Are you measuring the right metrics for content marketing success?
Anyone who has poked around in Google Analytics knows there are a lot of metrics to consider. While each data point is important in its own way, there are a few key metrics for content marketing you should prioritize.
7 Metrics for Content Marketing Success
Together, these metrics help paint a picture of whether users are finding, enjoying, and engaging with your content– and whether that content is leading them further down the conversion funnel. Keep an eye on these metrics for content marketing success, and try out the recommended tips for improving these content marketing metrics.
Revenue Generated
Ultimately, the point of content marketing is to bring in more revenue, often in the form of sales or leads. Sometimes, you are able to trace a sale or lead back to a specific content piece. More often, it’s a consolidated effect as you grow an audience that learns to trust your content (and you) over time.
So how can you generate leads and sales from content marketing?
- Create website content that targets strategic keywords in your niche
- Create social media content designed for your target audience
- Get people to subscribe and follow so you can reach them in the future
- Continue pumping out great content for your target audience
- Have a solid lead generation system
For obvious reasons, revenue generated is one of the most important metrics for content marketing success. But it can be deceiving, as content marketing strategies take time to generate clear revenue. While it’s possible to have “quick hit” success with social media or PR blasts, cultivating search engine rankings for keywords takes time.So while revenue generated may be the key content marketing success metric, it’s more of a long-term KPI than something to expect within the first few weeks. The remaining metrics for content marketing success will help you measure your progress along the way.
Email Opt-Ins
Your email opt-in rate is a telling sign of whether site visitors are enjoying your content and are intrigued by what you have to offer. Getting someone to visit your site is hard enough– impressing them enough that they decide to sign up for your email list or download your digital freebie is another level entirely.
The benefits of an email list are clear. You have a growing audience of people you can reach out to at any time with new offers and content. You get to build a relationship with them over time through that content. And you’re not beholden to the ever-changing algorithms of social media platforms, who much prefer you pay to promote your content.
What are some ideas for increasing your email opt-in rates?
- Offer a lead magnet of genuine value to site visitors
- Run social media ads for that lead magnet to reach your target market
- Create a sexy email landing page with reasons to subscribe
- Link to that page from your social media bios and occasionally share the page on social
- Share snapshots of your newsletter over social and your website so people see what they’re missing
Email often gets forgotten in the age of sexy social media, but 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI (Hubspot). That makes it one of the most important metrics for content marketing.
Pageviews
Are pageviews really among the most important metrics for content marketing? This one always gives me pause, as pageviews can carry the air of a vanity metric– one that is good for the ego but doesn’t necessarily translate to more income– similar to Instagram followers or likes. As a general rule, quality beats quantity, and there are other content marketing metrics that speak better the quality than pageviews.
Still, pageviews are a simple and sure-fire way to see how many people are finding your content online. They might be coming from organic search, a social media post, a link on another website, or a paid web or social media ad. They might even be staying and clicking around, as this metric counts all pageviews even in a single session. An increase in page views over time is generally a good sign and means you’re doing something right. However, without the other metrics for content marketing discussed in this post, increased page views won’t mean much.
Here are some ways you can increase page views on your website:
- Link between relevant content on your website. This helps your visitors easily access relevant content, and it’s good for SEO.
- Create more content! More pages to view = more potential page views. Regularly publish new content such as blog posts and send that content out to your audience
- Advertise. Sharing content with your existing audience is a great start. For an extra visibility oomph, promote that content over web and social. I find that kicking a few dollar to promote an article on Facebook or Pinterest works a lot better than random web ads.
Overall, keep an eye on pageviews over time and try to maintain healthy and gradual growth. But don’t go crazy over it, as it’s far from the most important metric for content marketing.
Average Time Spent on Page
Here’s a good content marketing metric for telling whether people are enjoying your content. Average time spent on page is exactly that– how much time a visitor spent on a single page, presumably consuming that page’s content. If you’re providing in-depth content– with lots of examples, resources, links, and step-by-step guidance– people will take more time to consume your page. Not only does this give you more of a chance to help them and get them more acquainted with you– it signifies to Google that people are appreciating your content. That makes Google more likely to show that content to users searching relevant terms and can increase your site ranking over time.
Some ideas for increasing average time spent on page:
- Write in-depth content that takes your visitor step-by-step through a problem or goal
- Provide plenty of examples and resources in your content
- Include visuals such as images and infographics
- Include videos, even if created by someone else.
- Set links to open in a new window. The previous window will remain active for awhile.
As with most metrics for content marketing, this one comes with a caveat. If you’re providing in-depth content for your users, you definitely want a high average time spent on page. If, however, you have a ecommerce store, where your goal is for people to browse and purchase products, this may not be the most important content marketing metric for you. Most items aren’t going to require a specific time spent on page for the user to buy them. So if your goal is more focused on product sales than lead generation, you may want to swap this content marketing metric for something like “Pages per Session”– the average number of pages a single user will view while on your site.
Unique Visitor
Unique visitors refers to how many new visitors come to your site– meaning that, based on their browser history, they have never visited your site before. This is an indicator that you’re reaching a new audience and bringing new people to your site, which is, obviously, a good thing.
However, it’s really easy to pour a bunch of money into web or social media ads, drive people to your site, then have them bounce immediately because they don’t like what they see or they weren’t the right audience for your product or service. (More on that bounce rate later.) You do want more unique visitors over time– but you also want them to be relevant, high-quality visitors, not randos who aren’t going to interact with or appreciate your content.
Some ideas for increasing unique visitors:
- Advertise. As mentioned, running ads is the fastest way to drive new site traffic, However, proceed with caution and a controlled budget so you don’t overspend, and try to learn more about audience targeting parameters.
- Guest blog or vlog on other websites. Guest blogging on other relevant sites in your niche is a great way to direct traffic to your site and generate backlinks which are good for SEO.
- Maintain a regular email list. Send your audience back to your site when you have new content or offers to share. This increases your return visitor rate, more on that below.
- Regularly post new content to your social media channels. Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all great platforms for sharing linked content. Instagram and TikTok are a little harder to link back to your content, but you can include your link in your bio.
Return Visitors
If it’s not someone’s first time on your site, they’re a return visitor. This is a great metric for understanding whether or not people enjoy your content enough to come back to it. Typically, when someone is a return visitor it means you are either 1) an SEO god and they are constantly encountering your content in search (like I do with Neil Patel‘s content) or 2) generating traffic from your existing audience via social media and email marketing.
Here are some ideas for increasing your return visitors:
- Consistently create new content so you have something to share
- Share new content over social media, in different ways for different platforms
- Maintain an email list with a minimum once-monthly newsletter
- Have a clear visual identity and brand so when you share content over social, media begin to notice and click through
Of all the metrics for content marketing, this one most shows your ability to build and nurture a relationship with your audience. If people are coming back to your website when they see you share a new post or other content form, that means they like what they are getting.
Bounce Rate
While the other metrics for content marketing have been (mostly) good, a high bounce rate is something you want to avoid. It means that users are getting to a page on your website and immediately bouncing– exiting or hitting the back button. It could mean that the content was low quality, or they just weren’t the right audience. It could even mean the page took too long to load or an annoying pop-up got in the way. Either way, a high bounce rate is sign you need to take a look at your content and make improvements. It’s not just for your user experience– Google looks at bounce rate to determine how popular your website content is, which can affect your search engine ranking.
Here are some ideas for decreasing your bounce rate:
- Make sure your page loads quickly– you can use a tool like sep.pingdom to check your site speed and get recommendations on how to fix
- Make sure your content clearly matches what is promised. If your headline, web or social media ad promise one thing and doesn’t deliver, people will resent that and bounce out
- Careful with pop-ups. They can be successful in creasingh email sign-ups, but it is way too often I enter a site and the whole thing crashes because of their pop-up that I wouldn’t have filled out anyway because it came way too soon. If you’re going to use po=ups, use intelligent ones that appear only after a certain period of time and don’t block the content the visitor is there to see.
- Improve your formatting. See how this article uses plenty of subheadings, bullet points, and small paragraphics to break up the information? It wouldn’t be as attractive if it was one big wall of text, would it? Be on hte lookout for way sto amek your site and contetn more visually appealing to visitors, and definitely avoid overwhelm in the content, design, or navigation.
Defining Your Own Metrics For Content Marketing Success
While these metrics for content marketing are indeed important, every campaign will have its own key performance indicators it will use to evaluate success. Is it important to you to increase your social media following? Increase referrals? Decrease your client onboarding time? Increase the average customer life cycle? Your business, audience, and goals are unique, so it stands to follow your content marketing metrics should be as well.
When you are measuring the success of your content marketing campaigns, be sure to keep an eye on these content marketing metrics. But don’t forget to also define a few of your own metrics for content marketing.