8 Content Marketing Metrics to Help Align with Business Objectives

1. Qualified traffic

The quality of traffic to your website is more important than the quantity. More engaged and converted customers will result in more success for your business.

” This can be seen in things like the amount of time someone spends on your page. According to Kayla Voigt, CEO of KL Voigt Writing Co., this is a good metric to measure the success of your goals.

Some content marketing programs focus on generating leads, while others focus on driving sales calls or increasing web traffic. To effectively measure the success of your content marketing, align your metrics with the goals of the individual post. For example, if your goal is to get people to fill out a form, tracking web traffic won’t be helpful.

Analyzing your traffic spikes and drops can help you make better decisions about when to release new content.

You should be aware of your audience’s changing interests so you don’t keep making the same mistake of publishing something they are no longer interested in.

It is important to be aware of what your audience wants from you when creating content.

Its important to keep track of your traffic from organic searches so you can see how many people are visiting your website because of your content strategy.

You can measure how well your content is doing by looking at how much traffic it’s getting organically.

2. Engagement metrics

If your users don’t always engage with your content, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. However, you should try to create content that drives your audience to want to interact with what you’re putting out.

” The CEO of KL Voigt Writing Co., Kayla Voigt, believes that engagement is the most important metric for evaluating the success of content. She believes that engagement tells you whether the content is effectively reaching the target audience.

Marketers don’t like engagement because it can be difficult to measure and understand. However, engagement is a better indicator of success than other metrics. If you’ve written something that is valuable and helps your audience, engagement will tell you if it was successful.

You will never be able to recreate your success if you do not understand why your current methods are effective.

The level of engagement can be determined by looking at the content model being used. For example, if comments are not enabled, then measuring factors such as time spent on the page or the bounce rate can give an indication of engagement.

There are other ways to measure engagement, such as video views/view time, webinar attendees that stay until the end, and number of shares on social.

On-page engagement refers to the actions taken while on your web page.

When someone takes an action to engage with the content on a website, it shows that they are interested in that content. This could be subscribing to a newsletter, scrolling down to read further, or even watching a video. When a user clicks to watch a video or expands a section, it demonstrates their interest in the site and its content.

It is important to investigate why users are not clicking on certain options if those options are not being clicked on frequently. Studies have revealed that a better user experience usually results in higher rankings and more traffic.

3. Backlinks

Link-building can be difficult, but it’s a good way to see how your content is valuable to your audience.

” Domain authority is a measure of how well your domain is doing, and building links can make a difference.

DA/DR (domain authority/domain rating) is a good metric to use for competitor analysis because it is more accurate than other methods and it shows which websites are actually making a difference.

The links to a website from other sites are called backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more engaged and valuable your content is likely to be.

Backlinks are like votes and are part of what decides how high a website is ranked on search engines. You can use tools like Ahrefs to keep track of backlinks on yours and others websites.

4. Organic shares

” Gerald Lombardo, the co-founder of The Word Counter, claims that content marketers should pay more attention to the number of organic shares a feed post receives, as opposed to metrics such as likes, comments, CTR, and paid media ROI.

The virality of a piece of content can be increased by social sharing. Therefore, it is beneficial to track the number of social shares of your content. You can grow your audience without spending any extra money simply by publishing great content and utilizing social media to share it.

You can keep track of how many social shares your work gets on each platform.

5. Quality content

How can quality content be tracked as a metric?

The way your audience engages with high-quality content is the only way to track it.

Ramani said that they came up with a metric that combines scroll depth, time spent on page, and goal completions to track the quality of content and keep users engaged.

Another way to measure the quality of your content for marketing purposes is its SEO score. This is not the only indicator of a good quality piece, but it can give you some idea of which elements you have executed well or need to improve upon.

Most people only start tracking how well their content is doing once it is already live on their website, and they only pay attention to a few metrics, like how often it is clicked on organically or how many times it is seen.

Wouldn’t it be useful to have a tool that would give you feedback on how well your content is optimized for SEO?

The SEO score is a combination of various factors including word count, number of internal and external links, readability, and whether all potential keyword groups are being used.

6. Email engagement rate

” According to Erin Stone, Head of Content Marketing at Hinterland Co., your email engagement rate is an important metric to pay attention to.

Many people overlook the importance of how they discover new content, but it is actually very important. One of the most effective ways for most people to discover new content is  through email newsletters. Initial contact may be through social media, search or even people sharing your newsletter. After that, email becomes the primary way to get your new content discovered.

Your engagement rate is important for the success of your marketing campaigns. Any analytics tool you use should be able to track your engagement rate.

7. Lead generation

The largest part of any business’s sales funnel is devoted to raising brand awareness and generating leads.

” Richard Lubicky, Founder of RealPeopleSearch, says that generating leads is the most important metric when it comes to content marketing analysis.

This is done by analyzing metrics such as page views, traffic, traffic source, and user behavior to determine if leads will be generated.

Conversion rates are important for measuring the success of a marketing campaign, but when it comes to content marketing, lead generation is the most important metric to keep an eye on.

8. Impressions

The number of impressions measures how often users have seen your content. Banner ads that appear on a page when a user loads it count as an impression, as do views of your content while users are scrolling through their feed.

” Nathan Hughes, Marketing Director at DiggityMarketing, believes that marketers should not ignore impressions.

They focus on engagement metrics like the number of likes and comments because most platforms’ algorithms push content with high engagement. However, impressions are just as important as any other marketing metric.

Although it is commonly believed that impressions do not necessarily mean engagement, they do give us an indication of how many people our content has reached.

Before you start – measuring content can be dangerous

A word of warning: content measurement can be dangerous.

The latest trend in marketing is data-driven marketing, so data must be good, right?

Not always, for three reasons…

1. Getting good data takes a ton of work. Getting insight from that data takes even more work! The time spent gathering data might be better spent in other places.
2. No measurements perfectly describe reality – there are always important things that your data doesn’t tell you.
3. Once you have a measurement, it changes how you act. It’s easy to get tunnel vision and only focus on that measurement.

The best way to avoid wasting time on data you won’t use is to not collect it in the first place. After you’ve looked at the analytics, make your best guess about the results, but don’t rely on the data to make decisions.

There’s an opportunity cost to going all-in on data.

This quote from Peter Drucker is emphasizing the importance of measuring things in order to hold people accountable.

An excellent Harvard Business Review article points out the problem:

In his book, Peter Drucker argued that the things which get measured are the things that get managed. However, many people falsely assume that if something cannot be measured, it must not be worth managing.

If you become too obsessed with measuring every single detail of your content’s performance, you run the risk of optimizing the wrong thing.

Is it more important to make sure that people see your product while reading a blog post, or would you be better served just by sending more traffic to your website?

There are many ways to measure your content’s success, so consider which metric is best suited to encourage the desired behavior.

• If you track leads from content, you’ll incentivize creating a ton of lead magnets and forms – because that will show the fastest uptick in the short term
• If you track traffic, you’re incentivizing a lot of top-of-funnel content – whether or not that content generates leads
• If you track number of articles published, that’s what you incentivize – even if the articles themselves suck

No metric is going to be a perfect measure of the value of your content, but it may be treated as if it is.

Two adages from the world of social science and economics put a nice little cherry on top of this discussion of the dangers of data:

• Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
• Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

When you measure something, people begin to change their behavior to make the measurements look good.

If you turn a measure into a target or goal, you may end up rewarding the wrong behaviors.

While numbers and data can give you a good idea of what is happening, they can also hide important information. It is important to use them as a guide, but to also remember what they don’t tell you.

By choosing a measurement model that is tailored to your business model, you can use metrics to improve the performance of your content. Be aware of the dangers of data to avoid negative consequences.