Key Points
- By monitoring KPIs for your content marketing, invaluable insights can be gained, which can help you optimise your content marketing efforts.
- Content marketing KPIs for increasing brand awareness include social shares, article views, and backlinks.
- Content marketing KPIs for boosting engagement include keyword ranking, referral traffic, and content click-through rates.
- Content marketing KPIs for generating more leads include cost per lead, consumer interactions, and click-through rates.
- Content marketing KPIs for increasing conversions include conversion rate, new sales, and length of the sales cycle.
- NUOPTIMA is a highly experienced growth agency that specialises in SEO. Part of our signature SEO strategies for clients is high-quality content creation. If you would like help with content creation or content marketing, book a free discovery call with our expert team today.
When it comes to monitoring content marketing efforts, it is important to track the relevant key performance indicators — or KPIs — so you can efficiently determine which content is benefiting your business and which is not. In this article, we reveal 17 KPIs and organise them into different content marketing goals so you can evaluate which metrics to focus on for your individual content marketing campaigns.
What are the Benefits of Monitoring KPIs for Content Marketing?
By monitoring KPIs for content marketing, you can gain invaluable insights into your content. These include:
- Understanding whether your content has an impact on your target demographic.
- Determining whether you are using the correct avenues to reach your target demographic.
- Evaluating what strategies are proving effective and which are not.
By learning this information, you can efficiently optimise your content marketing efforts to garner improved results.
17 Top KPIs for Content Marketing
The most important KPIs to focus on depend on what your content marketing goals are, whether it is increasing brand awareness, boosting engagement, generating more leads, or increasing conversions. Therefore, the next section divides critical KPIs according to these various goals. Please note that some of these KPIs and goals may overlap slightly.
Content Marketing KPIs for Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness involves ensuring that your target market knows you exist as well as what your brand represents and what services or products you provide. Indeed, the more your brand is recognised and trusted, the better the chances of your products being purchased. To help inform your audience of your brand, penning valuable content is critical. Below are several KPIs for increasing brand awareness.
Social Shares
This is when social media browsers share your online content on a social network. Social shares should be monitored to determine how well your content is doing. The more shares you have, the more awareness of your brand there will be and the bigger your audience. A great idea is to use a tool such as BuzzSumo, which identifies the top-performing content on a given topic so that you can learn what content impacts your target audience and use it in your own content.
Target Audience Engagement
By considering audience engagement (such as any interactions on your content), you can learn how people genuinely feel about your brand and which content, in particular, resonates with your target market.
Article Views
This KPI considers the number of views your articles are receiving. A great method for finding this out is by using Google Analytics. This tool can help you discover a multitude of useful information, such as the number of article views, how your content is found, and bounce rates for individual articles.
Inbound Links/Backlinks
An inbound link — also known as a backlink — is a link from an external site to your content. The more backlinks your content has, the more authority and credibility your website builds on search engines, and the more people will engage with your content. This assists with increasing the overall rank of your content. It is important to monitor this KPI to see who is linking to your content and to determine its quality and relevance. Great tools for checking backlinks include Semrush and Moz. Check out this NUOPTIMA article to learn more about backlinks and why they are so important.
Organic Website Traffic
This basic yet crucial KPI helps you evaluate whether your content organically draws people to your website. By analysing this metric, you can work out which of your articles attract your target market to your site and can help you form content strategies to widen your audience reach. Google Analytics allows you to break down traffic according to the source channel.
Number of Subscribers and Followers
This KPI is a fantastic way of tracking brand awareness. The more subscribers and followers you have, the more attention your content will bring. Perhaps the best aspect of this KPI is that the numbers can be quantified with ease.
Content Marketing KPIs for Boosting Engagement
It is imperative that you ensure your content is engaging enough for your target market. If you have high levels of audience engagement, this clearly implies that your content is enjoyable, insightful, and impactful. Boosting engagement can lead to better brand visibility, a higher SEO ranking, increased brand authority, and, ultimately, more sales. Here are some critical KPIs for boosting engagement.
Average Time on Website
The amount of time a person stays on your website indicates how engaged they are with your content. The longer time they spend on your site, the better the chances of them taking actions that can assist in attaining your business goals. Google Analytics can provide you with information for this metric.
Keyword Ranking
When you create and post fantastic content that causes your website to rank for your niche’s top keywords, you will enjoy improved visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), a larger proportion of your target demographic finding you, and an accelerated sales process. By improving visibility on SERPs, your reputation with search engines and potential browsers will improve, increasing engagement. An excellent tool to help improve keyword ranking is Google Keyword Planner. Read this article to discover how to check your Google keyword ranking.
Referral Traffic
When users feel obligated to refer others to the content on your website, this is a clear indication that you are building useful and informative content and will help to boost engagement. This is an insightful KPI into how valuable your content is. Referral traffic data can also be found in Google Analytics.
Likes, Shares, and Comments on Social Media
This KPI was mentioned (in part) earlier with brand awareness goals. In a nutshell, the number of likes, comments, and shares you succeed in garnering on social media platforms gives you a good insight into how much engagement your content has. You can then analyse which content gains the most attention on social media so you can create content in the future that aligns with this content, boosting engagement further.
Content Click-Through Rates (CTR)
By analysing this KPI, you can find out which content has higher CTRs than others. CTR is the percentage of impressions that led to a click. By studying which content has good and bad CTRs, you can tweak your existing content to improve CTR ratios that are left wanting to improve audience engagement. You can find data on CTRs through the use of tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Content Marketing KPIs for Generating More Leads
Lead generation is the process of attracting consumer interest in what you sell with the primary goal of gaining sales. To generate more leads, it is important that you provide the consumer with valuable content, whether it is an e-book, checklist, or innovative insights into a topic. The following KPIs listed should be tracked when your content marketing goal is lead generation.
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
CPL is a vital metric that can be calculated fairly simply. All you need to do is use the following formula:
CPL = cost of campaign ÷ total number of leads generated
This KPI can be highly insightful, particularly when comparing the CPL of various content types and channels, so you can evaluate which performs better and has the most efficient CPL.
Consumer Interactions (Subscribers, Downloads, Forms)
It is also useful to consider the number of consumers that interact with your content, whether it is subscribing to your website, downloading, or responding to forms. The better interaction you have with your content, the stronger the consumer interest is likely to be, and ultimately, the better the lead generation. An intelligent way of gaining more consumer interaction is to identify common pain points and offer a solution.
CTR
The best way to convince your audience to click on your content is to provide a strong call to action (or CTA) at the conclusion of each post you make. A CTA encourages users, customers, and leads to take action. This action could be to get in touch, purchase a product, or visit a particular page, to name a few, but it is important that the CTA is enticing and transparent in order to generate leads.
Content Marketing KPIs For Increasing Conversions
Increasing conversions could entail more sales, a longer subscriber list, or more leads. Good conversions are key to gaining a high sales volume for your business. There are a few key metrics to consider when your marketing goal is increasing conversions, as listed below.
Conversion Rate
By monitoring conversion rates, you can discover which pieces of content cause the majority of conversions and sales. A great way to do this is by using tailored UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) links. UTM codes are snippets of text that are added to the end of a URL to assist you in exploring where site traffic originates from if consumers click a link to this URL. You can do this for every piece of content created and published to identify top-converting content.
New Sales
If your sales are improving as a direct consequence of your content, this proves content marketing success. A fantastic content-tracking tool is HubSpot, where you can find out where a potential customer entered your site (such as through a specific video or article), as well as how many content pieces they looked at before purchasing from you. This information can help you substantiate how many new sales are a result of your content marketing strategy.
Length of Sales Cycle
It is critical to calculate the length of your sales cycle so that you can find out how long it takes for lead conversion. The intention is always to keep this length of time as short as possible. By determining how long it takes for consumers to move through each part of the cycle, you can locate ways to speed up the process, shorten the sales cycle, and ultimately improve conversion. To work out the average length of the sales cycle, follow this formula:
Length of sales cycle = total number of days taken for a deal to close ÷ total number of closed deals
Final Thoughts
When launching a content marketing campaign, it is vital that you monitor KPIs so that you can evaluate whether it is effective and beneficial. If you do not track key metrics, it can be hard to determine if a content marketing strategy is proving fruitful or is an entirely wasted venture. By following the KPIs offered in this blog, you can ensure that your campaigns are efficient and this will result in a better and more successful business. NUOPTIMA is a full-stack growth agency that specialises in SEO and content creation and also provides content marketing services. Our diverse professional team are experts in growing brands and can assist with the acceleration of your business. If you want advice about content marketing or to discuss growing your brand in general, book a 15-minute call with our team today to explore how NUOPTIMA can catapult you to better success.