5 Essential Content Marketing Metrics

How do you know if your content marketing efforts are paying off? Marketing is so much more than just creating and promoting interesting and good-looking pieces of content. Planning, designing and sharing marketing collateral is only half of a marketer’s job. The other half is monitoring the performance of shared content, by looking at key metrics, and then adjusting a marketing strategy with the findings. Here are five of the most important metrics to keep an eye on when executing content marketing campaigns:

Social reactions

Like, love, angry face, laughing face. How are your social followers reacting to the content you’re sharing with them? By mixing up the types of posts you share, as well as the frequency with which you’re sharing them, you’re bound to receive a mixed bag of reactions. If you track these post interactions carefully, over time you’ll get a clear picture of what types of posts your audience prefers – and which ones you should consider canning from your content marketing strategy.

Social shares

Social sharing is, like reactions to posts, an engagement metric every content marketer utilising social media marketing should be tracking. This is the holy grail of content marketing, because by sharing your post the reader trusts you enough as a professional thought-leader that they are willing to publically associate themselves with your content. When a follower shares your content, they award you access to their network of social connections, which greatly increases your content’s reach.

Website users

If a brand isn’t doing business in their brick-and-mortar shop, they’re doing it through their website. This means that, for most content marketers, the end goal of promoting content is to eventually drive potential customers to a website. By leveraging tools such as Google Analytics, content marketers can gain insights into how many people are accessing a business website per month, where they’re coming from, and which pieces of content have facilitated the conversion.

Time spent

Another critical content marketing metric to keep track of is the amount of time each online visitor spends on a website. Why is this so important you may ask? Well, time spent is an indication of how relevant your website – and ultimately your business – is to each website visitor. You might be able to grab attention with a well-executed piece of content, but what happens after the reader has clicked and been taken to the website? If you are getting clicks on, say, a blog article you shared on social media, and the average time spent on that page of your website is around the same time it would take to read the entire article, you know that people find it relevant and are thus willing to read the whole thing.

Bounce rate

The last content marketing metric we suggest keeping an eye on is your website’s bounce rate. If you’re noticing that readers are taking the time to read through your blog articles, but they aren’t navigating to any other pages on your website, then your audience targeting might be a little off. This would mean the website has a high bounce rate (which negatively affects its SEO scoring). If website visitors are browsing more than one page on your website each time they access the site, this results in a low bounce rate.

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