Key Performance Indicators for Tracking Your Content Marketing Strategy

11 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Tracking Your Content Marketing Strategy

Measuring your content strategy's performance is a critical part of the strategy itself. That's because data tracking content performance can predict which sort of future content will perform well.

When you're tracking the right metrics, you can adapt your content strategy based on what's working and what's not. By allocating your budget to what's working and dropping what's not, you can optimize your return on investment (ROI).

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measurements that help teams not only evaluate success but also for setting measurable goals. New tools for tracking performance metrics are making it easier than ever for businesses to leverage KPIs. Here are eleven KPIs you should be measuring in your content strategy:

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

CPA is a KPI that measures how much it costs to acquire each paying customer. It's determined by dividing content marketing costs by how many new customers were acquired from content marketing. This number is key when it comes to budget decisions for content strategy.

Customer analytics tools like Marketo, Mixpanel and Gainsight are able to trace each customer's journey to generate this data.

Measure the CPA of your content marketing efforts separately from your advertising and others strategies. The lower the CPA, the better your content is working to increase your bottom line. In content marketing the CPA is generally quite low, as a given sale could result from an email marketing campaign, blog post or a live video on social media.

Returning Visitors Rate

The rate of returning visitors on your website indicates the percentage of site visitors who have visited your site before. It's calculated by dividing the number of returning visitors by the number of total unique visitors within a given time frame.

The higher this number, the more it indicates customer loyalty and a successful content strategy, since your audience is coming back again and again.

Total Visitors

More important than measuring the total visitors to your website, you want to measure how many visitors arrived at each one of your blog posts or web pages. This way, you can analyze what worked for top-performing content pieces and start to replicate it.

Use a tracking tool like Google Analytics to find out how many unique visits each of your blog posts received, sorting the top-performers to the top.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session is a metric for the number of pages viewed within the average session on your website. Ideally, you want to see higher numbers for this KPI. It measures how well your content is pulling your target customers in and providing them value.

Pages per session quantifies or estimates your content's ability to keep the user's attention, which would otherwise be a subjective measurement.

While session duration is a metric that tells you how long the page was open, it doesn't tell you how much content was consumed. When users open various pages within your site during a session, they're more likely to be consuming the content and exploring with interest. That makes pages per session an important content marketing KPI to track.

One strategy you should be using to increase this performance metric is to include internal links throughout your blog content. For every 1,000 words, include one or more links to another blog post or page on your website. This can encourage more internal page views, since every new page has more links to other content.

Bounce Rate

Your website's bounce rate tells you the percentage of visitors "bouncing" off your site after viewing just one page. You want this rate to be low to indicate success.

When your bounce rate is high, it's most likely an indicator of poor targeting. That means your website is attracting the wrong audience through its keywords when it ranks on search engines.

High bounce rates include any number over 55%, and indicate your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy needs attention. Are you using a plugin for SEO on your website? Do you include researched keywords in your blog post metadata? These are some SEO basics for blog posts to make sure you have down.

Email List Growth Rate

Email marketing isn't going anywhere. It's effective as ever, with shopping and work going increasingly online. People check their inboxes constantly, and you want your business to get some of that attention.

Email list growth rate is a KPI for measuring how effectively your content is raking in new email signups for your list. If you're consistently putting out more content to attract leads and creating more incentives for visitors to sign up, you should see your email list's growth rate increasing. Not just growing--but growing in its growth rate. That's exponential growth! It's the compounding returns effect of content marketing.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click rate, or click-through rate (CTR), is a KPI measuring the ratio or percentage of users clicking on a given link embedded in your content. Given your content is neatly laced with links to your paid offers, you'll want to track how well the content is driving users to click on those links.

While this metric is commonly used in reference to online ads, this refers to the clicks within free content found online. However, you should also measure CTR in your email campaigns, which you can do with an email marketing software.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate in content marketing is the number of conversions a link or content piece generates divided by the number of total page visitors. You can define a conversion however you like.

For example, on a landing page for a free resource download, you might calculate the conversion rate for email signups. For a blog post that features a plug or call to action (CTA) to purchase one of your products or services, you could measure conversions in terms of buyers.

However you define it, conversion rate is a telling KPI to look at.

A/B split tests are analytic tests that compare two similar content pieces by their performance, and conversion rate is typically the metric used. It's probably the most direct proof of a content's performance.

If you want to measure the conversion rate of every blog post you publish, include a CTA at the end of every one, whether it's to look at a paid offer, download a free resource or jump over to another blog post.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is a KPI you should be measuring for a few reasons. First, it's a ranking factor for Google's search algorithm. Second, it indicates how well your content is helping and holding the attention of your customer. And third, dwell time is an indicator for how likely a visitor is to make a purchase.

If a visitor stays for less than six seconds, they aren't measured for dwell time, but rather factored in as a "bounce" that affects your bounce rate. The best ways to increase dwell time is to have a solid internal linking strategy and to improve the quality of your content.

Wherever your brand publishes content, it should be made easy to share. Plus, it should be highly "shareable" content that people feel driven to share. By tracking your shares with analytics tools, you can keep track of how well your content is performing.

This can help your content team find out where they need to improve to get more shares. Not only are views and qualified leads acquired when content is shared, but also it helps your ranking in search engine algorithms.

Email Open Rate

Email open rate is the ratio of people who opened your email to view it, divided by the number of people who received the email. Use it to measure the success of your email subject lines and the emails themselves.

If your email copy wins your reader over, they're more likely to open the next email. Plus, you should be creating subject headlines for emails that make them impossible not to open. With a look at your email analytics you can find your open rate for each email and find out which subject headers are performing best.

To improve your email content, you might try adding more comedy and entertainment value, but also helpful resources your readers will remember you for.

Measuring Content Performance with the Right KPIs

Measuring KPIs allows you to piece together a clear picture of your content's performance, but also to break down each element in your strategy to know what's working and what's not. Use these KPIs to set goals by looking at the data history.

When you optimize your content strategy piece by piece with the help of data, you'll be able to increase your bottom line and strengthen your brand's presence as a whole.