Which content marketing metrics should you use?
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If you’re creating great content, you want to know what’s resonating with your audience – and the search engine itself. That’s where content marketing metrics come in.
Metrics are the easiest way to gauge how well your hard work is performing on the SERPS, social media and beyond, allowing you to accurately measure what’s working. In short, metrics are the numbers you need to be tracking, studying, and using as actionable insights to help guide your content marketing strategy.
In this guide, our team of in-house experts will touch on all things marketing metrics, from what it is, which ones to use and how to accurately track your results.
So, let’s get started.
What are content marketing metrics?
Content marketing metrics use various data points to show the impact of your overall strategy, and reflect the quality of your output.
They often use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data – numerical and descriptive, respectively:
- Organic search traffic
- Various traffic sources
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Social shares
- Views
- And much more!
Of course, different metrics mean different things. That means that you have to cherry-pick the metrics you should track based on your content’s overall format, the channel and your final goal.
For example, engagement metrics on social media posts can help you understand how, well, interested your audience is in content on a particular channel.
On the other hand, return on investment (ROI) metrics focus on how well your entire content marketing output is contributing to your business’s profitability.
Both have different uses, with different scopes for improvement depending on the results.
Why should I analyse my metrics?
When you incorporate metric monitoring into your day-to-day practices, you can see how your content is performing in real-time.
But that’s not all.
- It can also be a handy way to see how your current content is doing
- Spot what kind of content resonates best with your target audience
- See which pieces of content are directly contributing to the overall business goal
- Actively use metrics to help optimise content strategies for improved performance and justify marketing spend.
What’s the difference between metrics and marketing KPIs?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s walk about KPIs and metrics.
Although they are both key considerations for businesses – and are often confused with one another – the two aren’t interchangeable.
Here’s how they differ.
Metrics
Metrics, in the broader sense, are general measurements that track various aspects of business activity. In short, it’s anything that can be quantified – but isn’t strictly goal-orientated.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
How Should You Set KPIs for Your Marketing Activity?On the other hand, KPIs are more specific. They represent a select number of metrics that are directly related to a business’s goals or a certain objective. By honing in on a benchmark, KPIs can help you create actionable steps to get there, giving you a complete picture that guides decision-making.
In essence, metrics are the building blocks of your results and KPIs contextualises them against your progress!
Now, let’s get into some of the specifics.
Choosing the content marketing metrics to track
Awareness
As the name suggests, awareness metrics are all about the ‘impact’ your content is having on your audience. That includes things like social shares, such as reposts, impressions (on Linkedin and across Meta for example) and overall follower count.
However, compared to strict traffic metrics, follower counts don’t always hold weight.
You’ll want to bolster those numbers by reviewing ‘awareness’ metrics as a whole, which means looking at:
- The number of people visiting your page
- The number of times people view a webpage
- Unique pageviews
However, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t translate into interest. That’s where engagement comes in.
Engagement
The rules of engagement are as follows: if you’re already getting high levels of traffic and want to build an audience, then these metrics are your bread and butter.
If you’re already creating high-quality content, engagement metrics are useful parameters for understanding how well your content is doing in terms of solving your audience’s problems.
Since the plan here is to grow your audience’s average time on your site or funnel them to specific landing pages, focus on:
- Click-through rates for certain actions, including form sign-ups and subscriptions. The same also applies to social media.
- Social comments, shares, and mentions across your channels.
Shona Worsman, Embryo’s Senior Content Manager said:
“Metrics are a crucial part of any content marketing plan – especially those planning to utilise engagement.”
“You can also track Total Time Reading (TTR) to see how long visitors spend engaging with your content, or gauge the average time on site as a whole. Bounce rate is useful for seeing which pages are attracting people but causing them to leave quickly, with inbound link tracking showing you which pages are deemed useful by external sites.”
To help boost your engagement metrics, focus on reducing bounce rates, and improve your overall readability while working on your website’s UX to boost navigation.
SEO metrics
Amy Leach, Embryo’s Organic Lead, says:
“SEO metrics are the foundations of search engine rankings. By using Google Search Console, you can see how well you’re ranking in the SERPs – determining how many more people can be driven to your pages, offering new engagement and fresh conversions.”
Two more aspects of improving your SEO are backlinks and authority. To track these, use SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Moz to help you keep an eye on them.
If you need to look out for how well your website stands out in a certain niche, or if it’s beating competitors, the following metrics are your best bet.
- Page Authority (PA) determines how well your page will rank – so the higher the PA, the higher it’ll show in SERPS.
- Domain Authority (DA) shows how relevant your site is on a subject. The more ‘expert’ you appear, the better you’re likely to rank.
Sales metrics and lead generation
If you’re using content for growing sales, look at the following metrics.
In this video, our very own George Noon talks about how it works. Although he’s thinking of it from a PPC perspective, the same principles apply to SEO content, with CTR literally translating to the amount of times a user clicks through to your content from a CTA button.
What Is CTR?But wait: what’s a CTA?
CTAs (or calls to action) are persuasive techniques that tell your audience exactly what you want them to do. For example:
- Click here!
- Sign up today
- Subscribe now
Other conversion metrics include tracking things like sales rates, which actively logs conversions from landing pages and other useful pieces of content.
Setting up a content marketing metrics dashboard
So, what happens when you’ve chosen all the metrics you need to track? Now, you can create a dashboard, using apps like Databox, to pick and choose key metrics for your campaign, helping you spot trends and identify for improvement.
If you’re missing a content marketing dashboard, you might forget to regularly review your content metrics.
To tackle this, you either build a custom content marketing dashboard or use a pre-designed template provided by various marketing tools. Whatever you choose, it’s imperative that you integrate all of your analytics sources – including platforms like Google Analytics.
This integration ensures that your dashboard displays up-to-date, real-time metrics, offering a completely holistic view of your content’s performance.
Need some help? We’ve got you covered.
We know that pinning the metrics for your dashboard can be tricky, especially when they span different KPIs and goals across the business. However, if you follow some of the tips outlined in this guide, you should be able to reap the rewards, supercharge your strategies and get seen on the SERPS.
But if you want key insights across the board, why not turn to our in-house experts?
Our team has top-notch expertise in reporting, with SEO strategy development that sets the stage for your brand’s digital success. Together, we can lift the lid on your results, spotting key opportunities and seeing what others don’t.
To get key insights into your SEO – or to get your content journey started – get in touch with us today!
