A marketing agent or CMO with detailed knowledge of data on his side is a tough act to beat in today’s world. Especially if they know inside and out the idea of metrics, and how to follow them. Today, most know the basics of metric follow: leads and traffic and other such basic metrics. But there are other types, more advanced or niche that can help your marketing team immensely. The following content marketing metrics are organized into 7 different types.
#1. Consumption
- Page views: This metric tells you which and how many pages on your site that users are frequenting most, which is a good indicator of what content is drawing people in most effectively.
- Average time on page: as the name implies, this is a measurement of how long each user is staying on each page on your site. This is a good way of deducing how engaging your content is.
- Unique visitors: this stat measure how many people overall are visiting your site, and how many of those people are repeat visitors.
#2. Retention
- Return rate: measures how many customers you have that are regulars and which are brand new. Good to know if you want to build a positive relationship with both.
- Bounce rate: Measures the rate of entry and exit clicks happening on the same page, typically the homepage.
- Pages per visit: tracks how many pages each visitor goes to every time they visit the site.
#3. Sales
- Pipeline generated: aggregates the total dollar value of all opportunities where the lead’s first touch associated with those opportunities was with your content.
- Pipeline touched: measures and gathers all opportunities where the user “touched” a particular piece of content.
- Revenue influenced: Observes the dollar value of revenue closed where the contact in question consumed your content before converting.
#4. Engagement
- Comments: Tracks the comments left on a particular post you make on your site. This is a good means of measuring user engagement.
- Session duration: The length of time a user spends on your site across several pages.
- Page depth: The number of pages a visitor clicks on per visit to your site.
#5. Lead metrics
- New leads generated: Using your CRM and automation marketing tool, you calculate how many new leads came into your database after they touched new content.
- Touched existing leads: Again making use of your marketing tool and your CRM, you can calculate how many existing leads in your database interact with a piece of content.
#6. Sharing
- Social media shares: tracks what content on your site is most likely to be shared by users based on what’s been shared previously. A good metric of what content your consumers seem interested in showing others.
- Social media likes: Like the previous metric, you can use this metric to keep track of shared content since many social media sites like to display what content a user “likes” to their followers.
- Email forwards: Although not every forwarded email can be measured and quantified, this can still be a very useful tool for measuring what emails got forwarded parallel another campaign.
#7. Production/cost
- Time to publish: Tracks how long it takes your team to publish a piece of content. More of an internal metric than marketing specifically, but knowing your team’s efficiency can greatly help how you market yourselves.
- Content throughput: Pinpointing how much content you and your team produces over a given time can make for excellent marketing if that number reflects efficiency.
- Content backlog: this measures how quickly your users are consuming your content, and can thus be a good indicator of how well you’ve been advertising your entire content log.
While not every metric listed above is necessarily a marketing metric, every single one of them ties back into marketing in some way. And being aware of these metrics can help your marketing team get a much tighter grip on marketing better to your customers. So remember these 7 types of content marketing metrics, and implement them whenever you can.