Content marketing is more than creating digital campaigns. To ensure your efforts are successful, it’s important to track the results and optimize your campaigns as needed. Below are some of the metrics you should be keeping an eye on during your content marketing efforts.
1. Traffic Sources
An audience is important, but it’s even more important to know where that audience is coming from. Knowing your traffic sources can help you better understand your audience, tailor your content to your audience, and in turn, your campaigns are more likely to be successful.
If you need to make adjustments to your traffic sources, consider improving your SEO strategy, getting involved in cross-posting or guest blogging opportunities, and seeing which traffic sources are working well for your competitors.
2. Total Number of Visits
Part of tracking your brand’s content marketing success is taking note of the total number of visits you’re getting on your website. By tracking this metric, you’ll be able to notice any increases or dips in your visits and get an idea of the overall interest in your brand.
If your total visits are low, try boosting your presence on social media or improving your email marketing strategy. It’s also recommended to stay consistent with content posting and collaborating with brands relevant to yours.
3. Unique Visitors
Your total number of visits is a broader, yet still important, metric. On the other hand, unique visitors indicate how many individual people are interested in your content. This can give you a closer look at your genuine audience size and see how your audience grows over time throughout your content marketing efforts.
Expanding to other social media platforms, improving your SEO, focusing on creating content that’s shareable, and starting an ambassador program for your brand are some ways to get more unique visitors.
4. Impressions
The number of impressions refers to how many times your content was viewed. An impression gets counted even if someone doesn’t interact with your post or digital ad. Use this content marketing metric to determine how far your content is spreading, how well your brand awareness is, and how visible your content is on various platforms.
To increase your impressions, make sure you’re using the right hashtags, gain access to a broader audience by collaborating with others, and post content at the right times. Additionally, increase your posting frequency without risking quality, try a re-targeting campaign, cross-post between different platforms, and engage in social media trends or utilize trending hashtags.
5. Engagement Rate
How often and how your customers are engaging with you on social media matters. While reach is critical, your engagement rate will show you how many people are interested in your content. This includes your number of likes, comments, and shares.
Low engagement rate? You may be targeting the wrong audience, or your content marketing strategies may need some tweaks. Learn more about your current audience, mix up the type of content you create, and engage back with your customers through replies and the like.
6. Average Engagement Time
The engagement on your posts and ads makes a difference, but your average engagement time is an even better indicator of your audience’s interests in your content. After all, quality is more important than quantity.
Generally, tracking your average engagement time suggests how effective and valuable your content is. Low average engagement time may indicate that your audience is losing interest quickly in your content or that your content is irrelevant to your audience.
7. Click-through Rate
Your click-through rate or CTR indicates how many people clicked on your ad or the call-to-action button on your post. This can help you understand how effective your calls to action are and help you understand the genuine interest in your content.
A low CTR rate often means you’re not targeting the right audience. It could also suggest that your call-to-action isn’t persuasive enough or looks too promotional.
8. Keyword Rankings
It’s important to see how your website is ranked for certain keywords on search engines. The greater your search engine optimization (SEO), the more likely you are to be seen by people searching for a particular item or service your business offers.
Poor keyword rankings, or even being ranked for irrelevant keywords, can lead to low visibility and reduced organic traffic. You may also notice that your competitors are taking the lead for certain keywords, your engagement is low, or that you’re not ranking for the keywords you’re targeting at all, which means fewer opportunities for conversions.
9. Bounce Rate
Every website has a bounce rate, the number of visitors who quickly leave without interacting with more than one page. This metric can help key in on user experience on your website and the relevancy and quality of your content.
If you’re struggling with a high or increasing bounce rate, there are many things you can do to improve it. Improve the user-friendliness of your website, make sure you’re targeting the right people based on your content, and make sure to regularly update your website.
10. Conversions
Most content marketing strategies have an end goal of turning prospective customers into conversions. A conversion can refer to someone filling out a form, downloading something, signing up for an e-mail list, registering for an event, or making a purchase from your online store.
Low conversions can point to many different things. It’s important to backtrack and monitor other marketing metrics to see where your content marketing strategy could be going wrong. Besides improving other metrics, some specific ways to boost conversions include making your forms simpler, brushing up your calls to action, and giving A/B testing a go.
Ensuring your content marketing campaigns are performing well can be tricky and, not to mention, time-consuming. Digital marketing agencies in Utah can help you produce successful campaigns to best advertise your brand.
Conclusion
There’s a lot involved in content marketing. There are many marketing techniques to test, different means of reaching out to prospective customers, and various platforms to consider. What is more, tracking your metrics is critical. From number of visits to conversions, the latter are some of the many content marketing metrics to closely watch.