There are certain content marketing KPIs that are more important than others if you want to increase traffic, leads, and sales.
If you’re staring at a list of content marketing KPIs and feeling overwhelmed about which ones to pursue or forego, you’re certainly not alone. Thousands of content marketing metrics span dozens of categories, and if that weren’t enough, all the experts and metric-tracking tools have different recommendations of which work best.
12 Content Marketing KPIs to Track for Better Results
1. Number of content marketing pieces published per week
The most important thing to track when you are first starting out is to publish three pieces of quality content each week.
Search engines want to provide their users with the best possible results for their search queries. When you publish high-quality, informative content on a regular basis, search engines will take notice and your website will rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you want your website to rank highly for multiple search terms and be seen as an authority by Google, you need to publish content regularly.
According to our data, traffic and leads tend to increase dramatically when companies consistently produce three or more pieces of high-quality content per week for at least one year.
Some companies produce greater quantities of content to achieve faster results. However, as a general rule, you need three pieces of higher quality content to get search engines to take notice of your website and include your information in search results.
Ragan Roofing is an example of a company that didn’t see much change in website traffic after publishing two articles per week. However, after working with IMPACT to publish three pieces of content per week, they experienced a much faster increase in organic traffic with page views nearing 40,000 per month.
You will need to hire an in-house content manager to be able to produce enough quality content each week to reach this goal. It is very difficult to rely on freelancers or agencies to produce this amount of content on a regular basis. Your content manager should be able to hit this metric easily.
If someone is a competent writer, leadership should ensure that they have the resources available to them so that they can produce three solid posts per week.
Another reason you should have a content manager on staff is that they can help you create a content strategy.
2. Organic website traffic
Organic traffic is an extremely important metric to track. This is because it is one of the best ways to measure how well your company is educating people (more traffic means more people are finding you). Also, organic traffic is a leading indicator of more inbound leads and sales. The more people that are on your site, the more opportunities you have to convert leads.
Now, not all website traffic is great. Only website traffic that is the right type is great. And we can tell you for certain that there is a way to get traffic that is qualified— meaning real buyers looking for products and services like what you offer, on your website.
When Marcus Sheridan was running his pool business, River Pools and Spas, he nearly went bankrupt during the 2008 recession. To save his business, he started publishing content on his website that honestly answered the questions his customers were asking.
So as a result of this, his website traffic and sales increased dramatically, and the company he worked for ended up doing really well and is still successful today.
Marcus found that five topics in particular led to increased traffic from potential buyers, resulting in more sales opportunities.
These methods can be effective in any industry, whether you are in a business that sells to other businesses or directly to consumers. Many businesses are not doing this well, or at all, because they are avoiding addressing these topics directly.
We call them The Big 5, and they are:
- Pricing and costs: How much your solution costs (factors, considerations, what defines value, etc.).
- Problems: The negatives about, or issues with, your solution that buyers ask about.
- Versus and comparisons: How your product or solution compares to similar products or solutions.
- Reviews: Honest and unbiased opinions and observations about your product, solution, etc.
- Best in class: What the best solution available is.
If people keep coming to you for answers, search engines will trust your content more and offer it to other searchers. This usually results in more organic traffic every month, which means that the content you’re creating is establishing trust and reliability with prospects and search engines.
It does not matter too much for most companies to pick between tracking organic traffic metrics such as sessions or new users. You should just pick one, measure it consistently, and make sure you see consistent improvement month over month to determine if your content strategy is working.
3. Leads
You should track how many leads you are generating if you want your writing to create more leads.
If you want to see how successful a new gated resource is, compare the number of new leads it brings in to the leads generated by other gated resources.
This analysis will answer some critical strategy questions:
- What are your customers looking for?
- Are your customers willing to give up their contact information to get your content?
- What kind of content generates the most qualified leads?
4. Transactions & Revenue
We recommend using Google Analytics tracking for businesses that want to increase revenue and transactions through their website. The reports should include a secondary dimension of “landing page” to see how many people purchased after viewing a piece of content. This metric will show which content is most effective in driving transactions or revenue.
If you want to know how much revenue your content generates, use the metric “revenue.” If you just want to know how many people converted after interacting with your content, use the metric “transactions.”
5. Goal Completions
If you’re not seeing enough data to get an idea of how your content is performing, you can set goals in Google Analytics to track conversions without monetary value. This way you can see which URLs are completing the goals you’ve set, such as filling out a form, making a phone call, or joining an email list.
6. Influencer Mentions
If people in your industry are talking about your content, that’s a good sign, even if they don’t link back to you. You can track how often your content is mentioned with a tool like Sparktoro, or by setting up a Google Alert. It’s also helpful to see if the mentions are positive or negative.
7. Keyword Ranking
If you want to be successful in your content campaign, you need to track your progress using tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush.
If you rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs), you’re improving your reputation with Google, its web crawlers, and people who are looking at search results but may not click on your page. Even if they don’t click on your page, they’ll still see it in their search results, which improves awareness of your site.
8. Comments
Do people respond to your blog posts with comments that contain valuable insights, questions, or feedback? If you write a blog post that resonates with people, they’ll often express that in the comments. Tracking this engagement metric will help you learn what topics are interesting to users and generate discussion.
“Great post, Ian! As a solopreneur, I find it useful to have a list to refer back to from time to time.” “I love lists like this – so specific and actionable. As a solopreneur, it’s often easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget the ‘bigger picture’ stuff.” These comments are both praising Ian Lurie’s blog post, “The Digital Marketing Checklist: 48 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t.” They mention how useful it is, specifically for solopreneurs, to have a list of actionable items to refer back to.
People read it, considered its points, and then responded thoughtfully:
It is important to have a meaningful engagement with users in order to build brand loyalty and further improve the value of comments.
9. Return Customers
Repeat customers are essential for a business’ success as they are both loyal to the brand and likely to make purchases.
Although it can be difficult to determine how much of an effect content has on customers who return to your site, you can use Google Analytics to set up tracking codes on the “thank you” page or log-in screen.
From here, you can see what kinds of content this group interacts with. Here are a few questions to consider when evaluating return customers:
- Do your returning customers visit your blog?
- Do they read your long form content?
If not, why?
If so, which ones are popular?
10. Likes & Shares
Social media is a great way to see how successful your content is. The more likes and shares, the better the content is doing in terms of engagement, which reflects your reputation.
The success of your content on social media depends on many factors. If you want to see how effective your content is, promote different pieces of content to similar audiences at the same time of day and see which one does the best. Then, put most of your promotional budget behind the winning piece of content and create more content like it.
11. Backlinks
Backlinks are a very important metric for content – for many writers, they are the goal to strive for. They are also a good way of assessing who enjoys and respects your content enough to recommend it to others.
SEOs often say that every link is like a vote. This means that when you receive unsolicited backlinks from authoritative sites, your readers are engaged, and your reputation is growing in the eyes of both readers and Google’s ranking algorithm.
12. Page Views
If you don’t have any website visitors, you won’t be able to create any engagement, conversions, or build a good reputation online. The more people who view your site, the more engagement you will have with your brand, and the more your reputation will spread. The wider your reach is, the more likely you’ll be able to generate conversions.
Content success is most easily measured by page views. Unsurprisingly, page views are also the most popular method of measurement. Some people might say that page views are the laziest method.
If you’re only looking at page views, you’re not getting the full picture. A key trait of successful marketers is their ability to take a surface-level metric like page views and compare it with other KPIs to see how well a piece of content resonates with readers. For example, a click-baity headline might generate a lot of page views, but if the content doesn’t meet the reader’s needs, they won’t spend much time on the page, resulting in a low pages per session and few backlinks. To get the most accurate understanding of your content’s performance, page views should be just one of the metrics you look at.
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