There are four buckets of content marketing metrics to track:
- Consumption
- Sharing
- Lead Generation
- Sales
The consumption and sharing metrics are easy to report on. It gets tricky when it comes to tying this into your CRM for leads and sales data. During my 20+ years of experience, I have never found this data to be 100% accurate. First off, content marketing rarely gets attribution or lead source credit either due to technical tracking issues or SEO programs taking credit.
When I look at this data, I take it with a grain of salt but it’s usually a good indicator of how well your content marketing programs are driving pipeline.
Example Dashboard
Consumption
Pageviews - This is a good measurement of site popularity and indicates whether the content is resonating with your audience.
Average Time on Page - This is a great indicator of content relevancy and user engagement.
New Visitors - Determine if a piece of content is working or not.
Bounce Rate - A high bounce rate percentage is a good indicator that the content you’re serving isn’t relevant to the audience and doesn’t keep them engaged.
Sharing
Social Shares - Measures of social engagement and shares such as retweets, likes, and comments are very potent indicators of content relevance and value.
Click-Through Rate - A high CTR shows that the messaging was relevant and that the content piqued their interest.
Lead Generation
First Touch - The first channel that a visitor interacted with before converting on your site. More commonly known as lead source.
Traffic Sources - Understand which channels have been the most effective, providing learnings to carry on to future campaigns.
Conversion % - The percentage at which viewers move from anonymous visitors to named contacts within your marketing automation platform. This can measure a few conversions: lead form fill, subscription, trial, demo, etc. based on your marketing definitions.
MQLs - Content marketing activities like blog posts, white papers, social engagement, etc. all lead to the marketing qualified lead (MQL) conversion flow, so this is an important metric to track.
Sales
Pipeline Influenced - Content marketing can be attributed back to the dollar amount of pipeline it influenced.
Opportunities Influenced - One step further down the sales funnel is converting sales pipeline into sales opportunities. Similarly, content marketing should be measured on its ability to influence this stage in the sales funnel.
Opportunities Won - A well-executed strategy should provide relevant and valuable content to a highly targeted audience that pushes them along the marketing and sales funnel to the ultimate conversion.
Metrics to Track by Channel
The following framework maps the content marketing metrics (in the order they appear in the marketing and sales funnel) against content channels. Using this framework, you can get a better idea of how to measure content across all channels.
Sources:
https://chartio.com/learn/marketing-analytics/content-marketing-metrics-to-track/
https://curata.com/blog/the-comprehensive-guide-to-content-marketing-analytics-metrics/