7 Content Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking

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November 23, 2022 Marketing

Investing in content marketing is one of the most effective approaches to growing your business. It attracts more people to your website and encourages them to remain connected with your brand. Simply put, it promotes the visibility of your enterprise. The various types of content include videos, photos, and blogs.

Ensuring that your content grabs attention is a must, but no matter how interesting it is, it doesn’t bring your business any value if it doesn’t generate the desired results. Measuring your content marketing ROI is therefore essential. You can keep track of what works and what doesn’t and concentrate your efforts on content marketing that generates leads and sales.

This article discusses the seven content marketing metrics that you should keep your eyes on to ascertain that you are on the right track.

1. Traffic

Traffic is one of the most important metrics you should be tracking to know whether your content marketing strategy is effective. It refers to the number of visitors who come to your website.

Bear in mind though that traffic isn’t all about the quantity. Quality matters more, so you should be mindful of non-targeted customers and bot visitors when checking traffic. Concentrate on people interested in your business or those who might convert easily.

By tracking traffic, you’ll be able to identify the kind of people visiting your site. When you understand the demographics of your visitors, you can streamline what content you can create for maximum engagement.

Tracking traffic on your website also gives you insights into the most viewed pages. You can then know which type of content or topics interests your target audience the most.

Moreover, tracking traffic may assist you in determining which referral channels are working for your business. Accordingly, you can focus on these channels to achieve the best results from your content marketing strategy.

2. Time Spent On Site

Generating traffic is good since it shows that many people are interested in doing business with you. However, traffic does not automatically translate to conversions.

Visitors should remain on your site for extended periods because only when they do so can they be influenced to buy from you. Serious customers will take more time on your website because they need to go through much content before making purchase decisions.

When tracking time on site, you need to determine what affects the fluctuations. If it goes up, you need to know what you did differently during that time. If it falls, try to find where you went wrong and look for ways to correct the mistake. In short, by tracking the time spend on your site, you can pinpoint and publish content that grabs and keeps the attention of visitors and addresses their concerns.

3. Social Shares

Most people spend several hours daily on various social media platforms searching for information, so having a social media presence is a must. Keeping track of your social media shares is a great way to know the progress of your content marketing strategy, as people read and share what they love. More social shares indicate that your campaign bears fruits.

You can implement various strategies to ensure your existing customers share your social content with others. First is posting materials that matter. People won’t share your content if they don’t find it either interesting or valuable.

Additionally, you can encourage your clients to spread your content to others. To do this, you must already have a loyal customer base. You may also want to offer bonuses to people who distribute your social content to others.

4. Backlinks

Backlinks to your company website are necessary to help increase your traffic and an essential component of your online ranking. You might want to collaborate with other business owners so that they can link their content to yours and vice versa.

When other businesses link to your content, it signals that what you posted is worth reading or consuming. Such posts likely generate more leads. By tracking how many links your website has, you can have an idea of how much link building should be done.

5. Click-Through Rate

If you’re running any content marketing strategy, you need to track the click-through rate to determine how well your campaign performs. Click-through rate refers to the correlation between site impressions and clicks. Once you know exactly your click-through rate, you can employ effective strategies to improve or make changes where necessary.

To improve your click-through rate, you need to include compelling calls to action in your content. You can also improve it by enhancing your titles and meta descriptions.

6. Email Subscription Rate

You need to monitor your email subscription rate as well to know how your content marketing is performing. People will subscribe to your monthly or weekly newsletter if they find your content helpful, and a growing number of email subscribers is an indicator of an effective marketing strategy.

On the contrary, if you receive very few or no email subscriptions within a specific period, then your content marketing strategy is not working as you hoped it would. Once you have the dismal numbers verified, it’s best if you re-evaluate if continuing to exert effort in creating a weekly newsletter is still beneficial. Maybe you rather focus on social media sharing or whatever is working well for your business.

7. Lead Generation

The primary objective of any marketing strategy is to generate leads that may convert to sales. Many factors may lead to poor lead generation, one of which is an ineffective content marketing strategy. For this reason, measuring your lead generation is necessary.

Tracking marketing leads is actually difficult because you have to consider many things. Leads can come from phone calls, filled forms, promo codes, and so on. You can’t afford to ignore this metric even if tracking it is challenging since it directly affects your bottom line. You might want to hire someone to track your leads to be in control of the situation.

Takeaway

Investing in content marketing should be in your to-do list when you want your business to succeed. For content marketing to be effective, you must be highly aware of who your audience is and what interests them. Grabbing their attention and encouraging engagement by providing valuable content can put your business on the map. To guarantee ROI from your content marketing, you should know which metrics to evaluate and focus on improving the ones that are falling short of your expectations.