To ensure your campaigns pay off, track critical content marketing KPIs.

content marketing kpis

Content marketing helps drive business growth in several ways. It can build brand awareness, encourage engagement and help target customers convert to buyers. The fact that content marketing can achieve a range of marketing goals makes it challenging to measure its direct impact on sales.

To ensure your campaigns are effective, it’s essential to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the campaign goals.

Fast facts: 75 per cent of top content marketing performers use metrics to measure content performance. Among those, 69 per cent claim website engagement provided the most insight into performance.

12 content marketing KPIs to track

  1. Organic website traffic
  2. Article views
  3. Social shares
  4. Audience engagement
  5. Inbound links
  6. Followers / subscribers
  7. Referrals
  8. Average time on stie
  9. SEO ranking for keywords
  10. Conversion rate
  11. Length of sales cycle
  12. New sales  

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Benefits of tracking content marketing KPIs

Tracking content marketing KPIs helps you understand:

  • If you’re using the right channels to reach your target audience.
  • Whether or not your content is resonating with your target audience.
  • Which strategies and tactics are working, and which aren’t.

This information will help you manage your content marketing to optimize results.

Here are 12 KPIs that will help you measure – and thereby manage – three top content marketing objectives: to increase brand awareness, engagement and sales.

Content marketing KPIs to increase brand awareness

In this case, brand awareness goes beyond logo or tagline recognition. It’s about ensuring your target audience understands:

  • Who you are as a brand;
  • What do you stand for; and,
  • What products and services do you sell.

The more your customers understand who you are and how you can help them, the more likely they are to buy from you. Here are the KPIs you should measure for brand awareness:

  1. Organic website traffic: Is your content bringing people to your site? By analyzing which articles are drawing your ideal customers to your site, you can create content strategies to expand reach.
  2. Article views: How many views are your articles getting? Use Google Analytics to understand how people are finding your content, how long they are spending with an article, and bounce rates.
  3. Social shares: When social media users share web content with their connections, groups or other individuals on a social network. Getting your customers to share content about you is one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness. The more social shares, the greater your reach. BuzzSumo crawls the web and social feeds to find the most popular content on any topic. Use this information to learn what’s resonating with your target audience.
  4. Audience engagement: Comments and interactions with your brand can help you extract sentiment and understand the types of content that resonates with your audience.
  5. Inbound links: These are links from external websites to a page on your site. The more links you have, the more people are engaging with your content, which means you are establishing credibility.
  6. Followers/subscribers: A growing number of followers offers quantifiable evidence your content is attracting attention.

Content marketing KPIs to increase engagement

When your audience is willing to participate and interact with your content, it means you are creating value for them. This is important because it will boost interest in your brand and improve your SEO ranking. It makes it easier for people to find you and builds trust in your brand. In addition to page views, social likes and shares, and follower growth, KPIs to track include:

  1. Referrals: When people feel compelled to recommend and refer people to your content, you know you are creating valuable content.
  2. Average time on site: The longer people stay on your site, the more engaged they are with your content and the more likely they are to take the action that will help you achieve your business objectives.
  3. SEO ranking for keywords: When you are publishing high-quality content that leads to your site ranking for your industry’s top keywords, good things follow. These include better visibility on search engine results pages, more of your target audience finding you and a sales process that accelerates.

Content marketing KPIs to increase conversions/sales

  1. Conversion rates: Use UTM or codes or snippets to identify top-converting content.
  2. Length of sales cycle: The goal is always to shorten the time it takes to convert leads to customers. Knowing how long it takes to move people through each stage of the sales cycle will help you identify opportunities to accelerate the process.
  3. New sales: Content marketing analytics tools can tell you which pieces of content a prospect viewed before they decided to make a purchase and how many sales are the result of your content marketing campaigns.

Effective content marketing campaigns have two key components, a great content and the right KPIs to make sure content marketing campaigns are achieving the objectives you set.