5 Content Marketing Metrics to Measure Performance and Strategy

Content Marketing Metrics

Content in a broader sense can exist in any form, whether written, video, or audio format. There comes the need of content marketing metrics and strategy. Primarily, the purpose of creating any form of content is to create awareness about your product or service, communicate brand value, generate curiosity among the audience about your brand and ultimately motivate them to buy your product or service. However, it is difficult to identify which content is giving you better results among the entire pool of content. Thus performance assessment becomes a critical step to ensure whether your content marketing strategy is heading in the right direction or not. 

Content marketing metrics helps to measure performance and track for a better strategy. Effective performance assessment lets businesses recognize strengths, areas of improvement and helps to set benchmarks with the aid of historical evidence.

In this pursuit, performance evaluation metrics are effective tools that enable you to identify the number of individuals consuming the content and how they are interacting with your content i.e., whether the content is being liked or not. However, even if your content is being liked by many, it is still difficult to determine whether content promotion efforts are driving any actual sales.

On the other hand, the past year has underlined the importance of effective content, as businesses were unable to physically reach their audience. Thus more and more businesses are turning towards developing sound content marketing strategies or taking significant efforts to revamp their existing strategies. Either organization is taking help from a content marketing services agency or doing it by themselves.

Meanwhile, if your organization does have a content strategy in place, without measuring its performance you risk all your efforts going to waste. Also, you possess a risk of losing a significant amount of time and money by sticking to an unsuitable content marketing strategy.

Hence, you can start evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing plan.

Content Marketing Evaluation Metrics

Content Marketing Evaluation Metrics

1. Consumption Metrics

This is the first step towards measuring the effectiveness of your content strategy. This metric evaluates basic goals such as increasing traffic to your website or raising the average time spent on the site.

It includes evaluating

Page views

This statistic lets you know about the total number of pages viewed and also gives you an overview of top-performing pages. 

Unique visitors

This number indicates the size of your audience or number of unique visitors

Average time spent on the website

This allows you to gain insight into how much time a user has spent on your website.

Downloads

You can understand how many individuals are choosing to read content on your website.

Consumption metrics data is essential to understand the initial information such as
The number of individuals consuming your content and downloading it.
Through which channels are they consuming the content?
How frequently and duration for which they are engaged with the content?

Nevertheless, these metrics alone are not enough to understand the complete picture of your online content marketing strategy.

2. Retention Metrics

Retention Metrics

These metrics allow you to understand how many individuals are spending more time on your website. However, the number depends vastly on the industry in which you are operating and the type of your audience.

The most commonly used retention metrics used are

  • Bounce rate which indicates how many visitors have left your website instantaneously just after visiting the first page of the website. Ideally, the bounce rate must be 40% or below. A lower bounce rate shows that content on your website is enticing enough to engage the audience for a longer time period. Hence, if your website has a higher bounce rate, you may need to revamp the content. Google Analytics will also help you in identifying where the user left your website.
  • Unsubscribe rate indicates how well your content is being received by the audience.
  • Percentage of returning visitors vs. new visitor rate, if you have more number of returning visitors indicates that your content is received well by the audience.

In addition, Google Analytics can also help you get hold of a total combined number of individuals who have viewed the website.

This content marketing metrics give you a clear sense of whether or not the viewer likes your content. If the aim is to create and maintain audiences, you will need to use retention metrics along with consumption metrics to measure overall success.

3. Engagement Metrics

Engagement Metrics

These metrics help you in identifying your loyal audience. The following parameters provide you the important information,
Blog comment: Tracking the reader’s helpful feedback gives you valuable insights into how your blog is interpreted by your readers. It also lets you find content that generates better engagement.

Page Depth

This metric provides the data of average pages your audience visits per session.

Click-Through Rate

CTR represents the percentage of clicks on the links to the views it has collected. It means that the viewer is reacting to the call to action (CTA).

Social Media Engagement

This metric indicates the number of likes, comments, and favourites generated for your content on different social media platforms.

4. Sharing Metrics

Sharing metrics

The metric reveals how effective your content plan has been in building brand awareness. Basically, the analytics reflect whether the audience considers the content helpful or not, since people post content that is either entertaining or informative.

Social Media Shares

Track the number of likes, re-shares, or re-tweets that your content receives in order to obtain an understanding of what works well for your target audience.

Email Forwards

Monitor the number of email subscribers who forwarded your email. This data indicates that your email has content that motivated the subscribers to share it with their network.

If your content is getting significant likes or shares then you can be assured that your digital content marketing strategy is working perfectly fine.

5. Lead Metrics

These metrics help you in identifying where your leads came from.

Following are some critical lead metrics:

Gated Content Downloads

content marketing strategy to check performace

Tracking the download count of your content gives you important insights into the content.

New Newsletter Subscribers

If an existing user subscribes to your newsletter, then it is an excellent indicator for B2B content marketing that users want to stay updated with your further content.

Apart from these statistics, marketers can keep a tab on the following key performance indicators to further evaluate the effectiveness of their content marketing strategy.

Generating qualified leads

Keep track of the number of qualified leads your content is able to generate. However, generating leads covers only half of the process. These leads must get transformed into sales phone calls. If not, you must rethink your SEO content strategy.

Sharwari Waghmare

I'm a content writer with love for creativity. I write SEO articles for businesses that want to improve their Google search rankings. My professional background in Engineering and Finance has given me a broad base to have a unique viewpoint on various technology, finance, health, and fitness-related subjects.

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