Content Marketing
May 21, 2024
Content marketing takes a lot of time and effort. Because of this, it is really important to keep track of key numbers and stats. If you think your business can make money from content marketing, you need to measure how well it is working.
These key stats won’t just show you how your content marketing efforts are doing. They are also indirectly connected to how much revenue or money your business makes.
So to reach your bigger goal of making more money, you have to regularly check these key stats over short periods. Doing this will help increase your business revenue over a longer period.
In this article, we will learn what the important content marketing numbers and stats are, how to properly measure them, and how you can connect them to your long-term business goals.
Content marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) are important numbers and stats that show how well your content is performing or how successful your content marketing campaigns are.
There are many different metrics you can find in your SEO strategy reports or Google Analytics, and this data can help you understand if your content is having the effect you want it to have.
No single number or stat will tell you if your content marketing is an absolute success or failure. However, by looking at the right KPIs, you can build an overall picture of how your marketing campaigns are doing.
The KPIs can show you who is engaging with your content, what types of content people like the most, what content isn’t attractive to your target audience, and more.
The short answer is Yes!
Keeping an eye on these key numbers and stats is the best way to measure if your content marketing efforts are paying off and leading to more business growth or increased brand awareness.
It’s essential to track these metrics, whether weekly or monthly regularly. This allows you to understand how your website ranks, how much engagement you’re getting on social media, who your target audience is, how well you’re performing in search engines, and more.
Tracking the KPIs will help you optimize and improve your content marketing strategies over time. You can keep adjusting and fine-tuning your marketing approach based on the data, to better connect with your intended audience and achieve your overall content marketing goals.
Organic traffic measures how many people visit your website after finding it through search engine results pages (like Google). As an important content marketing metric, tracking your organic traffic shows whether your SEO strategy is successful or not. It’s a key content KPI that you should regularly keep an eye on.
This metric highlights how crucial it is to optimize your website’s pages and content by using different relevant keywords. Doing this helps bring in more visitors from search and gets them to engage with what you’ve created. Organic traffic is important because it demonstrates your website’s ability to reach new audiences, compete with other businesses, and generate new potential customers – all without you having to directly pay for ads or promotions.
The organic traffic metric reflects how visible and discoverable your content is to people naturally searching online for what you offer. Consistent growth in this area signals your content marketing is effective.
The tool you can use to measure it is either Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
Screenshot from Google Search Console
Screenshot from Google Analytics – 4
You can also check your organic traffic in Google Analytics under the traffic acquisition report.
Backlinks are another really important part of having a good SEO strategy. Backlinks are words or phrases on your website (on pages, blog posts, etc.) that link out to other pages – either within your site or to external websites.
These inbound and outbound links act like referrals, pointing your web pages towards other credible sources online. This helps build your website’s “domain authority”, which tells search engines that your site is trustworthy and provides valuable content to its audience.
Having a successful backlink strategy can help generate more leads because higher domain authority means your site is more likely to rank higher in search results. This increased visibility makes it more probable that new visitors will discover and click through to your website.
Building a solid backlink profile with high-quality inbound links from authoritative sites is crucial for improving your trustworthiness according to Google’s algorithms. More high-authority backlinks signify your content is seen as useful and credible by other respected sources.
To manage your backlinks efficiently you can use Serpple’s backlink monitoring tool. It lets you add your created backlinks and crawl them daily to check if they are active or not.
Backlink Manager Report
You can add backlinks to this dashboard and maintain them as long as you are maintaining the SEO campaign.
Social shares refer to the number of times your content gets shared by people across different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This metric is really important for measuring how successful and engaging your content is.
By looking at which specific pieces of content get shared the most on social media, you can quickly learn what topics and types of content resonate best with your audience. You’ll see where there are opportunities to improve and grow. You’ll also get insights into which aspects of your brand messaging are hitting the mark.
A high number of social shares indicates your content is striking a chord and providing value that viewers want to pass along to their followers and networks. On the flip side, low share counts may signal that particular content missed the mark in terms of being shareable or engaging.
Tracking this KPI helps optimize your content strategy by allowing you to analyze and double down on the themes, formats, and approaches that facilitate the most social sharing and amplification.
The click-through rate measures how many people click on the links or calls to action you include in your social media posts, website content, email newsletters, and other marketing materials. This metric is important for understanding if your messaging and content is engaging enough to get viewers to take that next click.
Having a high CTR means the wording and presentation of your links/CTAs are effective at encouraging people to engage further. A low CTR may signal that you need to adjust the language, design, or placement of those clickable elements.
Without tracking CTR, you’d have no way of knowing if anyone is following through on your desired actions after consuming your content. For example, are blog readers clicking the links to visit your product pages? Are email subscribers clicking through to read the latest posts?
Improving your click-through rate can help drive more qualified traffic and potential leads to your website or offers after they see your content elsewhere. Testing different CTAs is key to optimizing this KPI over time.
If you have a Google search console setup for your website, you can easily track your CTR.
This can be done at a page level also.
The bounce rate shows the percentage of website visitors who leave or “bounce” from your site after only viewing a single page. This could mean they exit right away without clicking any other links, calling to action, or navigating to additional pages on your site.
You can measure the bounce rate for your overall website or analyze it for specific individual pages.
A high bounce rate generally indicates low engagement – people aren’t sticking around to consume more of your content. This is an important negative metric to monitor, as you ideally want to keep the bounce rate as low as possible.
If visitors immediately leave after landing on just one page, there’s no chance to convert them into customers or subscribers.
However, if your site-wide or page-level bounce rates are too high, that signals you need to improve things like website layout, page load speed, placement and wording of CTAs, content quality, and more. Making visitor-friendly adjustments can encourage people to stay, click around, and continue their journey through your marketing funnel.
A low bounce rate suggests your content is successfully grabbing people’s interest and giving them compelling reasons and paths to keep exploring your site further.
You can find your bounce rate in Google Analytics Report. Here is a screenshot of a report from traffic acquisition.
This way you can track the bounce rate, you can even track this metric page-wise of your property.
However, with GA4 the bounce rate isn’t directly available, you have to customize your reports to add this metric.
Read More: Top Marketing Tips for Small Business
Tracking page views is one of the most basic but important website metrics. A page view is counted every time a page on your site fully loads in someone’s web browser.
Page views provide a baseline understanding of how much traffic your website content is getting. However, this metric doesn’t distinguish between new and returning visitors – it simply counts every page load.
To get a more nuanced picture, you’ll want to look at unique page views. This metric only counts one view per visitor session, excluding any repeats from the same user during that period. Unique page views give you a better sense of how many distinct individuals are viewing your content.
Monitoring page views over time can indicate whether your SEO and content promotion efforts are successfully driving more eyeballs to your site. While page views alone don’t prove engagement or conversions, a steady increase suggests your content visibility and discoverability are improving.
Analyzing page view data by page and content type can also reveal your best and worst-performing content so you can optimize accordingly.
Again you can find this metric in Google Analytics 4, if you don’t find this metric in your reports by default you can customize and add it.
Consistently measuring and analyzing the right content marketing KPIs is crucial for understanding what’s working, what needs adjustment, and how your efforts are paying off in terms of business growth.
By using data to identify your top-performing content, most effective promotion channels, and customer engagement levels, you can double down on the tactics that are proving successful. At the same time, tracking KPIs highlights areas of underperformance, signaling where you may need to rethink your approach or reallocate resources.
However, to run a business you need a full-fledged SEO plan, be it optimizing internal links or optimizing the already content, every bit and piece would count.
