Content Marketing Metrics You MUST Pay Attention To

Success often doesn’t come overnight, and content marketing is often a lot of fine-tuning your strategy and optimizing your website for conversion. There are a lot of metrics you can track with various SEO tools, but only a few metrics really matter for the most part.

In this article, we’re going to show you some of the most important content marketing metrics you must pay attention to. Ignoring these metrics puts you at serious risk for letting potential customers slip through the cracks, so we’ve put together some actionable guidelines that you can immediately put to use.

Organic traffic and bounce rate

Traffic should be your most important metric to monitor, unless you’re somehow in such a niche industry that it’s feasible to optimize a high conversion rate from low traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of your content, as obviously the more page visits or video views you have, the higher likelihood you have of converting your audience.

But along with monitoring organic traffic, you also need to monitor bounce rate. Bounce rate is simply how long visitors stick around before bouncing off your content. So for example, let’s say you have a 15 minute YouTube video that has 3,000 views, but the majority of viewers are only watching the first three minutes. On your blog, you might have a 1,500 word blog post, but bounce rate shows people sticking around for maybe 30 seconds.

Monitoring organic traffic and bounce rate will give you a better idea not just where your traffic is coming from, but how long they’re sticking around, and that will help you to optimize your content and figure out how to make it more engaging.

In Google Analytics, you can split this into:

• Users: How many unique visitors have landed on your page.
• Pageviews: How many times a page on your website has been viewed, even by the same users.
• Unique pageviews: The same as pageviews but combined by unique users.

Conversion rate

Your aggregate conversion rate for organic traffic will give you an idea of how well you’re converting people who arrive to your page from search results. But you can also split it down further to get a better idea of how several factors influence the conversion. If you need professional help with the finer details, you can check out a content marketing service like Scribly.

You can start by measuring conversion rate by landing page, because it is typically the landing page that will have the most influence on conversion. If the landing page doesn’t have a high conversion rate, you know something is wrong with the marketing appeal on that page, and you can also check the bounce rate for that page to confirm. 

You can boil this down further to location, device, and browser type. For example, you might find that the mobile version of a landing page isn’t performing as well as the browser version of the same page, and with some investigation discover that the page doesn’t look appealing on mobile devices.

Organic traffic exit pages

If people click around your website and visit several pages, it’s a good idea to figure out the main exit pages (the last page they visit before leaving your website). You can then figure out why people are losing interest on these exit pages, and address the problem.

Traffic from alternative search engines

While Google is the most popular search engine, many of your customers could also be using Bing, or even Yahoo. While Bing is not nearly as popular as Google, it’s still the second most used search engine, and SEO for Bing is a bit different than SEO for Google.

If you’re getting traffic from Bing search results (or even Yahoo), brush up a little bit on how SEO for Bing works differently than Google.

Keyword rankings

Monitoring your keyword rankings is important for knowing which keywords to keep pushing, and which keywords just aren’t worth it. For example, if you’re getting a lot of traffic for specific keywords and even rank in the top 10 for those specific keywords, it’s a good idea to capitalize on that and continue pushing those keywords in your marketing strategy, as those keywords are bringing you the most traffic.