Content Marketing is a strategy used in many businesses to attract, retain, and engage web visitors by sharing relevant content like blog posts, videos, and infographics.

It helps to keep your business on the top of the mind of your potential customers.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of content marketing metrics to track for the best results on your campaigns.

Tracking your content marketing performance requires monitoring some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show how well your content is doing.

With these metrics, you can understand where you need to improve and measure your Return on Investment (ROI).

Below are ten content marketing metrics you need to track.

Traffic

Traffic has always been an important metric to know if your content marketing strategy is working or not.

It is the number of people who visit your website and gain access to your content.

However, it is not about how MUCH traffic is but about the QUALITY of the traffic.

You should not consider bot visitors or non-targeted visitors as quality traffic.

Traffic from your targeted audience is the best kind of traffic to have because they are most likely to convert to leads and sales.

The best tool to track your Traffic is Google Analytics because it is reliable information and free.

Social Shares

Social media is one of the best places to promote your content as a content marketer.

Keeping track of your social shares is a great way to monitor your progress because people share what they love.

Most social media platforms have an integrated analytical system to monitor your performance. You may also decide to use a third-party system.

Click through Rate (CTR)

If you drive your website traffic through Google or other search engines, then CTR is a crucial metric to consider tracking.

CTR is the correlation between website impressions and clicks.

For instance, if there is only one click out of every 100 impressions, it means your CTR is 1%.

Google Search Console is a robust tool to check your website CTR.

You can increase it by tweaking your Titles, Headlines, Meta Descriptions, and URLs.

Also, if you are running a PPC marketing campaign, you need to continuously monitor the CTR to know how well the ad is performing.

According to Wordstream, the average Google Adword click through Rate is 1.9%.

Backlinks

Search Engines regard backlinks as a vote of trust in your website. The more external links to your website, the greater the trust and authority.

Although many SEOs say it takes forever to get backlinks naturally, it can be faster than you think when you get your content marketing tactics right.

Backlinks are also an important metric to track. However, you should note that not all backlinks are good because the bad ones can harm your website.

Ensure you always confirm the kind of sites linking to yours. You will find many paid and free SEO tools online to help you achieve this.

Email Subscription Rates

The rate at which your visitors subscribe to your newsletter is a valuable performance indicator.

People are most likely to subscribe when they find your content relevant and helpful.

Although some other factors could contribute to the email subscription rate, those factors won’t matter at all when the content is bad.

There are several email marketing software providers from which to choose.

Post Engagement

Post engagements like comments, likes, and shares are good signs that your audience found your posts helpful.

Also, monitoring the comments is essential to confirm if there are good comments or spammy ones.

You should remove the spam comments and respond to the critical questions asked by your visitors and readers.

Bounce Rate

The speed at which people enter a website and navigate away contributes to its Bounce Rate.

Bounce rate increases due to bad traffic, poor content, pop ads, poor speed, and other factors that lead to a poor user experience.

So, tracking bounce rate is a good content performance indicator.

When you notice an increase, you should try to figure out its exact cause and fix it.

Google Analytics is a great tool you should use to monitor your website bounce rate.

Keyword Rankings

When you optimize your content for specific keywords, you must check whether they rank for them.

Although several factors contribute to the performance of keywords, some of them include Website Authority, Keyword Difficulty, and Website Security.

However, if you optimize your content for the factors above, you will still get a poor result if your content is irrelevant to the keywords you choose.

Monitoring your keywords ranking and improving on them would yield a great result.

Lead Generation

The goal of all businesses is to generate leads and sales. So, it is an important metric to consider.

A business with poor lead generation processes could be due to many factors, including your content marketing strategy.

Following up with your lead generation stats and improving them to result in more, qualified leads can bring tremendous growth to your business.

There are many Customer Relation Management (CRM) systems to integrate with your business to track the quality of your leads.

Returning Visitors

Having your content reach new visitors is a significant accomplishment but having them return to your website is a greater achievement.

This is so because it is easier to convert your returning visitors to leads than acquire new ones.

Therefore, it is advisable to tailor your content to suit the interest of your returning visitors to retain them.

Conclusion

Knowing these content marketing metrics is not enough but working on them and improving them is vital for better content marketing success.

Also, you should be aware that content marketing won’t give you overnight success but doing it correctly and consistently will.