Key Metrics to Track Your Content Marketing and Overall Digital Marketing Performance

You have put in huge efforts to create high-quality, relevant, and informative content. After thoroughly researching market demands, you have optimized your pages and articles using targeted keywords. What's more, your content marketing team is also working hard to update your web pages regularly to rank higher on search engine results. Keep it up; you are doing a great job!

However, listen up! Are you sure your content marketing strategies are generating the expected results? Are your content marketing campaigns doing better and producing the desired ROI? Do you even track how well your campaigns are performing? What are you even trying to achieve from your content strategies in the first place?

If you don't have a solid answer to these, it's time to focus on measuring your efforts and tracking your results. After all, without having clear goals and marketing objectives, you cannot track how well your campaigns are performing and what results you are really looking for.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is an umbrella term that includes optimizing and marketing various content formats, like blog posts, web page content, email marketing, social media, eBooks, videos, and many more. There may be multiple activities involved while implementing content marketing strategies. However, the basic goal is to get your message to your target audience.

Your content creation team needs to stay updated on the latest content marketing trends and search engine algorithms to enhance higher customer engagement and conversions. In short, ensure your content is engaging and enables visitors to find the answers or products they are looking for.

The Basic KPIs You Need to Track for Content Marketing

To track whether your hard work is really paying you off, your team needs to identify the metrics and track them to measure your content performance. Start with measuring the following Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to identify your success factors.

Brand Awareness

The primary target for every business is to place their brand's name favorably in the market and let others do the talking. To convert your content strategies into visibility gains, you need to focus on building brand awareness by tracking your −

• Pageviews and website traffic volumes

• Brand mentions on different social platforms

• Unique visitors during certain offer periods or seasons, and

• The number of followers gained on your blogs, social pages, and newsletters.

Audience Engagement

After generating brand awareness, focus on improving audience engagement by measuring a few website metrics, including −

• User engagement rate, that is, how long your visitors were interacting with your website content

• Page time of your visitors to identify how engaging your content was for your potential buyers

• Page or scroll depth that helps to determine at what points your visitors lost interest in your content

• Likes, comments, and shares on your social media or blog posts, which help to expand your network and reach.

Organic Visibility

SEO or search engine optimization aims to generate more organic traffic to your website, thus generating leads in a non-paid manner. Organic SEO metrics indicate that your content strategies are efficient and your audience finds your campaigns interesting.

Therefore, to give your brand a voice through greater organic visibility, track the following metrics −

• Organic website traffic that gives an aggregate of your overall traffic on a certain web page. It helps to track how many potential customers landed on your content from the search results.

• Keyword rankings and volumes can be easily measured through keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console, or Google Keyword Planner.

• Backlinks generated from high-value domains, boost your website's credibility.

ROI (Return On Investment)

Finally, your ROI is a key metric that lets you identify whether your content marketing strategies are paying off. Analyze the revenue generated over the past few years to determine your profits generated and the percentage of revenue increase after implementing content strategies.

Also, compare the before and after results to see a clearer picture of your content performance. Besides, tracking the vital metrics like the number of leads generated, conversion rates, average customer acquisition cost (CAC), cost of acquisition, and your total return on investment.

How to Analyze and Measure Your Content Performance?

Now that you are aware of the KPIs you need to measure and work on, let's proceed toward our vital step of analyzing and tracking how well your content marketing campaigns are performing. The following approaches would help you stay competitive with highly engaging content.

Revisit Your Goals

If you feel lost in a sea of information and ever-changing market trends, it's time you revisit your business goals. What are the short- and long-term goals you wish to achieve? What are your organization's vision and mission statements? Determine why you are putting efforts into content marketing in the first place.

Analyzing these answers from time to time is necessary to stay on track and ensure you are not getting diverted from your objectives and purpose. Besides, this era is witnessing a rise in purpose-driven brands. So, if your end goals are unclear, you cannot determine the right marketing approaches for your business.

Track Social Media Engagement

Modern-day brands must be highly active on social media platforms and create and strategize content accordingly. However, track your social media content performance by measuring your post shares, comments, and reactions.

Focus on posting more attractive and visually appealing content that is either 100% text or a balanced mix of multimedia. And don't forget to use trending and relevant hashtags.

Another way of promoting audience engagement and discussion is by creating polls and lists, introducing fun concepts and games, and starting debate-worthy topics. In short, get your audience talking and then, from their activities, measure their interests and chances of getting converted and spreading your brand name through word-of-mouth.

Track Your Backlinks

Backlinks play a vital role in boosting your site's credibility and authority. Getting good quality backlinks from other creators and publications is a sign your content creation tactics are working and showing results.

However, remember to focus on quality rather than quantity and be consistent in your content creation schedule. It will help you receive more valuable backlinks from high-authority domains, giving search engines the impression that your content would create high value for visitors (and hence, the higher ranks!)

Conclusion

We hope the above techniques and methods help your content marketing team to identify the loopholes and fill the gaps for better decision-making. These principle KPIs and strategies will not only change your content marketing game but also take your overall digital marketing to the next level. Just make sure your efforts are not going to waste by tracking your content performances from time to time, thus leading you in the right direction.