Getting Started with 10 Key Content Marketing Metrics

Metrics, or it didn’t happen. Marketing metrics are numerical measures that can help businesses measure the performance of their marketing activities. They provide insights into how customers interact with their products, services, and campaigns. We use these insights to improve the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Examples of data that businesses can track include content metrics like website traffic, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and social media engagement.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is an integral part of any business’s digital marketing strategy. It involves promoting a brand’s products or services through content such as videos, blog posts, infographics, and webinars. While content marketing can be highly effective, understanding and utilizing content marketing metrics and analytics is necessary to ensure successful campaigns. That’s where marketing math comes in. 

Marketing math is content marketing metrics and how they are used to drive business goals. These metrics include website traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, click-through rate, content download rate, social media engagement, email subscribers, unsubscribe rate, marketing-qualified leads, and sales-qualified leads. But what do all of these metrics mean, and how can you use them to measure your content marketing efforts? 

Here’s your (almost) jargon-free intro to content marketing metrics and analytics. We’ll start by defining the ten metrics mentioned above and then discuss setting goals for improving them. As you understand and implement these metrics, you’ll be able to track and measure the success of your content marketing campaigns and make adjustments to help reach your great big goals.

What are Content Marketing Metrics?

They are the indicators and data points that measure the success or performance of a content marketing campaign. Small businesses and nonprofits can use these numbers to identify opportunities, make strategic decisions, and measure return on investment (ROI). Some metrics include website and blog visits, social media engagement, unique visits, cost per click, lead generation, and customer feedback. Over time, these metrics give you a better understanding of your content strategy, identify areas of improvement, and maximize your content marketing ROI.

Why are metrics important?

Using content marketing metrics to measure the success of your organization’s content strategies is an essential part of making informed decisions. These metrics give an overall picture of your content performance—from the overall engagement with your content to the click-through rate on your website. They allow you to track your progress over time and pivot as needed to ensure you get the most out of your content marketing efforts. Marketing math helps you identify which strategies are working and which are not, allowing you to make more effective, data-driven decisions about the future of your content and digital marketing.

Defining Content Metrics

These ten marketing metrics will give you a solid foundation as your baseline to set goals and benchmarks for future campaigns.

1. Website Traffic measures the number of website visitors, the average length of visits, and page views. There’s no point in a website if no one ever goes there, right? Consider website traffic as an at-a-glance measure of whether people are in learning specific information about your brand, cause, products, and services. 
2. Bounce Rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave the website after viewing only one page. Often, this means that they didn’t find what they expected, but it could also mean that you answered their question on that page. A high bounce rate could indicate that it’s time to revamp your site content to align better with search intent.
3. Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, like signing up for your newsletter. 
4. Content Download Rate captures how many people download your content items, like white papers or ebooks. If someone subscribed to your newsletter later downloads your ebook or signs up for a webinar, that’s a sign that you’re on the right track with your content.
5. Click-Through Rate measures the success of a call to action by calculating the percentage of visitors who take the desired action. The click could be from an email, on a landing page, or from your social media profile – so it’s essential to have a reliable tracking system in place.
6. Social Media Engagement measures the number of likes, shares, and comments on your social media posts. Ideally, you’re moving from “like-and-scroll” to “the good stuff” – comments, shares, and click-throughs.
7. Email Subscribers are people who have subscribed to receive emails from you. It seems simple, but growing your subscriber list can be challenging at the beginning of your marketing journey.
8. Unsubscribe Rate tracks how many people are unsubscribing from the email list. Don’t take unsubscribes personally! You want folks on your list who genuinely want to hear from you instead of folks who never open your messages.
9. Marketing Qualified Leads are potential customers. They’ve shown interest in you by subscribing, attending your webinar, and so on.
10. Sales Qualified Leads have been identified as prime customers, which means they’re closer to buying. SQLs have signed up for a demo, made an appointment to speak to sales, or flat-out asked about pricing and delivery options.

These measures can help you evaluate campaigns, inform strategic decisions, and optimize your efforts. Use the data from these metrics to check the effectiveness of your content marketing strategies and prioritize objectives. Explaining to stakeholders which metrics are important and how to interpret the data is a helpful starting point for reporting, even if you’re a team of one.

Tools for tracking Content Metrics

There are a few essential tools you should know to work with marketing math. 

Google Analytics provides detailed data on website traffic and user behavior. It’s free, easy to use, and has tons of training videos available, making it ideal for beginners just getting started measuring their marketing efforts. 

Hootsuite Insights and Buffer Analyze both give you a comprehensive overview of your content marketing metrics, including engagement, reach, and conversions – at varying costs. Other tools like SEMrush and SpyFu can track the performance of competitors’ content to give you an edge. Choose your tools wisely, and you’ll have a well-rounded overview of the information you need to make strategic business decisions about your content. Don’t forget to look at the data living in your CRM!

Assessing the ROI of Content Marketing

Since content marketing takes time to deliver results, it’s hard to prove its value to your stakeholders. Use content marketing metrics such as website clicks, impressions, and visits, blog engagement, and conversions to measure your marketing efforts against sales. Effectively tracking and analyzing these metrics helps you evaluate the success of your content marketing efforts and make informed, strategic decisions. 

Use these metrics to tailor content to your audience’s interests, optimizing performance and increasing reach for your brand or cause.

Be sure to identify which metrics are relevant for you and measure the success of the published content over time. Make a point to analyze the performance of each piece of content to determine what did and didn’t work. Using these metrics, even small teams can gain powerful insight into what content resonates most with their audience so they can create and deliver more successful campaigns.