Content Marketing Metrics: Measure Your Content’s Success!

Content marketing has become one of the most important and efficient marketing strategies in which many successful brands and companies use. It is a well-known fact that a good content marketing strategy can improve customer relationships, overall brand awareness, and market share of a business. Ready to explore content marketing metrics now?

Like any other marketing strategy, content marketing requires a strategy. And as you may already know, all good strategies include a part where the performance and efficiency are constantly measured.

Of course, content marketing is no different than others in those terms. You need to be keeping on track regarding your content’s success to evaluate it objectively and make changes if needed.

However, there is one difference between content marketing than other digital marketing tools. Many professional digital marketers state that content marketing has a difficult nature in terms of measuring its success.

While there can be many different reasons for this difficulty, it does not mean that the situation is desperate. Today, we will talk about the content marketing metrics that would help you measure your content’s success and continue your marketing strategy more efficiently.

Now, let’s dive into the subject.

Do you want to increase your website traffic?

Try for free to boost your website traffic!

Register Now

Measuring Your Content’s Success

In business development and marketing, key performance indicators (KPIs) are one of the most important terms.

For every marketing campaign you have, you should internalize the key performance indicators. Once you know what your key performance indicators are, using the metrics we will discuss soon will make so much more sense to you.

It is crucial to know the objectives of your content. You do not need to be too critical about it, but you need to have a general idea. It is safe to say that if you do not have an objective before you create content, the metrics will not be useful for you.

There are many different content marketing metrics. Using every single of those metrics to see a clear picture of your campaign might be a very bad idea. We said it once, and we will say it again: you need to define your objectives before attempting to measure your content’s success.

Otherwise, it would not be useful for you.

Now that you know the first step of measuring your content’s success. Let’s see what the content marketing metrics are to measure your content’s success.

Traffic / Consumption Metrics

The most obvious metric to measure your content’s success is the traffic you get. Traffic, as a content marketing metric, is a subcategory of consumption metrics and includes many different aspects.  

However, we should once mention that your goals for your content need to be defined in order to measure your content’s success. For instance, is traffic a good measure for your content if your purpose was to increase your business’ sales?

Of course, increasing traffic is not a bad thing for most cases. However, your definition of “success” is not increasing traffic in this case. Can’t you tell there is something wrong if your traffic is increasing drastically, but not a single soul buy anything?

On the other hand, if your goal is to increase traffic, traffic can be a wonderful metric for your content’s success. In many cases, website traffic is considered one of the most essential success metrics of a content campaign.

No matter what, you need to measure your website traffic. It might not be directly related to your content’s success, but it will be a predictor of something important one way or another.

Maybe measuring your content’s traffic will tell you something so valuable that will make you succeed later; who knows?

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the confusing world of measuring your content’s success, traffic might be the best place to start. Tools like Google Analytics give you a lot of insight regarding different aspects of your website traffic.

For instance, with Google Analytics, you can see the number of users who visited your webpage, the number of times your webpage was visited, the location of your visitors, in which devices they viewed your content, and what channels were led to the visibility of your content.

Each of those analytics would help you a lot regarding measuring your content’s success. For example, if you see a pattern regarding the location of your visitors, you might want to focus more on that area as your target audience and make minor changes.

Another example might be given from the devices your visitors visit your webpage. Everybody who is interested in digital marketing knows that mobile experience matters a lot for many different reasons. If you see that most people prefer visiting your website on their mobile phones, you might want to work more on increasing the user experience for mobile devices.

In general, traffic can be seen as a consumption metric where you can monitor pageviews, unique visitors, average time spent on the page.

Click Through Rate and Impressions

Traffic is an important indicator of measuring your content’s success, but you cannot overlook the click-through rates and impressions.

Indeed, traffic can tell you a lot of stuff without exhausting you. However, if you want to see how much of a benefit you are getting from your keywords, you need to track click-through rate and impressions on Google Search Console.

Imagine this: you created content in which you optimized the use of different sets of keywords. But, how beneficial will those be if you do not know whether if they bring you clicks and impressions organically?

The only way is to track them through Google Search Console. Once you look for it, you can see a whole report of the performance that tells you if it is succeeding or not.

If there is something wrong, you can detect it easily. Suppose that you have content, and you are so sure that you optimally use all the relevant keywords.

Even in this case, you might not get the ideal CTRs and impressions that you aimed for. It is crucial to see that you cannot always understand what the underlying reason behind this failure is if you do not take impressions and CTR as a metric for your content’s success.

Test Your Website Issues

You can quickly analyze your site

Analyze!

User Behavior / Retention Metrics

Another metric that can be classified as a consumption metric is user behavior. It is quite common for user behavior to not be a predictor of success on its own, but when you combine it with other metrics, you most definitely get some valuable information regarding your content’s success.

You should have heard the quote “traffic won’t purchase from you, people will” earlier if you are into digital marketing, and it is a truth that everyone can see. It’s not that traffic does not work anything, but you get the idea.

So, what can you do to measure your content’s success regarding user behavior? At the end of the day, their behavior of clicking purchase or subscribe might be your ultimate goal.

Analyzing user behavior should be the first thing to do as a metric of content marketing success. How do your visitors behave on your website? Do they just click and leave immediately, or do they keep coming back?

You can measure the user behavior on your website through the time they spent on your website, the bounce rate, new visitors, and returning visitors. Each of those metrics will give you an idea about how users tend to behave on your website.

For example, if the bounce rate is suspiciously high, you might want to see if there is something wrong with the design of your content, there are any technical problems, or if the content is misleading.

Or you might want to focus more on a type of content that seems to be more attractive than others. If you see a significant difference in some contents than others, it might mean that your target audience has a preference. Working more on that type of content can help you to achieve your marketing goals.

Engagement

As a part of user experience, engagement is another significant content marketing metric that can help you to measure your content’s success.

One of the most known rules of content marketing is to create engaging content that attracts visitors and well aims for them to engage with it.

The metrics we mentioned might help you regarding the engagement metric. For example, seeing the average time spent on pages will help you see which contents are more engaging.

Another metric to measure engagement is the pages/session metric. You can see the number of pages a certain visitor visits while they are on your website. It is a good metric to illustrate how engaging your content is.

Moreover, you would want to gain insight into your new visitors and returning visitors. Through new vs. returning visitors, you can see if people engage in your content for the first time or if they come back after a while.

Measuring your content’s success is very much possible through engagement. At the end of the day, one of the reasons why you are creating content is because you want people to engage with it, right? It is basically in the definition of content marketing – to create engaging content.

The following goal of yours might change, but engaging content is most probably a part of your “successful content” definition. If you need a metric to measure your content’s success, engagement is your answer.

If you are using Google, you can easily find the metrics you need through Google Analytics. Additionally, you can use other analytics platforms you want to use.

Backlinks and Content Shares

Your content being good enough for people to spend time on it is great.

But your content is awesome enough for people to want to share it with others is incredible, which brings us to our next metric to measure your content’s success: backlinks and content shares.

We mentioned that one of the main objectives of content marketing is to create engaging content. How can you do this? The answer is simple; you need to put out content that is valuable for your readers.

Okay, we got that we need to put something valuable. But how can we measure the value of content (or success in those terms)? You can measure it by the desire of people to show it to others.

See Also: What is Backlink?

Of course, there is not a metric that would show you “the value” of your content in numbers; it is a very much subjective thing to measure. However, you can always estimate the value assigned to your content through what your visitors choose to do with it.

At this point, backlinks and content shares give us very meaningful answers regarding those questions. Of course, backlinks and content shares are not only predictors of successful content, but in normal conditions, a high share and backlink predict successful content.

Backlinks and content shares become very important metrics, especially if your goal is related to spreading awareness and increase visibility. As you can guess, the more shares and backlinks you get, the more people will see your content.

You can find different tools online to see how and with what your content was linked and references. Additionally, you can benefit from some tools to see how well your content connects with certain target audiences through the shares it got.

Social Metrics

A great thing about content marketing is that it is possible through many different channels.

You can have a content marketing plan on the web, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and all the other social media platforms you can think of.

When it comes to measuring your content’s success, social metrics offer a very good and accessible source. All the metrics of social media is in the hand of the account owner, so you can have access to your account’s information to see how well your strategy is doing.

See Also: PR and Digital Marketing

Follower Count

For example, one social metric for content marketing is follower count. Regardless of which social media channel you are using, you can have an overall idea about your content’s success with your follower count.

While using social metrics to measure your content’s success, you should be knowledgeable about the algorithms of different social media channels. For example, you cannot expect similar results in Twitter and TikTok by following similar strategies; those two are very different social media channels with different audiences and algorithms.

Shares and Likes

With that being said, social media shares and likes are other social metrics to measure your content’s success. We mentioned how engagement is something you would want for your content and how it is a metric for your content’s success.

It is no different in social media.

One of the most valuable things that can happen for your content is to go viral. Of course, content can go viral for lynching purposes too, but you get our point.

If the metrics you are checking are telling you that you have poor shares and likes, you might want to work on those.

You can choose a different social media strategy or spot the mistakes you have been making for better results on your content’s success.

It is possible to track shares and likes of your comment by simply looking at them, but if you use a tool that gives you all the analytics you need, you can gain more insight. For example, you can see at what hours people tend to like your content more or which day of the week seems like getting the most shares.

Comments

Social media comments are one of the most valuable content success metrics since they bring an accurate picture of engagement.

People commenting on your content is literally the equivalent of saying something to your brand face-to-face if that was possible. Additionally, it is a wonderful opportunity for you to communicate with your audience.

Keeping on track of comments would contribute many things to you. You can get to see what people are thinking about your content and get feedback from them to be better. As you implement those feedbacks on your content, you might start to see an improvement.

If you want to increase the comments you get on social channels, you can start by simply asking. Not that you will ask people to comment on your posts, but you can write descriptions that ask questions. They are more likely to get comments as answers.

Content Production Metrics

You didn’t think that content marketing metrics are all about how the reactions are, were you?

If you want to measure your content’s success, you need to be keeping track of every single aspect of it: from production to consumption.  At the end of the day, your content is a sum of all the inputs and outputs that you can think of, which includes the production.

See More: Content Optimization Guide

Content production metrics are valuable when they are combined with other content marketing metrics, and they help a lot when it comes to your choices in the future content.

Time spent on content creation

The first content production metric is the time spent on content creation.

In this metric, there are no such things as less time means no success. As we mentioned earlier, content production metrics are valuable when they are used with other metrics.

For example, you spent more than 3 days creating a single piece of content. Given that you spent so much time, would you expect the same results with content that you created in two hours?

So, the performance of the content you create (in most cases) should be relevant to the results you get. If there are some meaningless results that do not make sense when you consider the time you spent, it means you need to change something.

Performance over time

Performance over time is another content production metric that is dependent on your purpose.

So, your objective was to get visibility through shares and backlinks. And you got what you wanted; the content got more than 200 shares in the first week.

But what about the next week?

What about within a month?

You should be considering the performance of your content over time. Of course, there will be changes as time passes. But are those changes are going in the way you wanted it to go, or are there some stuff that really doesn’t sit right with you?

Tracking performance over time as a content production metric will give you the insight you need to achieve your long-term goals within the content. According to that information, you can detect what is working for you and what is not and build up your next marketing strategy.

Content marketing metrics are tools that marketers can use to determine their content’s success. There are many different content marketing metrics, and all of them can tell us something different regarding the content’s success. The following are some of the most frequently asked questions about content marketing metrics that might help you to understand them better.

FAQ

Test Your Website Issues

You can quickly analyze your site

Analyze!

You May Also Like

• What is Speed Index? Full Guide About Speed Index in 7 Headings!
• How To Increase Your Organic Traffic – Comprehensive Guide
• Page Speed and Buying Behavior: What Do Your Customers Experience?
• First Contentful Paint
• Backlinks and SEO: What are They and How to Get Them?