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Oct 22, 2024
Content marketing KPIs provide valuable insights into your content strategy’s performance, but let’s face it — with so many data streams and metrics available, tracking them can feel like you’re drowning in a sea of data. What do you hang on to when searching for those super juicy insights?
I’m going to discuss the core content marketing KPIs in detail so you can choose the ones that’ll keep your brand not only afloat but racing full speed ahead with powerful content. I’ll also explain the value of content marketing tools in making your life easier.
Ready to turn those overwhelming metrics into useful insights? Goggles on.
Content marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) are quantifiable metrics used to measure the success of a content marketing strategy. They indicate how well your content is achieving marketing goals, such as increasing website traffic, boosting conversation, or generating more sales, and provide insights for improvement. Setting the right KPIs ensures focus and guides your efforts toward achieving desired outcomes.
More data is not necessarily better. In fact, too much data can create confusion. That’s why focusing on the right KPIs is so important if you want to measure success effectively.
Setting content marketing KPIs isn’t just about tracking numbers but about strategically steering your content efforts toward your goals.
Here’s why having clear content marketing metrics is crucial for a successful strategy:
KPIs act as a compass for your content strategy framework, ensuring every piece of content aligns with your overall goals.
By tracking KPIs, you eliminate guesswork, quantify the return on your content investment, justify budgets, and focus on high-performing content.
Concrete metrics help you make informed choices about content types, topics, and distribution channels so you can continuously improve your content strategy.
The right metrics clearly show you what’s working and what’s not, enabling you to allocate resources more effectively.
Content marketing KPIs give your content creators clear targets to aim for, boosting productivity and motivation.
KPIs provide evidence of your content marketing success, helping you gain support from leadership and clients.
Let’s explore the different types of content marketing KPIs to track to get a comprehensive view of your content’s performance.
There are plenty of content marketing KPIs to choose from, each offering unique insights into your strategy’s effectiveness. However, not all KPIs are created equal for every brand.
Your specific goals and context will determine which metrics deserve your attention. Below, I describe various KPI types so you can pick and prioritize the ones that align best with your content marketing objectives (you have set clear objectives, haven’t you?).
Content operations KPIs track the performance of your marketing efforts and help you streamline your content workflow.
By leveraging marketing operations tools to measure KPIs, your team can better identify bottlenecks, optimize processes, and improve productivity.
Here are the main operational content marketing KPIs I like to keep track of.
Content quality is a critical KPI because it directly influences user engagement, brand perception, and the overall success of content development.
Establishing a minimum accepted quality standard means that every piece of content meets certain criteria, including grammar, readability, style, and tone of voice.
In addition to these basic elements, strategic considerations such as keyword optimization and alignment with search intent enhance visibility and relevance. Also, internal linking can improve user experience and encourage exploration of related topics.
Content should also provide value to the target audience by addressing their needs and interests. Content pillars based on target audience research should guide all your content creation efforts.
Create a checklist to ensure everyone on the team is able to score high on quality criteria.
Meeting deadlines is a critical content operations KPI. It helps content marketers evaluate timelines, resource allocation, and team efficiency.
Perhaps most importantly, if your team is consistently failing to meet deadlines, it becomes almost impossible to build any momentum with your campaigns. You’re always waiting for something to be finished and chasing up on statuses.
Effective collaboration is essential to meeting deadlines but it can be challenging when working on multiple projects at once, as freelancers and agencies know well.
Content collaboration tools can guide your team through rough waters, improving coordination between team members and providing visibility into progress. Streamlined review and approval processes remove bottlenecks and keep things moving smoothly.
Collaboration and approval in Planable
Marketing agency software can be a lifesaver, especially for agencies. It helps manage complex workloads and track deadlines so that content arrives on time and in top shape in clients’ inboxes.
Publishing frequency reflects the number of articles, social media posts, newsletters, videos, and other marketing collateral published in a given period. Consistent publishing keeps your target audience interested and enhances visibility.
A well-structured content calendar is crucial for maintaining a healthy publishing frequency. It helps you plan, schedule, and track your content output, ensuring a balanced and regular flow of materials. Using content calendar tools streamlines this process, making it easier to coordinate topics, deadlines, and publication dates on various platforms.
Content calendar view in Planable
By monitoring your publishing frequency, you can identify gaps or inconsistencies in your content marketing campaigns. This enables you to adjust your workflow, allocate resources more effectively, and maintain the rhythm necessary to keep your audience engaged.
Updating frequency is an important content operations KPI that often flies under the radar.
While creating fresh content is important, updating old content can be just as valuable.
Regular updates keep your content relevant, accurate, and useful. In fact, updating old content can sometimes yield better results than publishing new pieces, as it builds on established SEO equity and audience familiarity.
Tracking how often you refresh your content ensures you’re not letting valuable assets deteriorate. You can also catch newer assets that are underperforming to give them a much-needed booster shot. It’s a key aspect of effective content organization, helping you maintain a vibrant, up-to-date content library.
Establish this as a KPI and maintain it to identify opportunities, prioritize updates, and ensure your team stays on top of recycling and revamping your content portfolio.
Brand awareness KPIs measure how well your audience recognizes and remembers your brand. In other words, are your integrated content marketing efforts creating a lasting impact, or do you need to do more to increase brand awareness?
These content marketing KPIs will help you track brand awareness and ensure you remain top-of-mind.
Organic traffic and page views show you how many website visitors are discovering your content through search engines and by directly visiting your pages, measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and overall content relevancy.
Keep track of organic traffic in Google Analytics or your preferred platform to understand which topics resonate with your audience and which keywords potential customers are using. Spikes in organic traffic might indicate that your content is appealing and your SEO strategy is working, while dips signal the need for content refreshes or algorithm adjustments.
Moreover, analyzing page views across different content types helps you identify the formats and themes your audience prefers. Are your how-to guides outperforming your SME interviews? Do certain topics consistently get more views than others? These insights can help you create more of what your audience loves and boost your brand’s visibility.
Getting endorsed by other websites and platforms with authority is one of the oldest tricks in the content marketing book. And it still works.
You should track referral traffic to see where your audience is coming from and which external sources are most beneficial for your brand. This information helps you understand the impact of your social media content creation, guest blogging, and influencer collaborations.
This way, you can identify partnerships that contribute most to boosting brand awareness, nurture them, and try to develop similar ones.
Additionally, referral traffic data reveals which types of content are most attractive to wider audiences, enabling you to refine your content strategy to better meet these interests and maximize opportunities.
Backlinks and PR mentions reflect your content’s impact beyond your own distribution channels. Tracking backlinks reveals which pieces of content are most link-worthy. PR mentions, on the other hand, showcase your brand’s presence in the media landscape.
By tracking these metrics, you understand how well your content resonates with other websites and media outlets, providing insights into your brand’s authority and relevance in your industry.
These insights inform your content strategy, guiding you to create more of what works. Integrating this data into your PR calendar can help you time your content releases to maximize media coverage and brand visibility.
Brand awareness KPIs also contribute to your SEO efforts, as search engines view backlinks and mentions as votes of confidence, potentially boosting keyword rankings and driving more organic traffic.
Want to know if your content is making waves?
Audience growth metrics show how effectively you’re expanding your reach, while social shares indicate which content pieces are spreading far and wide. Tags and mentions demonstrate direct social media engagement and user-generated content, highlighting your brand’s relevance in conversations.
Social media analytics dashboard in Planable
With insights into which platforms see the most growth and engagement, you can refine your content distribution strategy and optimize your deliverables for those channels. This is especially helpful when managing multiple social media accounts, as you can use data to tailor your approach for each platform.
Moreover, these metrics reveal audience preferences and potential influencer partnerships, helping you make informed choices for boosting brand visibility.
Content engagement KPIs are like a heart monitor for your content. They reveal whether your audience is excited, hooked, bored, or missing in action.
Below are the vital signs you should track to ensure your content still makes your audience’s heart race.
Time on page and scroll depth go beyond surface-level views, revealing the quality of engagement and the true value of your content to readers.
Time on page indicates how long visitors spend consuming your content. Longer times suggest that readers find your material engaging and valuable. However, format matters: a quick how-to guide might naturally have a shorter time on page than an in-depth article.
Scroll depth tells you how far down the page users go. High scroll depths mean that your content maintains interest throughout, while low depths might indicate that your opening isn’t compelling enough or that the content isn’t meeting expectations.
Together, these KPIs help you understand which topics, formats, and writing styles keep your audience’s pulse (and mouse) racing.
Average session duration measures how long visitors stay on your site. A longer session duration suggests that your content is relevant, while shorter sessions may indicate that you need to optimize the content or user experience.
This is another key content marketing metric you can find in Google Analytics. It helps you identify which pages or types of content keep users engaged the longest. It also helps you understand user behavior, such as whether visitors typically explore multiple pages or quickly leave your site.
With this data at hand, you can replicate successful elements across your site and other distribution channels and fix potential problems.
All businesses’ ultimate goal is making sales — and content should contribute to that.
Click-through rates (CTRs) reveal how effectively your content convinces readers to take action. This metric measures how many visitors click on a specific link or call-to-action (CTA) within your content, providing valuable insights into content effectiveness.
High CTRs send marketing managers’ pulse racing. They indicate that the content is not only engaging but also persuasive, guiding readers toward the next step in their buyer journey.
Low CTRs might suggest that CTAs aren’t compelling enough or that there’s a mismatch between the content and the audience’s expectations or needs.
Tracking this KPI provides valuable insights into:
These insights lead to content strategy optimization, which, in turn, drives more conversions from your content marketing efforts.
By tracking newsletter subscriptions, you can measure how many people find your content valuable enough to want regular updates.
Every new subscriber is a vote of confidence in your work. By analyzing how your list grows (or shrinks), you gain insights into the effectiveness of your newsletter planning and overall content strategy.
You identify which content topics, lead magnets, or CTAs are most successful in attracting new subscribers. Tracking subscription rates over time also helps you understand the impact of marketing campaigns and provides valuable feedback on user engagement and loyalty.
A steady increase in subscriptions suggests strong audience interest and satisfaction, while a plateau or decline may indicate a need for content adjustments or new strategies to re-engage your audience.
SEO metrics measure the effectiveness of your content in improving search engine visibility. After all, how will people engage with your content if they can’t see it in the first place?
These content marketing KPIs guide your SEO workflow, helping optimize content for better keyword rankings, increased organic website traffic, and a more successful online presence.
Let’s look at the most important ones to track.
Many content marketers prefer to focus on the more creative part of crafting content (guilty!). While it can get more technical, SEO is essential to ensuring your creations actually get seen.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings and impressions provide valuable insights into your content’s visibility and performance on search engines. SERP rankings show where your content appears in search results for specific keywords, indicating its relevance and authority.
Impressions measure how often your content appears in search results, regardless of clicks. This KPI helps you understand the reach and exposure of your content.
Together, these KPIs offer a comprehensive view of your SEO efforts. They reveal which keywords are driving visibility, which pages are performing well, and where there might be gaps in your strategy.
Organic keyword growth shows how well your website is ranking for target keywords.
This metric helps you identify which keywords are driving traffic and where you need to refine keyword targeting by optimizing content.
Additionally, organic keyword growth reflects your site’s overall authority and relevance. Consistent growth in this area suggests that your content is resonating well with search engines and people, resulting in higher rankings and more significant organic traffic.
The rate of keyword acquisition reveals how quickly and effectively your content is gaining visibility in search engines.
Everyone races to the top, so monitoring this KPI gives you real-time insights into the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns and SEO tactics, allowing you to adjust and fix problems quickly.
This metric also helps you identify successful content themes and topics, guiding future content creation. Use content planning tools to streamline this process so you can strategically target new keywords and maximize your content’s impact.
Domain and page authority are like you’re website’s lungs. They provide the vital oxygen and stamina needed to rank higher in search results.
Domain authority measures the overall trustworthiness of your website, while page authority evaluates the strength of individual pages. High domain and page authority scores indicate that your site is considered a reliable source, more likely to enjoy better rankings and get more organic traffic.
These metrics help you identify which pages are performing well and which need improvement. They also provide a benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of your SEO efforts over time.
Conversion KPIs measure how effectively your content drives desired actions, such as sign-ups, downloads, or sales.
The metrics below are an essential part of every marketer’s toolkit. They help evaluate the success of your marketing campaign plan and optimize your content marketing efforts to boost ROI.
Conversion rates for landing pages and Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU) content directly measure the effectiveness of your content in driving final actions like purchases or sign-ups.
These important content marketing KPIs show how clear and persuasive your offers are, how effectively your CTAs drive action, and how the overall user experience favors the buying process (or not).
High conversion rates suggest that your landing pages are well-optimized and resonate with your target audience. They also reveal which pieces of content are most influential in the decision-making process, helping you refine your content strategy.
Low rates require action, from content and CTA optimization to testing the effectiveness of the landing page design and UX.
Tracking the conversion rate growth to organic traffic growth ratio provides crucial insights into the quality of your organic traffic and the effectiveness of your website’s conversion funnel.
By comparing these two content marketing KPIs, you can determine if increased organic traffic is translating into more conversions.
If conversion rate growth outpaces organic traffic growth, it suggests recent optimizations to landing pages or the overall user experience are working well. Your site is becoming more effective at turning visitors into customers.
However, if organic traffic is growing faster than conversions, it may indicate one of two issues:
This ratio often goes unmeasured, but it’s a highly valuable KPI to include in your content marketing performance reports. It helps you quickly identify and isolate issues and take appropriate action, whether it’s refining your marketing campaign or optimizing your conversion paths.
Tracking content marketing KPIs is essential for assessing performance against strategic goals and making the necessary adjustments to your content marketing strategy. By now, you should be able to confidently select the right metrics for your brand or clients. Remember, it’s not so much about the quantity of data but about being consistent over time and taking action based on insights.
To streamline measurement and optimization, consider using content planning tools designed to help you refine your strategy quickly and boost your content marketing success.
Sabina is a freelance writer with 15+ years of experience in the MarCom industry. Her to-do list includes helping people write better and businesses sell more through content. She is the host of Zest, a podcast that brings writing within listeners’ reach.
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