Are you aware of the importance of content marketing metrics? Are you keen to learn what are content marketing metrics? How does it aid in content marketing?
Initially, as you get to know more, it may seem overwhelming to start analyzing it all at once.
But, they are important key performance indicators. Let’s start gradually by looking into the basic and important content marketing metrics.
You will need them to quantify the success of your company. What is the use of such metrics? They can help the marketers get more return on investment by making more sales. The values help the brand to become more visible online.
Content marketing metrics aid marketers in knowing where they stand. To know whether their efforts turn into profit or in vain.
After all, in the ever-evolving marketing world, it is important for marketers to monitor the brand’s performance.
For marketers who are very new to the content marketing metrics concept, let me first put out to you what are content marketing metrics.
What Are Content Marketing Metrics?
To put it in the most simple words, it is the measurement of the performance of your content. Content marketing, as you know is the strategy to distribute the content to retain customers.
- How many views do you get on the content you made?
- Knowing what is the profit that you make out of strategies you implement while marketing the content?
- Did the strategies work to add value to the content?
Implement further strategies based on such metrics, to improve the content quality. There are metrics that quantify such efforts by what you call content marketing metrics.
I hope you are somewhat clear with what are content marketing metrics.
There are some basic metrics that one can use. Although some metrics vary from business to business. But, in this blog, I will brief you on the very basic ones that are important for each kind of marketer.
Let’s learn some of the basic and important content marketing metrics that any marketer can use for the company’s growth. Most of them focus on the performance of the website, overall.
So, they are also content marketing performance metrics.
Top Ten Important Content Marketing Metrics That Every Marketer Must Know In This Digital Era
1. Website Traffic
We always talk about online traffic or organic traffic when it comes to content writing or marketing. An optimized content goes on to get good website traffic, we know that too!
You can know the performance of your website. You can actually monitor the website traffic! It can make you nervous, but you got to look at your stats, to improve the website’s performance. Don’t worry, you will not only get a hang of it but also gradually improve on the basis of it.
You can monitor
- The number of visitors
- Major sources of traffic
- The most commonly used device that leads the visitors to your website
- The localities of the viewers (this can tell you how viral your content is across the globe)
- Audience engagement with the website content
- Variations in the organic traffic
For measuring the website traffic one can use tracking tools like
- Google Analytics
- Clicky
- Adobe Analytics, etc.
2. Click Through Rate (CTR)
Before you learn about CTR, let me just introduce you to a very basic yet important term. That is, “Impressions”.
If you already know what impressions mean in digital marketing, you can skip the next paragraph. If you don’t, then just keep reading.
In two words, impressions mean the “digital views”. It can be a blog post, ad, video, or any digital content. It appears in the search results or in some viewers’ feeds, or social media. If the title of your content or its thumbnail is seen, then it counts as an impression. By tracking impressions, again you can know from where your content is getting noticed. Is it through suggestions? Or, organic search? Landing pages? etc.
The CTR is linked to impressions. Let’s see how!
The viewers see the title and click on the digital content to watch it. Quantifying it defines the click through rate. A ratio of the number of clicks to the total impressions is what defines the click through rate.
A content marketer can analyze the performance of the content. CTRs are important metrics for marketers, content creators, and advertisers. CTR is one of the important content marketing performance metrics.
The marketing and creative team can focus on some vital things here. What can be done to optimize the content?
Working on the
- Keywords
- Meta titles
- Titles and their attractiveness
- Thumbnails
- Tagging
So, satisfying the user’s urge to watch the content plays an important role in improving the CTR.
Also, for PPC ad campaigns, it is the CTR that Google uses to mark the quality score.
You can use Google Search Console to track the impressions as well as CTR. Go to ‘Performance’, from there to ‘Search Results’. On it, click on ‘Queries’.
3. Shares And Likes
Firstly, putting out the content on shareable platforms is important. Social media platforms help you achieve this.
Building up a community in social media helps you grow more. It helps the business to stay relevant by interacting with its customers on social media. It contributes a lot to content marketing.
The number of shares and likes that you get on the content in social media, keeps you aware of the quality of content that you post. Also, if the content gets genuine critical comments, then you can use it for further improvements.
Engagement in social media plays a great role in content marketing.
So, tracking down the number of likes, shares and responses are vital. Analyzing these metrics helps you shape your future content.
4. Followers And Subscribers
The online community or social doesn’t just end by having a certain number of likes and shares or followers.
As you grow, you get more engagement. Then the more is the expectation for your brand to come up with exciting content.
The marketers need to come up with strategies to entice more followers and subscribers.
The more you do that, the more famous the brand would become. The more likely for them it would be to go down the sales funnel. The more will the sales be. So, it is important to track the number of followers and subscribers.
These metrics inform the marketer, how much progress they made in building a community.
It reflects whether you are leading them to your website. Is your audience taking interest in your content or losing interest? Are you able to get more followers? Are you making more shareable content or not? Is the content catchy enough? , etc
5. Metrics related to pages per session
Pages mean the pages on your website. Sessions mean the number of visits that a viewer makes each time.
So the metrics based on pages per session tell you the number of pages that the viewer visits, every time they land on your website.
When you analyze such kinds of content marketing metrics, it helps you know how engaging the viewers find your content to be. It tells you where the website content sparks an interest in them or not.
The higher the value, the better the engagement is. The lower its value, the more you need to work on the website content. You can strategize your content based on the value the pages per sessions metrics show.
6. Conversion Rate
One of the very main aims of the marketer and their company is for their viewers to take the desired action. To take this action, website and social spaces require a ‘Call To Action’.
The desired action can be, for example, to make a sale. Then the CTAs guide the viewers in the website. The CTAs they take, convert them into customers.
This is where conversion rate comes into play. The frequency at which the viewers take the CTAs in your digital space. It quantifies the desired action taken by the customers.
CTAs are of use when the audience has to
- Subscribe to a newsletter
- Download contents
- Make a purchase
- Leaving a comment related to more information to lead them through the sales funnel, etc.
So, the formula to measure conversion rate is the number of customers (taken the CTA) divided by the total number of visitors to the website.
Such content marketing metrics tell a lot about the efficiency of the marketing strategies of the company.
It decides the return on investment (ROI) too! The more frequently the visitors to the website take CTAs, the more is the ROI. Higher conversion rates reflect that the marketing strategies have worked well for your website. The higher the value, the more is the sales you make.
7. Backlinks
The backlinks can be internal, which means their use in the posts within the website. Or, it can find its space on external websites.
The metrics related to it show how many backlinks the content possesses. You can also identify their origins in the case of external backlinks. When a high-quality page refers to your links and gives you a backlink the more likely it is for your content to rank high.
It again reflects the quality of your content. You can also optimize it to make it better by analyzing such content marketing performance metrics.
8. Ranking On Search Engine Page
Who doesn’t want a good ranking when viewers make their searches on search engine page results (SERP)?
When you search for the content in the search engine, you will come to know the ranking of your content. To be in the top five or ten, one must optimize their content. For that, make the posts SEO-friendly. Using relevant keywords, titles, tags, backlinks, URLs, etc can help you in content optimization.
Such metrics help you know whether the brand ranks on the top page or not.
9. Average Time On The Page
To rank in the top search engine page on Google, one of the criteria is to know how much time the visitor spends on the web page. That also reflects the interest of the visitor, in accessing your content. Also, it shows that they want to establish a connection.
The more time the visitor takes, the more good the engagement is. It means that the viewer likes the contents and the more likely it is for them to take the desired action.
Marketers must work on adding such strategies that would make the visitor spend more time hanging out on the website.
You need to optimize the landing page, the content whether it is blogs or UX design. Try to make it more attractive. More engaging. More SEO-friendly.
10. Bounce Rate
Again this is one of the content marketing performance metrics. It questions the quality of the online content.
The value of this metric shows how many visitors came to the page and did not visit other pages and left. The higher the bounce rate, the more efficiency you require to bring in the marketing strategies.
It does not mean that the content’s quality is bad. But, it also means that the quality is not enticing enough to the viewers. For a brand new page to have a high bounce rate is normal, but gradually one needs to optimize it. So, analyzing such kinds of metrics, must not be a discouragement to you.
Marketers can come up with strategies to minimize the value of the bounce rate by optimizing the landing page timing, etc.
Conclusion
As a marketer in today’s time knowing what are content marketing metrics has become very important. It is useful to both beginners in marketing and a professional getting used to the metrics. Knowing to apply content marketing performance metrics to improve quality has become a must. To generate more return on investment, using these metrics is important. These goodies would help the marketers analyze the loopholes or prospects and act according to them. To increase the sales of your brand, you must use such metrics to upgrade your brand nowadays.
