Content Marketing KPIs: What You Should Be Monitoring

Monitoring the performance of your marketing campaigns is an essential step in your overall strategy. After all, if you’re not learning from your efforts and making month over month improvements, can you really call it a strategy? Whether you’re currently working with an agency or managing your marketing in-house, having a clear understanding of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) by which you should be measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategy is critical.

Understanding these metrics will enable you to determine if your current efforts are paying off while identifying areas of opportunity for improvement. At Elevation Marketing we believe transparency is key to an effective, collaborative client/agency relationship. Hence why we’ve decided to publish a blog series on the KPI’s you should be focusing on in each area of your marketing strategy. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to check out our previous posts on SEO KPIs, social media KPIs and paid media KPIs.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the KPI’s you should be considering as you assess the impact of your content marketing statistics.

Traffic

This KPI is often the first metric our clients want to discuss when it comes to analyzing their content marketing statistics and it’s no surprise. Assessing your highest trafficked and lowest trafficked pieces of content over the last 90 days, 6 months and 1 year, is a great place to start. Why such a long look back period? Because SEO takes time. You can’t expect to see the fruits of your efforts when it comes to SEO optimized content for at least 90 days and you might not have a true picture for a year. This is because like a fine wine, content gets better over time. It takes a while for Google to index and begin serving your content. Hence why it’s important to publish fresh content frequently.

Here’s an example of a piece that was published in early 2020, and as you can, we didn’t begin to see much traffic until September and didn’t see major traction until late in the year.

Be sure to check in on the traffic levels of your content strategy at least quarterly and include a 12 month look back. Be sure you, or your agency, are using this information to inform your on-going content planning efforts.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is a metric we also mentioned in our piece on essential paid media KPI’s. Your click through rate is the ratio of times your blog was served in the search engines versus how often it was clicked. You can find this metric in Google Search Console. This tells us how much a given piece of content is resonating with your audience. If your CTR on a particular piece of content is high, this is a great indicator that people are interested in your topic and want to learn more. If on the other hand, you have a piece of content with a low CTR, it’s a good idea to assess the title and meta description. Perhaps simply a refresh in your meta data can improve the performance of your piece.

Take note of the verbiage that resonate best as well as the verbiage that falls short. Use this information to help you identify new topics and write your meta descriptions in the future.

Social Shares and Engagement

Use the backend data of your social media channels to assess engagement levels with each piece of content you promote. Which drives the highest engagement? The most shares? The most comments? This is a clear indicator that your content is having an impact and an early predictor of which pieces will gain rank within SERPs in the coming months.

SEO Rankings

Take a look regularly at the keywords each of our highest trafficked pieces of content is ranking for. Which are climbing in terms of number of keywords ranking? Which are losing traction? Which are ranking for your highest value keywords? This should be a regular touchpoint for you, whether you’re managing your content strategy or you’re working with an agency. Your content marketing statistics around keyword rankings are the clearest indicator of which pieces are moving the proverbial SEO needle.

Zero Click SEO Rankings

Zero click search rankings are the number of times your content is serving in Google SERPs in featured snippets, quick answers, people also ask and similar components. This is particularly important because Google is moving more and more toward zero click SERPs. Meaning it’s their goal to answer a searcher’s needs immediately within search results without the need to click through to a website. While it is our goal with content marketing to drive direct traffic, it’s also important to work to get your content included in these features as much as possible.

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While we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here with content marketing KPI’s, these will give you the most clear cut indicator of the success of your efforts. Interested in learning more? We encourage you to check out our complete KPI series and to subscribe to the Elevation Marketing blog.

We also encourage you to follow our social channels: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you would like to discuss your content marketing or other digital needs, we are here to help you realize your business goals!