7 Key Metrics to Measure Your Content’s Impact

From building authority and trust to measuring social shares, discover the top 7 content marketing KPIs that will help you to track the impact of your content.

Content marketing is becoming the cornerstone of any effective digital marketing strategy. But not all content is created equal.

Some companies do a bang-up job of creating engaging content that generates awareness, shares, and helps build brand trust and loyalty to their core audience.

On the other hand, some companies write about how great they are, or how great their cat is.

Don’t get us wrong, cats are great. They’re definitely not as great as dogs, but that’s neither here nor there.

The point is, simply writing content for content’s sake is far from an effective content strategy.

Your content plays a lot of different roles out on the digital marketing field to boost your business, including:

• Improving the health of your site with regular, relevant updates
• Building trust and loyalty by providing value to your visitors
• Improving your SEO ranking & attracting more traffic to your site
• Engaging your visitors with information on topics they’re interested in
• Establishing you as an authority figure in your industry

There’s a lot that content can do to grow your brand. But you’ll only reap these rewards if your content strategy is effective.

So how can you tell if your content is doing its job or not?

Here are 7 KPIs you should be tracking to measure the impact of your content. These metrics will show you where your content is working—and where it could use some work.

Without further ado, here are the most important metrics to track in your content marketing:

KPI #1: Unique Visits

Where to find it: Analytics

The most fundamental content marketing KPI is volume.

How many people are visiting your blog? Is that number trending up or down? Which articles are driving the most traffic?

Knowing your unique visits helps to give you a better idea of your content’s reach.

The goal is to increase your content’s reach over time — which means generating more unique visits this month than you had last month. 

To get even more actionable information on your traffic volume, it’s helpful to segment your visits by channel. Some of the biggest channels you’ll want to track include:

• Organic traffic
• Referral traffic
• Social traffic
• Paid traffic
• Email traffic

With content, you’ll probably want to pay particularly close attention to organic traffic. Which is why we’ve made organic traffic our 2nd most important content KPI.

KPI #2: Organic Traffic

Where to find it: Analytics, SEO tools

When done right, great content can grow your organic search rankings and improve your site’s SEO.

Each new blog post should target a different keyword that’s relevant to your business or industry. This will help your company rank for more relevant keywords and drive more organic traffic.

Make a habit of tracking organic visits to your content. If you have access to more sophisticated SEO tools like Moz or SEMrush, you may want to keep track of where your content ranks for relevant, high-value keywords.

This way you’ll notice if some of your organic rankings start to slip so you’ll know where to focus your SEO efforts.

KPI #3: Time on Page

Where to find it: Analytics

Measuring your traffic is important, but it doesn’t give you the whole picture. A ton of traffic isn’t a good thing if all your visitors peel out after cruising around for a few seconds.

That’s why you should track time on page. This helps to give you a better idea of how well your content is engaging your visitors.

It’s a good idea to look at time on page on a page-by-page basis, so you can see which pieces of content are doing the best job of getting your visitors to stick around.

As you can see in the screenshot below, these numbers can vary significantly from one page to the next:

Does this mean that the piece of content in the bottom row is bad? Not necessarily. It might just need a few tweaks at the beginning to make it more relevant to your visitors and draw them into the meat of the article.

KPI #4: Bounce Rate

Where to find it: Analytics

Your bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who “bounce” off your site without visiting any other pages. The lower the bounce rate the better your club — er, blog is.

If you find that visitors to a certain piece of content have a high bounce rate, that might be a sign that it needs a stronger call-to-action near the end of the article to keep them on your website.

And just as with time on site, bounce rate is a metric that you’ll want to look at on a page-by-page basis:

Look at the page with the 17.65% bounce rate. What is it about that article that’s doing such a good job of leading people onto other pages? Does it focus on a trending topic? Speak to a specific audience persona? Contain relevant links at the bottom of the post?

Whatever it is, you want to analyze your winning posts to find out what they’re doing right. Then, see if you can leverage those tactics to improve your other pieces of content.

KPI #5: Social Shares & Interaction

Where to find it: Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

We talked about tracking organic traffic as a content marketing KPI. But SEO isn’t the only way to bring more traffic to your website.

You’ll also want to keep a finger on the pulse of your social shares & engagement.

As you create and share more and more content on social networks like Facebook, you’ll start to learn that some pieces of content receive more likes, shares, and comments. Those are probably the topics that resonate most with your audience.

 

And the more you learn about what kind of content your audience enjoys the most, the more you can refine your content strategy to put the right topics in front of the right people and maximize your reach and impact.

KPI #6: Conversion Rate

Where to find it: Analytics

Good content does more than just attract and engage visitors. It helps to position you as an authority by building credibility and communicating the value of your product or service.

And one way to track this is through your conversion rate.

Each business will have different conversions that are important to them. Ecommerce stores will want to track purchases—do people who read your content tend to be more likely to make a purchase? Which pieces of content have helped increase sales the most?

Other companies might focus on newsletter sign-ups or white paper downloads. And others still might prefer to track phone calls initiated by your content. (You can track calls back to organic traffic using a call-tracking service like Dialogtech or CallRail.)

This is an important metric to watch because it helps you to see your content marketing’s impact on the company’s bottom line.

KPI #7: Authority & Trust

Where to find it: Polls, surveys, & interviews

When you provide relevant, helpful information in the form of dynamic content, on-site content, and free downloads, you’re providing value to your visitors. In other words, you’re showing them that you care—that you aren’t just looking for sales.

And that helps to build authority, trust, and credibility between your company and your customers.

So how can you measure something like this?

This is more of a qualitative KPI, so the best way to measure it is through qualitative means like polls and surveys.

Interviewing your customers on a regular basis is the best way to track how much trust, goodwill, and credibility your content is creating with your customer base.

Does Your Content Strategy Need Help?

Here at BKMedia Group, we have years of experience in helping some of the world’s savviest companies create content that moves the needle and improves their content KPIs.

Learn more about how our expert content manager can give your content efforts a boost >