Content marketing is a strategy used across industries to reach out to various audiences and achieve other goals. However, many industries and companies are still figuring out how to measure the success of their content strategies.
How do you know whether your content strategy is successful? Are there any metrics to prove it?
Most content marketers steer clear of these questions because they think they’re subjective, yet they’re not.
Sadly, many organizations only focus on content production, without checking whether the content is working for them or not. The time and resources involved in production are quite significant, hence the need to check whether it’s a worthy investment.
To answer the metrics question, yes. We have specific metrics that can show you how your content is performing. However, be careful with some of the metrics you hear out there, as they can distract you from the actual strategy.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of four crucial metrics you should use to measure a successful content marketing strategy.
Traffic Generated From Different Channels
Traffic is the lifeline of any content marketing strategy. What’s the point of producing content if no one’s going to read it? It’s worthy to say that it’s the most important and basic metric, as it sets the way for other metrics that come after it, such as engagement and conversion.
Traffic in itself is not the best indicator of content performance, because every site has a different traffic level than the other. Maybe some have implemented better SEO strategies than the rest, or have simply been around for longer periods.
What you should be looking at is how the traffic grows over time.
Simply put, there’s no specific amount of traffic that a blog or site is supposed to have. Remember that you have different goals and objectives.
If you have the proper content marketing strategy in place and perfectly execute it, you should see an increase in web traffic over time.
You can split this metric into four different categories, namely:
| Traffic Metric | Description |
| Users | The users are the total number of unique visitors to your page |
| Pageviews | Refers to the total number of views that your page has received |
| Unique Pageviews | This metric combines the total number of different times one user has viewed your page, and only counts unique pageviews |
| Sessions | This counts the number of different times a user visits a particular page, whether it’s their first time or not |
Google Analytics is a perfect tool for monitoring your web traffic over time.
Keep a monthly record and update it each time to observe how it changes over time.
If you want this metric to work for you, look at the months where you performed best and isolate them. What did you do differently? Do that often.
With time, you’ll start to adopt a list of all the best practices and adopt them as your strategy. You’ll also cut out what doesn’t work for you.
Engagement With the Readers
The traffic metric is a measure of how you’re able to get people to click your links or access your pages, but not if the content is actually good. How do you know if you’re creating remarkable content that provides value to the readers?
Engagement is an essential metric to see whether your content is good. You measure whether your readers are engaging with your content by looking at how much time they’re spending on your web pages and how many pages they click on each session.
Unless your goal is to take them through a sales funnel in the shortest time possible, you should aim to keep them on your site for a long time and make them read more pages.
You can get engagement information on Google Analytics, under Audience Overview. This function gives you the following information:
- Total number of visitors and sessions
- The average number of pages per session
- The average time spent during each session
- The bounce rate
Remember you’re creating your content to be read by humans. As such, you want a high number of visitors and sessions, long durations for each session and a low bounce rate.
Don’t just stop there. Another essential way to measure your content engagement is to look at its performance on social media. Look at how many times it gets shared because each share means that users are finding your content valuable.
Also, look at the traffic you’re getting on all social media platforms. More clicks mean more people are engaging with your content.
Total Number of Conversions
Now your content is receiving more traffic and perhaps getting more engagements. However, are the readers taking action once they’ve read to the end? Are they signing up for your email newsletter? Are they contacting you to make queries?
Conversion is subjective and varies from brand to brand. It’s up to you to decide what conversion is to you. One brand’s goal may be to make a physical sale, while for another it may be simply to create awareness.
For example, if you’re a B2B brand, conversion to you may be when your content gets you more leads or even direct sales. The goal of your content strategy should be to get people who barely know about you to become interested in whatever you have to offer.
As a B2B brand, you can track your conversions by the number of subscriptions or by monitoring the click-through rate.
If you simply want to increase brand awareness, you can monitor how many times your content is shared on all your socials and how people engage with it.
Conversion metrics can be classified into the following categories:
- Leads generated: This metric helps you track how many leads come from your content, how they interact with the content and on which platforms.
- Lead quality: You spend a lot of time and resources on content generation, so don’t ignore lead quality.
- Funnel conversion rate: Out of all your content, what helps you push your customers down the sales funnel?
- Revenue influenced: This helps you know if your content strategy is worth the investment. You can establish which of your customers purchased your products and services by coming into contact with your content.
A competent writing agency, like CopySmiths, will help you create content that converts.
Site SERP Rankings
SERPs refer to search engine results pages. Your ranking is where your website shows up when a user searches for your keywords or something relevant to you.
Your SERP may not really be a metric to calculate but is a key indicator of how your content strategy is performing. Google is likely to rank your content highly if it deems it as high value. If you rank highly, then your content strategy is successful.
You can check your SERP by searching for terms relevant to your business. Try different word combinations and see if you still show up on the first page.
SERPs are a long-term strategy that may take some time and effort for you to evaluate. However, with the right strategy, your site will start to show up on the first page with time.
You can even start showing up on Google’s #0 results if your content is good enough #0 result is when your content is featured as a snippet on Google’s results.
If your content marketing strategy’s goal is to optimize your content for search, SERPs are a great metric.
Measure Whether Your Content Strategy Is Successful
A content marketing strategy is essential for any brand that wants to carve a niche for itself in the online world. As such, it’s essential to measure how your content strategy is performing and whether it’s headed for success.
Luckily, there are a few metrics you can use to measure this. Track how much traffic is coming to your web pages through different channels and how much time users spend on your page. Also, monitor how the readers engage with the content
Your content only serves its purpose when it converts and helps you achieve your goals. Establish what conversion means to you and check whether your content strategy is helping you reach that target.
