Content Marketing KPIs to be Tracking

For most websites it’s quite easy to track how a campaign is performing. Many sites have some type of conversion tracking set up, whether that be form fills, shopping cart purchases, or downloads. Marketers can simply jump into analytics, find the conversions or goal section of the campaign, and review what has happened. Well if you’re running any type of content marketing campaign it can be difficult to determine if the new content being created is being effective. The following KPIs can help showcase how successful a content marketing campaigns has been.

Page Views

It can be a bit tricky for some people when it comes to pageviews, visitors, sessions, etc. That’s why we like to focus strictly on pageviews to show in content marketing campaigns.

According to Google “A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.”

This means each time a page is visited by a user it’s registered as a page view, so a user may visit multiple pages. Now for other campaigns you may want to track unique visitors, or how many people come to a page. For content users may click internal links, tags, or other links to view additional content. This is why it’s important to track how many times a specific page is viewed.

Time on Page

Now once a user views a page, there’s a few different things for them to do. Click back and leave, click a link somewhere on the page or site and leave, or read through the article. By monitoring the time on page metrics within Google Analytics you can get an idea of what content users are finding interesting. Let’s say you are running ads to get users to a specific post on your blog. The page may have a decent click thru rate, but once you check analytics you find users are only staying on the page for 10 seconds. This will tell you the content on the page is not relevant to users or the ad.

Additionally, reviewing the pages which have the longest time on page can help you determine what kind of content users find interesting. This will help when creating new content strategies going forward, by seeing what content users stay to read.

Referring Domains / Back Links

In any search engine optimization campaign one of the biggest metrics to track is the number of referring domains, or back links coming in to the site. It can also be used to monitor how the blog is performing as well. Ideally, the referring domains pointing to your blog should be constantly climbing in an upward trend. This shows users are finding the content helpful, useful, entertaining and linking it from their site.

There are quite a few tools available out there that can track referring domains to specific URLs and one of my favorites is AHREFs.com. It’s quite simple to use too, just plug in your domain in this case it would be examplesite.com/blog and a few different metrics about the URL will show, specifically referring domains. Refer back to this about once a month to see how new sites are linking to your blog. New links means the content is awesome.

Subscribers

Your blog should have some type of option for users to subscribe to it. Subscribers will be sent updates when new content goes live, keeping them in the loop of new articles. Also, you can throw in other promotions within the email to entice users to check out products and services.

Social Shares

Every article will perform differently, but a quick and easy way to see how one has done in comparison to another is to check the social shares. Hopefully, you’ve set up social sharing options within your blog, which allows users to quickly share with their followers. Many of these sharing options show the number of shares each social network received.

If you don’t have a counter for your social shares you can utilize one of the multiple tools available online. If you’re using a WordPress blog platform there are plugins available that will automatically track social shares for you.