How to Measure the Success of Content Marketing

Thomas Lore is a 26-year-old writer. As a creative and diligent freelance blogger, he is always seeking new ways to improve himself by writing technology-based work. 11 minute read

Modern-day digital marketing strategies can only do top-quality content marketing to stay ahead of the curve. 

You should craft and distribute valuable and relevant content to engage and retain the target audience. In the case of proficient content marketing, the company will increase its brand awareness, generate leads, and, as a result, boost sales.

However, how to understand you are moving in the right direction? More than simply looking at the number of likes and shares is needed to assess the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns fully. Instead, tracking multiple metrics, including KPIs and data points, will help businesses measure their content marketing efforts correctly and in detail.

This post provides an in-depth guide to determining the level of content marketing performance success. Plus, you will find specific metrics to monitor and tools and techniques to analyze data. So keep reading to develop stellar content within your marketing strategies work frames.

What is Content Marketing, and Why is it Vital?

Before going any further, it is worth understanding what content marketing is all about. Content may involve a range of formats like email marketing, ebooks, social media, videos, blog posts, etc.

The primary (but complex) task of merely spreading your brand’s key message may require immense different marketing content-connected tasks. Content marketing takes place on the engagement and educational (brand awareness) end of the funnel, and to this end, it relates more to a conversation than conversions. Because of this, you must incorporate that strategy appropriately because it serves as the foundation of a successful outcome.

The Importance of Content Marketing Metrics

No doubt, a profitable content marketing strategy is highly time and energy-consuming to plan and takes a lot of resources to execute. Besides, you will want to ensure that you are watching a sufficient return on investment for your efforts. 

To make it with flying colors, implement content marketing measurement metrics. With the info attained, you will know if what you are doing affects things, if you need to enhance your approach, or if it is better to give up on it.

Content Marketing Success Metrics to Track

Traffic and Engagement

In addition to getting dofollow backlinks to boost ranking, you should also pay considerable attention to traffic and engagement performance. This metric showcases the flow of visitors to your site and their interaction with your content. So keeping abreast of traffic and engagement indexes will allow companies to define which pieces of content are the hottest within the audience and incorporate relevant strategies. 

Content planning

When it comes to the traffic analysis, the metrics below will demonstrate if your content adds value to visitors:

  • Users – the total number of unique readers on your pages
  • Pageviews – the general amount of times visitors have viewed your site pages
  • Unique pageviews – multiple views of one page by a single user

Still, sometimes the heavy traffic you reach results from how you are good at involving people to click your links rather than just captivating content itself. That way, to examine if your site engagement is on a decent level, check for the following:

  • The general amount of visitors to your site
  • The total number of sessions, including the duration of each
  • The average number of pages per session
  • Specific pages visited
  • The most engaging pieces of content
  • Bounce rate

Measuring content marketing metrics like traffic and engagement is decisive from a business development perspective. This facilitates identifying which content formats and topics resonate the most with your audience and adjusting appropriate content strategies based on that info. When your site has a steadily high number of pages per session, a long session duration a low bounce rate, you are on the right course.

Conversion Rate

In case of people visit your site and engage with your content, it is superb. But are they clicking your links, going for more articles, or signing up for different newsletters? So conversion rate overview will detect how efficient your content is in encouraging profitable customer actions. With this metric, you can monitor the percentage of site users who take particular measures like subscribing or purchasing products/services.

Content marketing specialists may see which pieces of content provoke users to act and pick a suitable strategy to make out the best of it. To be more precise, when a specific blog has a high conversion rate, a company can craft more same-topic content or perform its repurposing to drive extra potent conversions.

SEO Performance

Another critical component to evaluate the effectiveness of content marketing is investigating SEO performance. Of course, plenty of traffic comes from there due to the vast social media influence on the digital environment. However, search query visitors also play a significant role.

The fundamental metric to follow here is SERP ranking. You should keep creating SEO-friendly content and review your current pages’ position within search engine results for specific keywords or key phrases. Subject to your correct use of relevant links in the articles based on the previous profound keyword research, your SERPs will rank high.

Ranking over time stands as one more metric worth considering. It is not a secret that such indexes tend to change, but by optimizing your content according to the audience’s preference, fluctuation will be minimal. Thus will gain in-niche trust and authority as well as improve brand visibility. Additionally, using Shine Ranker can help track your website’s performance over time and identify areas for improvement in your content strategy.

Social Media Reach

Agree that a prosperous business promotion with no social media presence is almost impossible. Therefore, verifying all metrics across these platforms should be on your agenda. Tracking likes, shares, comments, and followers will give insight into how well your content performs on social networks and if the audience interacts nicely with it. 

First, you will understand which platform is better for capturing tremendous reach. It can aid in laying the foundation for content strategies engaging the target audience. And also, you will be able to define the content types of the highest popularity and user involvement.

Return on Investment

ROI measures generated profit by the company through content marketing potential. Every business aimed at company name and revenue can only do with this metric. Comparing it with the cost of producing and distributing content is requisite. That way, you will know whether your current-day content tactics are beneficial or worth entirely switching the direction.

Calculating ROI may be daunting, especially while doing it manually. Moreover, it is possible to attain not-so-accurate information because of the human factor, which can lead to further wrong content development concepts. That’s why utilizing varied automated software makes sense. They provide comprehensive and error-free ROI analysis and save content marketing specialists time they might use for other essential tasks’ completing.

KPIs by Content Type

The definition of content success will change dramatically according to your movement between funnel stages. And KPIs depend on the funnel location in most cases. There is the top (web traffic, email list conversions), middle (demo/free trial requests, qualified leads, buyer energy), and bottom (sales, up-sells/cross-sells) funnel metrics. 

Measuring Business

So you must consider the specific funnel metric and correlate it to the produced content type. Let’s investigate how to measure content marketing efficacy via KPI content type.

Email Marketing

Crafting appealing marketing emails takes a lot of effort, proficiency, and creativity. Since people are increasingly exhausted by emails flooding their inboxes, you should offer truly precious content to get them thrilled. Then an email will be a worthy content marketing strategy to continue developing. So be sure to monitor such metrics:

  • Opens – the percentage of recipients who opened your email. High open rates frequently indicate a well-picked subject line.
  • CTR – the number of users who both opened and clicked on the CTA in the email. This is probably the most crucial metric to pay attention to within email marketing.
  • Unsubscribers – how many people refused to receive your emails. Exit surveys will be a great practice to incorporate. That way, you will see reasons for the audience leaving and can take steps to fix this.
  • Bounces – the index of unsuccessfully received emails in the database. When the bounce rate is towering, it may signify ‘dirty data.’ 

Video 

People adore visual content, especially videos, So there is no surprise that more than 90% of companies engage customers via video content. Still, to make it work, content marketers should keep an eye on the metrics below:

  • Views
  • Likes and the overall engagement
  • Shares
  • Comments
  • Watch time per session 
  • Negative feedback or dislikes

‘The more is better’ is the golden rule for all points except the last one. However, precisely this metric must be a priority. Negative reviews may decrease the audience’s reach and prevent new visitors from watching and interacting.

Webinar

Webinar is the perfect marketing tool for multiple reasons:

  • Interacting with the audience live, thus interesting them in the provided content
  • The pieces of content are trouble-free to repurpose into other content forms
  • Effortless utilization of real-time CTAs and convert a few leads concurrently

Therefore, if you constantly produce webinar-centered content, tracking on-platform metrics will assist you in understanding whether the content resonates with your public. These metrics embrace:

  • Registrations – the number of signed-up users. If you want a high sign-up rate, take care of the captivating webinar landing page with a clear guide to register and how the webinar might satisfy attendees’ needs.
  • Attendees – people who participated in the webinar. Generally, 50-60% will denote success, but these indexes may vary depending on the audience size and niche.
  • Attention – the duration of attendees’ focus on the presented info. By examining this metric, you can drill down into the webinar parts: the least attention-holding and the minimum exciting for users. Thus you will come up with fresh ideas for improving the situation further.
  • Conversions – The webinar generally hosts some CTAs, typically at the end of the content. What’s important, it doesn’t have to be an aggressive sell, as it may considerably turn leads off. The best CTAs are downloadable assets or free trial offers. And, as practice shows, they drive vast conversions. So to maximum benefit from this, set up a custom, trackable URL to separate traffic reached from webinars. It will help cross-reference any conversions to the particular page against the webinar sign-ups to know if the content is operating well or if you should change the tactic.

eBook or Downloadable Files

Since assets like ebooks, one-pages, or white papers appear as PDF files, tracking engagement is impossible after their initial download. You take measures intuitively by utilizing tools to edit PDF documents and incorporating dynamic elements for ongoing interaction analysis. Luckily, tools allow you both to monitor a prospect’s interaction with downloadable content and receive relevant pieces, for example, eBook pages. 

Business Planning

The leads’ reading time gets tracked and tied to each prospect record in your CRM. So how can you deny the benefits of automated software in this case?

The Hottest Tools and Techniques to Analyze Metrics

With different SEO tools based on automated software, analysis of content marketing performance happens faster and more high quality. So if you still don’t use these instruments daily, it is time to take them on board. The following list introduces the best metrics-analyzing tools of its kind:

Google Analytics

This service ensures companies with data on site traffic and user behavior. So if you yearn to verify the conversion rate and the target audience engagement with content, including specific pages and content formats indexes, this tool is just the thing. You can even import Google Analytics data into Google Sheets™, to analyze your traffic and content engagement with a GA4 Google Sheets addon.

Social Media Analytics

When you devote sufficient time and effort to social platforms, this software will give valuable insights into how the content operates within social networks and whether it fits the target audience’s preferences. Concentrate on the number of likes, shares, comments, and impressions.

Ahrefs

Backlinks and organic search traffic are your weak point? Monitoring SEO metrics with Ahrefs will drastically change things. A detailed metrics track and analysis will showcase how to boost rankings and generate flawless backlinks. Thus, there is no chance your content marketing campaigns can fail.

Conclusion

Though the metrics you target entirely result from your content marketing strategy goals, the funnel location, and content type, there are points you must constantly track to succeed:

  • Web traffic and engagement
  • Conversions
  • SEO performance
  • Social media reach
  • ROI

Using the correct automated tools to analyze and measure content marketing metrics is equally essential. So choose one of the most suitable automated software above and become a market-leading business.



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