Content marketing is an effective way to provide value to your target audience — but is it an effective way to generate revenue for your business?
While nearly all marketers use content marketing, only about 30% of B2B marketers and 38% of B2C marketers feel that they’re effective at it. It’s important to note that the effectiveness of your content marketing — whether it’s generating revenue for your business — depends largely on how well your content aligns with your business, sales, and marketing goals.
If you’re looking to drive leads, revenue, and brand awareness for your business, you’ll need to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. But what exactly should you be measuring? And how can you track that data over time?
Here, let’s review the key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing.
1. Conversion Rate
Your website’s conversion rate is one of the most important KPIs to monitor. This is the percentage of people who visit your website and complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for your email list.
You can also track the conversion rate for individual pieces of content, such as blog posts and landing pages, to see how well they are performing.
If you have a high conversion rate, it means that your content is resonating with your target audience and driving them to take action. If your conversion rate is low, it’s a sign that you need to make some changes to your content strategy. Sometimes, in order to improve your conversion rates, it might be beneficial to hire a digital marketing agency.
2. Time Spent on Page
The average time spent on a page tells you how long visitors are sticking around to read your content. It’s a good indicator of how engaging and valuable your content is to your target audience.
To find this metric, simply subtract the time the page was visited from the time the visitor came to your site. Then, divide the sum of these numbers by the number of visitors to the page.
If your time spent on page is low, you may want to think about how you can make your content more engaging. A good way to do this is to break up your content with subheadings, bullet points, and images. You can also try to add more context to your blog posts by linking to other blog posts, infographics, or videos on the topic.
3. Bounce Rate
When visitors come to your website, how many are leaving after only viewing one page? This is what your bounce rate measures.
If you have a high bounce rate, it could be a sign that your content isn’t engaging or relevant to your audience. On the other hand, a low bounce rate means that visitors are finding what they’re looking for and are more likely to continue exploring your website.
You can also look at the bounce rates for individual pages on your website to see which ones might need some improvement.
4. Organic Pageviews
As we touched on earlier, organic traffic is a critical KPI for content marketing success. But, it’s important to break down your organic traffic to understand which content is driving it.
Organic pageviews are just like regular pageviews, but they only include traffic coming from search engines. This KPI will help you understand which pieces of content are ranking well in search and driving the most traffic to your website. An experienced digital marketer would agree that optimizing your content for search engines can lead to higher organic pageviews.
5. Social Shares
Social shares are a great way to see if your content is resonating with your audience. If someone shares your content on social media, it means they found it valuable enough to pass it on to their own followers.
The number of social shares your content gets can also help you determine which types of content perform best on different social media platforms.
For example, if you see that your blog posts are getting a lot of shares on Facebook, but your infographics are getting more shares on Twitter, you might want to focus more on creating infographics for Twitter and blog posts for Facebook.
6. Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is a digital marketing metric used to measure the number of clicks your content generates.
If your content marketing strategy involves any paid advertising or sponsored content, CTR is a great way to measure success. However, it’s also a valuable metric for organic content.
High CTRs indicate that your content is relevant to the audience and that your calls-to-action are effective. Low CTRs can mean your content isn’t reaching the right audience or that your CTA isn’t compelling.
To calculate CTR, take the total number of clicks your content has generated and divide it by the total number of impressions (or views) your content has received. Then, multiply that number by 100 to get your CTR percentage.
Here’s the formula:
(Total number of clicks ÷ Total number of impressions) x 100 = CTR
7. Email Subscribers
Building an email list is one of the most important things you can do for your business. Email marketing is a great way to build relationships with your audience, and it can also be a great way to drive traffic to your website. Email lists, sending outreaches, managing the performance of email marketing can be done by an email virtual assistant.
If you’re creating great content, you should be able to convert some of your website visitors into email subscribers. Your email subscriber rate is a great way to measure how well your content marketing is working.
You can find your email subscriber rate by dividing the number of email subscribers you have by the number of unique website visitors you have, and then multiplying that number by 100 to get a percentage.
8. Inbound Links
Inbound links are links from other websites that direct users to your website.
When another website links to your content, it’s a sign that they trust you and consider you an authority on the topic. This can have a positive effect on your website’s domain authority and can help improve your rankings in search engine results pages.
Inbound links are a great way to measure the success of your content marketing efforts. If you’re creating high-quality, relevant content, you’re more likely to earn inbound links.
9. Return Visits
The number of return visits to your site is a great way to measure how engaging and valuable your content is.
If you’re doing a good job of creating helpful, high-quality content, then your audience will be more likely to return to your site to read more.
Plus, return visits are a great way to measure brand loyalty and repeat traffic. If you’re getting a lot of return visitors, then you know you’re doing something right.
10. Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings are a great way to see how your content is performing in search engines.
If you’re creating high-quality, valuable content, it should be ranking well for relevant keywords. If it’s not, you may need to do some keyword research and optimization to improve your rankings.
You can use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your keyword rankings.
11. Comments
If your blog, YouTube channel, or any other content platform with a comment section is getting a lot of engagement, this is a great sign.
It means people are not only consuming your content, but they’re also interested in what you have to say. In other words, they’re invested in your brand and your content.
If you’re getting a lot of comments, that’s great. But even if you’re not, you should still make an effort to respond to the comments you do get. This will help you build a relationship with your audience and show them that you value their feedback.
The Bottom Line
Content marketing is a proven way to drive traffic, leads, and sales for your business. But, you have to do it right.
To make sure you’re on the right track, it’s important to measure your content marketing results. And, the best way to do that is by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) that show you how your content is performing.
In this guide, we shared 11 KPIs you can use to measure your content marketing success. But, remember — you don’t have to track all of these KPIs all of the time.
Instead, focus on the metrics that align with your goals and objectives. Then, use the data to make informed decisions about your content marketing strategy and performance.
Conclusion
There are many KPIs you can use to measure the success of your content marketing strategy. The KPIs you choose to track will depend on your goals, your content strategy, and the type of content you’re creating.
