In this digital age, an efficient and concrete content marketing strategy is the need of every brand. After all, you want to increase your brand awareness and conversions, while generating more leads and boosting your brand engagement. Isn’t it?
But how would you know whether your content marketing strategy is really effective? Here’s a secret to success in content marketing.
While you push a lot of incredible content to the industry-relevant market, you also need to understand the key performance indicators (KPIs) that can supercharge your content marketing strategy. Tracking and working towards your content marketing KPIs can help you identify whether your strategy is going in the right direction or not.
Here are a few content marketing KPIs to track:
1. Organic website traffic
Website traffic metrics and its analysis can reveal a lot about the performance of your content marketing. Thus, organic website traffic is one of the essential content marketing KPIs as it shows the number and percentage of visitors finding your website organically via search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Organic website traffic refers to the traffic that comes to your website through unpaid search results on search engines.
Being found via organic search resulted in better click-through rates and more time spent on page compared to paid ads. It’s an indication of how well you are ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). With organic website traffic, you can see whether or not your rankings are improving and which keywords are better performing.
The more you narrow down your organic website traffic data, the more you will learn about the behavior of your potential buyers towards the content you provide.
2. Time on page
One of the most critical KPIs is engaged time. It shows how much time users spend actively engaged with your content on the website. You want your audience to stay on the page and spend time reading the content you provide. Your audience will stay longer when your content answers the questions of your audience and provides them with the helpful information they need. So, tracking your time on the page helps you identify which pieces of your content are working for your audience and keeping their attention longer.
According to a benchmark report, published by HubSpot, the average time on a page is 54 seconds, across all industries. This can be used as a benchmark; however, the ‘good’ depends on the type of website you have, the industry you’re in, and the webpage you are tracking. Connect with one of the best content marketing services in Boston, MA to understand what is ‘good’ for your industry and where to focus your efforts.
3. Bounce Rate
Tracking the time on the page and the bounce rate together are great metrics as part of content marketing KPIs, as they both indicate how people interact with your content. The bounce rate shows how many people visit your page and leave without visiting any other pages. Sometimes, bounce rate also means people may come to your content, find precisely what they need and leave.
For that reason, you need to track time on the page and bounce rate together to track a complete picture of your content. According to an analytics glossary by Grow Hack Scale, the average website bounce rate is 49%; the lowest being 27.33% and the highest being 90.2%.
4. Inbound Links
Inbound links a.k.a. backlinks are links to your content from external websites. More backlinks mean more visibility to users, as Google rewards websites that have higher backlinks with better SEO to improve the rank of your content. As part of Content Marketing KPIs, you can track the percentage of backlinks your website is receiving. If you are receiving numerous inbound links to your pages, it indicates that it’s relevant and informative for the readers.
5. Organic Keyword Rankings
This KPI helps you see if your content delivers the information that is matching your user search intent. If your website starts ranking on the first page for the top keywords in your industry, it indicates that you are publishing high-quality content. As a result, overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) success improves, which means more visibility on those search engine results pages (SERP).
6. Pages Per Session
A session means a group of interactions within a time frame in your website. Obviously, the higher the better. If a user leaves your website but returns within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session. Whereas, if a user is inactive for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be considered as a new session. This apart, if a user leaves and then comes back using a different route or a keyword is also a new session. On the other hand, Pages per session is the average number of website pages viewed during a session, including repeated views of a single page.
For instance, if your website has an average page per session of 3, this means the average user visits three pages before leaving your website. With this content marketing KPI, your website shows how many pages people visit after viewing your content. Pages per session help navigate whether they visit any blog posts, pricing pages, or service pages. You can see if your content prompts the audience to learn more about a topic or explore pages with information about your products, services, etc. Having more pages per session typically means that users are interacting with and exploring your website.
7. Social media visibility
Today, the majority of brands use content marketing through social media for brand awareness. Because it is easily accessible and recognizable to brands as well as the audience. As a KPI, you can track which social media channels your target audience prefers accordingly to maximize your content marketing efforts.
8. Conversion rate
Last but not the least, the conversion rate is one of the most important Content Marketing KPIs. No matter how popular the content may be or the effort that goes into it, what matters, in the end, is conversion rates. Conversion rate tells you the percentage of people who’ve come to your website from the search engine result pages (SERPs), engaged with your content or purchased your product/service.
Particularly, helps you track which content pieces result in the most conversions and purchases. For example, if you get 100 visitors from SERPs with 5 conversions, your conversion rate would be 5%. There are many ways you can improve conversions such as eliminating distractions like unnecessary images or content on your website, leveraging social proof like reviews and testimonials, strengthening your CTA (Call to action) copy, providing user-friendly navigation, using effective communication channels, etc.
Final words on Content Marketing KPIs
Overall, tracking the right KPIs is important for effective content marketing. When evaluating the performance of your content strategy, the metrics above shared should significantly help you determine if your content marketing strategy needs improvement. Do you want help tracking those critical content marketing KPIs for your brand? If you are looking for a company with the best Content marketing services in Boston, MA that can help you customize your content marketing strategy, create engagement-worthy content, and regularly improve performance, browse for effective content marketing services on our website crossdma.com. You can also contact us online through our email digital@crossdma.com or call us at 888-863-1150.