Your content is everywhere – your website, your social media, your email campaigns. Having a good strategy linked to your content is critical to your inbound marketing efforts.
Analyzing and measuring is arguably more important as it shows you directly what is working and what isn’t - and what’s generating you leads and revenue. Here are essential key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure divided into four categories: consumption, retention, engagement, and lead.
Consumption
Consumption metrics answer three very fundamental questions that emphasize the high-level effectiveness of your content. They are:
- Who’s viewing your content?
- Where are they getting your content?
- How much time are they spending with your content?
Think of consumption metrics as the starting point of your long journey to measuring your content strategy. The most important consumption metrics are:
- Page views and unique pageviews (for your website and blog). A unique page view is especially important to evaluate as it shows the number of sessions during which your webpage or blog article was viewed one or more times.
- Unique and new visitors (to your website or blog). A unique visitor metric indicates distinct individuals going to pages from your website during a given period you’ve established in your reporting.
- Average time on page or site (could be specific website pages or blog pages)
- The number of new followers on social media.
While this information is great to know, it’s not enough to truly understand the overall performance of your content.
Also read: Inbound Content Strategy: Overcoming the Saturation Problem
Retention
Retention metrics track how well your content resonates with your audience. These metrics show you how many visitors come back, how often they come back, and how long they spend with your content once they revisit. Examples of retention metrics to monitor:
- Bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. Likewise, these visitors may visit your blog and just read one article. If your bounce rate is high, your content isn’t strong enough to keep users interested in sticking around.
- Percentage of new vs. returning visitors. The more captivating your content, the higher the number of returning visitors you’ll receive.
- Unsubscribes to your email lists. When you combine consumption and retention metrics, you get a picture of how well your content attracts and entertains and informs your visitors.
Also read: Choosing the Right KPIs for Your Marketing Strategy
Engagement
If you want to get a sense of how invested your audience is in your brand and your content, engagement metrics can showcase just that. Engagement metrics examine how your audience interacts with your content. Many of these metrics include social media KPIs. They include:
- Blog comments
- Session duration and page depth. This shows how many pages your visitors engaged with and for how long.
- Referral traffic. Referral traffic references how your visitors reached your website or blog.
- The number of comments and likes across your social media platforms.
- The number of shares across your social media platforms (this includes retweets and video views).
- Social media follower growth over time.
- Click-through rates across different content media: email, SEO, social, and blog CTAs.
- Email forwards.
Also read: Create and Track Success with the Content Strategy Tool
Lead
For marketers, a good content strategy should result in leads. With excellent content that appeals to your visitors, you can transform their attention into revenue. Important lead KPIs to monitor are:
- Gated content downloads. When your content is so compelling and valuable, your visitors will be willing to provide information to get it. Hiding content behind a form is a reliable way to get top of the funnel (TOF) lead information.
- New newsletter subscribers. When someone signs up for your newsletter, it’s a clear sign they’re interested in your services and content surrounding it. Newsletters are great TOFU content.
- High click-through rates across platforms.
- Completed forms across your website – anything from a demo request, free trial, or event registration can signal a lead.
When you look closely at how your content is performing across consumption, retention, engagement, and lead metrics, you can see what content is a true value-add to your business. Good metrics mean a good strategy, which ultimately creates more leads. To get help understanding what metrics matter most and how to create effective content, contact LyntonWeb today.
