Content marketing is the practice of creating compelling content with the intention of driving leads or sales. Every content marketer will have one clear goal when doing content marketing: lead generation and/or sales. The problem is that most marketers don’t know how to measure the performance of their content marketing campaign.

The purpose of this article is to explain how you can utilize the use of analytics for your content marketing initiatives, whether you own an online magazine website or run an e-commerce blog. This will be done by providing four different stages that you can use to gauge your campaign’s effectiveness: traffic generation, web engagement, conversion, and retention.

Stage 1 – Traffic Generation

In this stage, you want to see how many visitors are coming to your site and what pages they’re viewing.

The first way to measure your content marketing campaign is by the number of views. You’ll want this number to be high because it means people are interested in what you’re providing and they find it compelling enough to view it more than once.

The other big piece of the puzzle is your target audience and where they can potentially come from before visiting your website. How well do you know them? Do they have a lot of potentials and how often do they consume this type of content? These are questions that every marketer should be asking themselves in order to determine their best plan of action for success in content marketing.

Metrics you should take note of:

  • Users
  • Visits
  • Pageviews
  • Impressions
  • Source of traffic

Stage 2 – Web Engagement

This stage is all about how much time people spend on your site and what they do while they’re there. Some of the ways you can measure web engagement are by tracking visitor session duration, bounce rate, page views per visit, pages per visit, and average time on site.

Another underrated metric that marketers tend to forget is the internal search metric. Knowing what people search for inside your website can give you a clear idea of what their interests are. This will help in determining the type of content that is right for your audience.

Metrics you should take note of:

  • Bounce rate
  • Visit duration
  • Pages per visit
  • Average time on page
  • Internal search terms
  • Scroll depth
  • Engagements (comments, likes, shares)

Stage 3 – Conversion

This is where you want to know if people actually took action after visiting your site or not. Whether they filled out a contact form after reading your content or clicked on a banner that leads to another converting page.

The other, less discussed, a measurement that most marketers overlook is conversion rates – how many people go from viewing your content to becoming a lead or purchasing one of your products? If these numbers are low then there’s probably something wrong with either the execution or the content itself.

  • Metrics you should take note of:
  • Actual conversions (downloads, sales, filled up contact form, etc.)
  • Conversion rate

Stage 4 – Retention

It’s all about how many people return to your site. You want this number to be high because it means you’re giving them what they need, and it’s probably worth their time for a second visit.

  • Metrics you should take note of:
  • Returning users
  • Loyal customer rate
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Repeat purchase

Key Takeaways

Using free analytics tools such as Google Analytics can help you gauge the performance of your content marketing campaign. Make sure you utilize it. Content marketing is an important piece of your online marketing strategy and knowing every detail of your content marketing campaign’s performance can lead to success.