Whether you have an existing content marketing campaign or are considering adding one, monitoring your metrics is key to your campaign’s success. Metrics aren’t just arbitrary percentages and ratios – they tell you whether or not you’re getting enough return on the time, effort, and money you are investing into your campaigns.
But in order to monitor your metrics, you need to familiarize yourself with the most relevant ones for content marketing. These numbers will be able to tell you if what you are going is working, or if there is room for improvement.
Content Marketing Success Metrics
There are dozens, if not hundreds of different metrics that businesses can utilize to monitor campaigns, which can make starting off feel overwhelming. Thankfully, there are only a handful that are really necessary for monitoring the impact your campaigns are having. Here are the metrics that you should be watching to get the best understanding of your content marketing performance and effectiveness.
Traffic Sources
While you might not care how people find your content, it is in fact a very important metric to watch. Knowing what led visitors to your site means that you can more accurately distribute your budgeting, putting more money in to what is working and less into what isn’t.
Impressions
The more impressions your content has, the more people have visited it (obviously). This can help you to identify topics that get the most traffic, and utilize that to create more content that is in the same vein.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Impressions are important, but CTR takes that information one step further. Your CTR tells you whether or not your content is actually being read after it comes up in search results. The higher the CTR, the more effectively your content is working for you.
Shares and Backlinks
One great benchmark to determine if your visitors are connecting to your content is how often it is being shared or backlinked. People only share content with their own audiences if they think that it is interesting and valuable. This metric also helps to boost your reputation on Google, helping to increase your rankings on search result pages.
Email Opt-in Rates
CTRs are important in letting you know if your audience is taking action on your content by visiting your site. But, if they don’t convert right away, how are you going to keep in contact with them to keep them in the sales funnel? Email marketing helps fill this gap, but it only works if you are actually getting people to sign up to receive your content. When someone opts into emails, this means that they recognize the value of what you have to offer, even if they aren’t converting into sales at the moment. It also gives you the ability to continue to court them by keeping them engaged and informed, so that you can hopefully guide them down the sales funnel in the future.
Bounce Rate
In an ideal world, every visitor to your site would take the time to read your content, explore your pages, and turn into a lead or a sale. Sometimes, however, people land on your site and then leave it without moving to another page. This is called bouncing, and the less time visitors spend on your site, the higher your bounce rate will be. Site with a high bounce rate often end up with a low quality ranking from Google, because it tells them that people are not finding the information they want on your site. This can have a major impact on your search result rankings, putting competitor sites above yours and affecting your bottom line.
A number of things can lead to a high bounce rate: bad content, slow loading times, difficult navigation, and other user experience-related issues. If your bounce rate is high, you know that you need to improve content and user experience on your site in order to gain traction and increase your leads and sales.
Keyword Rankings
A very important part of content marketing is identifying the right keywords to use, and making sure they’re on each page at the ideal density. Keyword research is the easiest and most effective way to determine which you should be focusing on. But as trends change over time, old keywords may become irrelevant while new ones take their place. Monitoring your keyword rankings helps you to continually hone your content to suit the searches that your ideal customers are typing into their search engine.
How Can Content Marketing Benefit Your Business?
The goal of any quality content marketing campaign should be to educate current customers and potential customers alike about your industry as well as your business’s products or services. Customers appreciate brands that show an interest in their experiences, both positive and negative, and who care about providing a great customer experience. That’s why we expect content writing to only continue to increase in popularity and effectiveness in the coming years.
When it’s time for your business to build an effective and engaging content marketing campaign, Gulf Coast Web is here to help. With over 25 years of experience in managing marketing and web design services for business across all industries, we have the knowledge necessary to build a campaign that appeals to your audience, generating you quality leads and conversions. Our staff consists of highly-trained web design and digital marketing professionals who are both passionate about their jobs and excel at what they do. And unlike many other design agencies, we have a content writer with over 10 years of experience on-staff to handle everything from website copy to blogs to social media posts. Contact us today to book a consultation with our team. We look forward to outlining exactly how we can help you grow your business with our digital media agency services.