3 Important Metrics to Measure Your Content Marketing Efforts

After you’ve planned out and executed your content strategy, there’s one crucial step that needs to be performed next: analytics. Analytics is a marketing practice that you can’t ignore or skimp on. You need to understand how your content is performing to know what parts of your strategy are working (and what isn’t). In a recent report, SEMrush stated that 84% of businesses have a content marketing strategy, but only 11% evaluate their strategy as excellent. It’s not enough to create and execute a content strategy—you need to measure and understand its results as well.

By tracking and analyzing your content’s performance, you’ll gain clear insights into your content’s efficiency, and adjust your strategy to leverage on strengths. This allows you to minimize any unnecessary marketing costs and achieve your main objectives effectively. Of course, when it comes to content marketing, there are different types of metrics that are highly important to track and measure.

To help measure your content marketing efforts, make sure to closely monitor the following metrics.

1. Website traffic

Website traffic plays an important role in online content. When you track website traffic, you’ll know whether blog posts or website pages are gaining views and unique visitors. Measuring traffic data gives you an idea of which individual pages are performing the best, the demographics of your website’s visitors, and how long users spend on each page. Knowing this data can help you tailor your content strategy to meet the needs of your audience.

2. Conversions

Along with website traffic, you’ll also need to know how many users your content is converting. For example, if a user finished reading a blog post or a consultation page, what activities are they performing next? Are they clicking links to fill out a form? Are they navigating through other blog posts? How many are signing up for your newsletters? What counts as conversions depends on your individual goals for your marketing efforts. For example, if your goal is to build brand awareness, it’s a good idea to measure social media engagement or shares. If your content is sales-oriented, you can use analytical tools like Google Analytics to track all sales metrics.

3. Engagement

The main goal of most content marketing strategies is to provide value to target audiences. Therefore, you’ll need to know whether audiences are sharing your content—whether it’s blog posts or infographics—on their social platforms. One tool that can help you measure engagement is BuzzSumo, which gives you insights on which content is being discussed, and how your content is performing on social platforms. Another engagement metric to measure is backlinks. In the simplest terms, backlinks are links to one website from another. Backlinks are highly valuable because it pushes a website’s ranking on search engines like Google. For this metric, you’ll need to track how often your content is linked to other websites, especially respectable ones. Tools like BuzzSumo and SEMRush can help you measure backlinks.

Marketing analytics can be tricky, but it’s an action that must be done. Tracking the appropriate metrics will allow you to move forward in the right direction. After measuring and tracking your metrics, you can evaluate certain strategic choices you made and make the best changes you can to them. Like all forms of marketing, content marketing is always evolving so you’ll need to keep up the pace to avoid getting left behind. By tracking and analyzing your metrics, you can avoid mistakes, minimize costs, and create quality content that gives value to your audiences.