13 Essential KPIs That Every Content Marketer Should Be Tracking

Content marketing is a powerful way to grow your business, but it can be hard to know exactly what’s working. If you’re not measuring the right KPIs, it’s all too easy for your content marketing efforts to fall flat.

What’s worse? Measuring only vanity metrics (a very common problem among content marketers today). Vanity metrics are those that make you feel good but don’t necessarily indicate whether your content marketing strategy is working or having an impact on your business. For example, page views and social media shares are vanity metrics.

Sure, it’s great if your content is being shared a lot on social media, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s reaching the right people or that it’s helping you achieve your business goals. I’ve made this mistake many times in my career.

You should be tracking metrics across the funnel all the way from page views to signups to MRR generated. Here are thirteen important KPIs (split into four buckets) that will give you a better idea of whether or not your content marketing is actually working.

1. Content Engagement

Content engagement is a measure of how much your audience is interacting with your content. Content that is engaging will keep people reading, viewing, or listening, and will encourage them to take action.

There are a few different ways to measure content engagement, including:

• Time on page: How long are people spending on each page of your website?
• Bounce rate: What percentage of people are leaving your site after viewing only one page?
• Pages per visit: How many pages are people viewing during each visit to your site?
• Average session duration: How long is each session on your site lasting?

There are a few key reasons why content engagement is such an important content marketing KPI to track.

1. Engagement is a key indicator of how well your content is resonating with your audience. If people are engaging with your content, it means they’re finding it interesting and relevant.
2. Engagement can help you gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. If you see an increase or decrease in engagement, you can make changes to your strategy accordingly.
3. Engagement can also lead to other important marketing metrics, such as conversions and more search traffic.

2. Traffic

Traffic measures the number of people who are coming to your site. You can track overall traffic, as well as traffic to specific pages or pieces of content. You can also track from what sources the traffic is coming from like organic, referral, social, etc., and optimize your content promotion strategy towards the sources that repeatedly bring you traffic.

There are a few different ways to measure traffic, including:

• Unique visitors: How many people are coming to your site?
• Pageviews: How many pages are being viewed on your site?
• Referral traffic: How much traffic is coming to your site from other websites?
• Search engine traffic: How much traffic is coming to your site from search engines?

There are a lot of reasons why traffic is an important content marketing KPI to track. Here are just a few:

1. It can help you determine which content is most popular and what kind of content is driving the most traffic to your site. You can tweak your content briefs according to the style that’s working with your audience.
2. Traffic can also be a good indicator of how well your content is being received by search engines. If your traffic is increasing, it’s likely that your content is being ranked higher in search results.
3. It can help you generate leads. If you see a lot of traffic coming to your site, you can try to capture that traffic by offering a lead magnet or other opt-in.

3. Leads / Emails

Leads are people who have shown an interest in your product. They may have signed up for a free trial, downloaded a white paper, or requested more information.

There are a few different ways to measure leads, including:

• Lead conversion rate: What percentage of people who visit your site become leads?
• Cost per lead: How much does it cost to acquire each lead?

Leads eventually turn into customers, so tracking them helps you measure the success of your content marketing in terms of generating new business as well as what kind of leads to bring in.

4. Sales/Revenue

Sales are the number of people who have purchased your product. This is the ultimate content marketing KPI that you should be mapping to all your other content marketing KPIs to. This is the primary content marketing KPI CEOs care about.

Revenue is the bottom line for any business. It’s what keeps the lights on and allows a business to grow. Without revenue, a business is not sustainable.

There are a few different ways to measure sales, including:

• Signup conversion rate: What percentage of leads become sales?
• MRR/ARR/Revenue: How much revenue did you generate from these leads?
• Average order value/LTV: How much does the average customer from these leads pay?

There are a lot of reasons why revenue is the ultimate content marketing KPI to track.

1. Revenue is a great indicator of how well your content marketing is working. If your content is driving revenue, then it means people are finding it useful and are willing to pay for it. This is the ultimate goal of content marketing: to create valuable content that people will pay for.
2. Revenue is a great way to track the success of your content marketing over time. If you’re seeing a consistent increase in revenue profitably, then it’s a good sign that your content marketing is working and you can continue investing in it. And, if you’re seeing a decrease in revenue or no revenue, then it’s a sign that you need to make some changes to your content marketing strategy.

If your content marketing efforts are not generating revenue, then they are not successful.

You can’t track what you don’t measure

In conclusion, there are many KPIs that you can measure in your content marketing campaigns. However, if you want to succeed at it, it’s important that you choose the right ones for your business. If you’re currently not measuring anything at all or just tracking generic KPIs like ‘social shares’ or ‘impressions’, maybe it’s time to combine with the above content marketing KPIs?