Unlock Growth: The Essential Content Metrics Every Marketer Needs to Track

Which content metrics actually drive growth? Here’s how to align KPIs with business goals, from email opt-ins to branded search and conversions.

This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Zahara:

“What metrics should small businesses actually care about when measuring content strategy success? Everyone talks about different KPIs, but I need to know which ones truly matter for growth.”

The metrics to measure for growth with a content strategy change by company and industry, and the type of business you run.

Publishers, for example, make their money by selling ad impressions and repeat content to consumers.

Ecommerce stores rely heavily on direct conversions and subscribers, while service-based and SaaS companies need leads and to scale remarketing groups.

There’s no shortage of ways to twist data, but there are certain key performance indicators (KPIs) and conversion items I measure based on what the goal of the client is, their current and future marketing capabilities as they grow or shrink, and things that I like to use as a measure of success when talking to the C-suite vs. day-to-day workers.

Here are some of the metrics or KPIs I measure from content marketing campaigns, and when I apply them to different clients.

Email And SMS Opt-ins

These are the unsung heroes of the marketing world. They’re people with enough of an interest in your company that they want to get marketing messages from you.

They sign up from blog content, whitepapers, and all other channels. Yet, most companies segment them without considering where the opt-in originated from.

The metrics here are:

• Number of opt-ins.
• Dollars in sales.
• Average Order Value (AOV).
• Lifetime Value (LTV) of the customer by content type and by article (if you get granular).

By tracking how many email and SMS opt-ins you get from content, and then the conversions and LTV metrics, you can tie revenue directly to the type of content on your site and how valuable each customer is based on the type of content you produce.

YOY Traffic Increases With Conversions

The next metric we track from content marketing is the total traffic increase year-over-year.

Showing an increase in non-branded and branded traffic displays:

• More impressions are being made that build brand awareness if the topics are relevant to your business.
• An increase in website visits, which can result in opt-ins for email and SMS, PPC, and social media to build remarketing lists.
• Direct conversions if you’re tracking clicks on internal links, banner ads, and other calls to action.
• Increases in branded search.

Direct Conversions

One of the easiest content KPIs to measure is direct conversions.

These could be completed sales, completed form fills with or without identifiable and financial information (credit cards or social security numbers), and sign-ups for petitions, non-profits, and parties or events.

The reason this is the easiest content KPI is because you can track the conversion from a piece of content, and the system records it on the thank you or confirmation page.

Page Views Per Visit

Publishers need page views to make money, and analytics packages make it easy to monitor how many page views each topic and content type gets on average.

By using internal links, an educational series, and content that makes sense to read as a follow-up, you can measure how the content you’re creating increases the amount of pageviews per visit, so you can increase your company’s overall revenue.

Repeat Visitors

These are people who come back for more content, whether it is a direct type-in, a new non-branded phrase from a different keyword in search results because they enjoyed your previous content, or from a different marketing team sharing content that is interesting to the audience.

By seeing which visitors come back from what efforts, you can better segment who gets what type of content and the types of content that move the needle.

There is no shortage of KPIs you can track from content marketing. It’s a matter of matching them to the people you report to.

HR may want more job applicants, while the sales team wants leads. Marketing and advertising want direct conversions and subscriber list growth, while the C-suite wants to know market share and reach.

As a content marketer, you can fine-tune your tracking and reporting to meet each stakeholder’s needs and become the star of the company by keeping everyone informed on how your efforts are growing their parts of the company, and that is how we decide which KPIs to monitor and report on, based on the client.