Essential Content Marketing KPIs
Learn how to select and utilize Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your content marketing strategy.
We’ve all heard the saying, “Content is king.” While content may be considered the king, realizing its positive effects can take much longer than you might expect. Content marketing is a long-term strategy that often requires numerous rounds of optimization for maximum online performance. While this extended waiting period can seem frustrating, tracking your content’s performance can help you establish benchmarks, understand weekly progress, and meet monthly targets. When you establish key performance indicators (KPIs), you’re able to review how your content shifts in online rankings, as well as how to properly optimize it for better results.
As with any great marketing strategy, KPIs are crucial to advancing your agenda, providing defined goals that can be measured and balanced. KPIs for content marketing help you track the success of your content, while reminding you what metrics are important to reach your overarching objectives.
What are Marketing KPIs?
A key performance indicator is a measurable value that shows progress toward an intended result, specifically strategic objectives within the marketing department. Having clearly defined KPIs for content marketing is vital to its long-term growth and success.
Examples of online marketing KPIs include organic website traffic, brand awareness, and page duration. By measuring the correct KPI of your choice, you will be equipped to make intelligent decisions regarding your content strategy. Doing so will help increase exposure to your website and ultimately improve conversions.
How should you establish your digital marketing KPIs?
The answer to this question depends on numerous variables. As your clients journey through the client lifecycle, from lead to buyer and then into retention, content campaigns will require different KPIs. By evaluating individual campaign goals, you can easily determine which KPIs should be of focus.
Choosing what to measure is crucial in setting a digital marketing KPI. If your goal is to raise brand awareness, then one of your KPIs should be regarding social media engagement, such as shares or comments. If your goal is revenue, tracking conversion rates is probably a smart idea. Focus on measuring the factors that will impact your organization’s targets and goals.
Partner with Textbroker to determine your crucial content KPIs. Let’s get started!
KPIs for Brand Awareness
Brand awareness KPIs are the easiest to track and will help you determine if your content strategy is working as expected. The greater your industry brand awareness, the higher the interaction with leads, clients, and expanded target audiences. You can measure brand awareness using a few different KPIs for content marketing.
Website Traffic
Both direct traffic and referral traffic increase to a single page when content is gaining traction. Clicks, time on page, and page scrolling, can also increase during this time. This is directly related to how new website traffic is interacting with your content.
Mentions
Mentions or shares refer to how your brand is introduced across social media, news, and industry publications. The goal is to encourage and compel consumers to mention your brand, so you can track what and how often people are talking about your business.
A drawback of brand mentions is that it doesn’t show if your content marketing campaigns are leading to the desired outcomes. Engaging in social media conversations can help ensure the correct narrative is being told, while helping you establish a proactive approach to potential negativity.
As a tip, setting up a Google Alert with your brand name is an excellent way to track brand mentions.
Inbound Links
If your content is being linked to on other platforms or websites, then your content has hit the mark. Receiving inbound links to your content means others view you as a credible source within your niche.
There are many ways to check inbound links to your site. By searching on Google, you can find no-cost backlink checkers that provide metrics on your inbound links.
KPIs for Engagement
Any content marketing strategy aims to bring consumers back to the website. If they don’t return, then your content is probably not leaving a great first impression.
Returning Visitors
Tracking new organic visitors is always exciting, but what percentage of visitors are returning to your website to read new or existing content?
If your content is exciting and engaging, you should observe a higher number of returning visitors. Google Analytics can track the percentage of new visitors and returning visitors.
CTR (Click-through rate)
Organic click-through rate (CTR) refers to the percentage of users that click on a search result.
For example, if your webpage receives five clicks after one-hundred impressions, your CTR is five percent. As a quick note, impressions measure the number of times any URL from your site appears in the search results viewed by a user.
Studies have shown a strong correlation between organic CTR and higher position rankings. A high CTR tells Google that your content answers the search query.
Page Duration
Ever wonder how much time consumers spend reading your content? You should. According to Google, time on page is the “average amount of time users spent viewing a specific page or screen, or set of pages or screens.”
By analyzing page duration per visitor, you can easily discover if you are attracting the right kinds of users or just unqualified leads.
A short duration on-page could indicate a problem. For example, your content may not align with the associated search term. As a result, visitors are likely to be confused and leave quickly.
However, what if your analytics show on-page visits being too long? A longer time spent consuming your pages is generally considered a positive thing.
But, if your visitors are not taking the actions you are hoping for, this may be a sign of concern. These actions could include purchasing a product or filling out a contact form. Understanding your intended goals for each piece of content can help you determine where and how to succeed, while helping you uncover goal completion obstacles your users may be facing.
By choosing the proper KPIs, you should be able to reach accurate conclusions based on what performance indicators are telling you. Only then, is it possible to adjust your content marketing plan to match what your website visitors expect.
If you’re still not sure what’s best for your business, contact Textbroker today! We’ll help you develop content ideas and useful KPIs; and even create your content. Let’s get started!