitors land on your site from external websites or online sources.
The metric also indicates how well your content is being shared and discussed online and it can contribute to brand awareness and site authority. Google Analytics is a go-to tool for measuring referral sources.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who leave your webpage after viewing it and failing to interact with it. A high bounce rate suggests visitors leave immediately after viewing one page, hinting your content or site experience isn’t meeting expectations. Most users usually interact with sites that they love.
Such interactions may include clicking on CTAs, dropping a comment, or clicking on other resources.
Tactics to lower bounce rate:
Insert internal links in your content
Provide compelling CTAs to explore more pages
Average Time on Page
With this metric, you learn the duration of time that users spend on each page of your site and thereby know what content captures their interests and engagement. Higher dwell times usually signal relevancy and quality.
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Pages Per Session
Here, you learn the average number of pages that users view during single sessions on your site. High numbers often point to engaging, interconnected content on your platform.
Research shows that many sites struggle to keep session duration above 2–3 minutes.
Inbound Links (Backlinks)
Inbound links or backlinks help to enhance the SEO and authority of your website so you should use this metric to assess the number of external websites that link back to your content.
For example, you may use backlink checker tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console to monitor the backlinks on your site. For better link building:
- You must ensure that the quality of your content is high and link-worthy enough to attract inbound links. This is how you can more easily boost search engine rankings.
- Thereafter, you can analyse content that receives high-quality backlinks. High-quality backlinks are those that come from relevant and high-authority websites.
- Then, use this insight to ptimize your content creation strategy.
- Meanwhile, you should regularly reach out to high-authority and relevant sites that could possibly link to your content.
- Watch out for harmful or spam links to disavow if necessary.
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Past Performance
The historical performance of your content is important because a proper analysis of it can provide useful insights on what to improve and what works best. You may check previous content performance for content decay and initiate the following steps:
- Check for Content Decay: This involves checking for content that gets outdated or becomes less relevant over time resulting in a decrease in organic traffic. If you’re able to catch content decay on time and update/refresh such content, you are more likely to maintain its performance. Tools that you may use to track blog traffic over time include Ahrefs and Google Analytics.
- Outdated Content or Keywords: A 20% or more drop in traffic over a 3-6 month period may indicate content decay. Check if the information is outdated or whether the keywords have become less relevant.
- Update the Content. This may involve adding new content, improving internal linking, and refreshing statistics.
- Update Publishing Date: Remember to subsequently change the publish date and promote the post by sharing it on social media platforms.
Track the Right Content Marketing Metrics
Ultimately, focusing on key metrics like conversions, CAC, CTR, social engagement, traffic, and past performance ensures your content marketing produces tangible outcomes. Regularly review and analyze these data points to refine your content strategy, enhance user engagement, and spur ROI growth.
Need more insights and lessons on content marketing? Visit Exclusive Blueprint, a digital marketing blog powered by Buzztide Technologies. Our blog provides insightful tips, trends, and tools specifically focused on measuring content marketing success, optimizing strategies, and enhancing audience engagement through actionable metrics.
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