Key metrics to assess your content marketing success

You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king” and thought it’s some kind of a marketing buzzword but truth be told – it’s more relevant today than ever before.

Today’s consumers are becoming increasingly tech-savvy, more empowered, and more demanding, and hence, brands need to create more compelling content in order to increase engagement and stand out from the crowd.

But creating this content is only the first step of the content marketing process. After carefully planning and distributing your content to your audience, you have to measure the success of your efforts.

This is necessary in order to understand whether all your efforts are paying off. Measuring this will help with continuous improvement – if you are not seeing the results you want, then you must make alterations to your marketing plan.

Fortunately, there are many tools available to help you with these measures, including Google Analytics and Kissmetrics. But how do you scale such success? Here are four metrics you can measure to determine if your content is effective.

Consumption

This is an important metric in allowing you to understand the effectiveness of your content. Consumption metrics provide answers to the number of people viewing and downloading your content, as well as the time they spend consuming it.

Key consumption metrics include:

1. Page views: How many times has your page been viewed?
2. Unique visitors: This metric will give you the size of your audience.
3. Average time on page: How much time are your user’s spending on your website? Are people actually reading your blog post from start to finish or simply taking a glance then leaving?

Retention

This metric provides insights into the ability of your content in retaining existing visitors. For instance, how many users return to your website to engage with your content? And how often do they return?

Some key retention metrics include:

1. Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who exit your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate is likely to mean your content is not engaging enough, so if this is a consistent pattern you should rethink your content strategy.
2. New visitors vs returning visitors: This gives a good indication of the success of your content. Why? If the number of returning visitors out-runs the number of new visitors then you’re doing well to engage and retain your audience.
3. The number of unsubscribers: How well is your content doing with your existing audience? If you have an email list, keeping an eye on the number of unsubscribers will indicate to you whether your content needs a revamp.

Engagement metrics

Like the consumption and retention metrics, this metric enables you to understand the ability of your content in engaging the audience. But unlike the prior metrics, measuring engagement allows you to delve deeper into how exactly they’re engaging.

Here are some key engagement metrics:

1. Comments: Be vigilant in regards to comments posted on your blog. Not only will they give an indication of which content is gaining the most attraction, but they can also give you some valuable feedback. While not all comments will be useful, some readers may post insightful comments which can inform improvements.
2. Click-through: This refers to the ratio of the clicks on the links to the views it received. If visitors to your site are clicking on the call to action (CTA) within your content, this shows that your content is compelling enough to motivate them to click on the CTA to further engage.
3. Social Media: This measurement of this metric informs you of the number of shares, likes, comments, retweets, etc, that your content generated on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Lead metrics

With content marketing taking a large chunk out of your budget, how exactly can you justify the return on investment (ROI) of your efforts? Lead metrics can help you with this, informing you of new leads and where they came from.

Key lead metrics include:

1. Newsletter subscribers: A user who signs up for your newsletter while visiting your website shows an intent to stay updated with your brands content.
2. Gated content downloads: Marketers use gated content to generate leads by providing valuable information in exchange for the users’ name, email address, title, etc. This includes content such as white papers, ebooks, and videos. By measuring the number of downloads generated by your content, you can gain insights into which content type is generating more leads.