7 Content Marketing Metrics to Consider for Continued Success

No business can survive without customers. While customer retention is incredibly important, attracting new customers is essential to growing your business. Because of this, customer acquisition should be a top priority for business owners. This begs the question, how do you get new customers or clients in the literal or figurative door?

Traditionally, your sales team will engage with your potential customers, sending emails, making phone calls, and visiting them in person depending on the nature of your business. Though this approach is often effective, is it the most efficient use of your employees’ time?

Many successful businesses have decided that it would be better for the customers to come to them, rather than them go to the customers. One of the ways to do this is to take an inbound approach and implement a content marketing strategy.

对于大多数企业来说，这是一个很好的举措，但是，当您将内容营销活动纳入整体策略时，您需要确保您看到投资回报。

Content marketing is a type of marketing where you create and share online content in order to spread awareness about what you do and create interest in working with or purchasing from your company.

Earlier, we mentioned how salespeople will interact with potential customers multiple times. Why do they do this? These multiple contacts are so that when your potential customer is ready to be an actual customer, your business is top-of-mind.

内容营销试图做同样的事情，但更有效。通过以博客，视频或社交媒体帖子的形式创建内容，您可以将业务定位为您所在领域的“首选专家”。本质上，您成为人们在遇到问题时发现和想法的品牌。

As important as this is, content marketing works in another important way. As a consumer, what do you do when you have a problem? If you’re like millions of other people, you ask Google how to fix that problem. You may not even know how to communicate what’s wrong, but Google magically knows and directs you to the answers you need.

When you engage in content marketing, you become the answer that your potential customer is searching for.

Does it work? According to theContent Marketing Institute,内容营销领导人近eigh经验t times more site traffic than non-leaders.

Need more convincing?Demand Metric表示内容营销的成本比出站营销低62％，并且产生了三倍的潜在客户。

什么是内容营销指标？

Is content marketing a good strategy to incorporate into your business? Probably. But, it takes time and energy to plan and resources to execute. Just like any other strategy, you would think to include, you’ll want to make sure that you’re seeing a healthy return on investment (ROI) for your effort.

为此，您需要熟悉内容营销指标。有了这些数字，您将能够确定您的工作是否会产生影响，是否需要调整方法，或者是否需要完全放弃它以换取其他事情。

Content Marketing Success Metrics

While there are hundreds of specific metrics out there you could use to determine whether or not your content marketing efforts are making enough of an impact to justify their costs, there are a handful of metrics that are essential. Incorporating the following numbers into your content marketing metrics dashboard will give you a great understanding of your performance and effectiveness.

1. Traffic Sources

It’s wonderful to discover that people are consuming your content. But, how did they find out about it? A truly successful content marketing plan will attract new potential customers through engaging content. On the other hand, you may also be creating more engagement with past customers or on-the-fence potential customers. This is still good as it can create repeat business and help you stay top-of-mind.

Either way, it’s important to know how readers have made their way to your content. To find traffic sources to your blog or website, you can use a platform such asGoogle Analytics.

2. Impressions

How is your content doing? Does Google recognize that you are an "answer" to the searcher’s problems? Using Google Search Console, you can determine how many impressions your content has received. The more impressions, the more people you’ve reached.

3. Click-through-rate (CTR)

Impressions or views of your content is important, however, without acknowledging your CTR or click-through rate, you won’t be able to fully understand whether or not your content is effective.

More people may be viewing or consuming your content, but is it moving them to action? Are they visiting your website? Are they learning more about your products? Understanding your click-through rate provides this insight.

4. Content Shares and Backlinks

您正在推出良好的内容（希望如此！），但是足够分享吗？对您的内容的真实测试是人们是否发现它有用或有趣，可以与自己的受众分享。

Bonus, the more your content is shared, the more Google sees it as the "solution" and shows it to more people. If you’re posting on social media, shares are easy to determine. If you’re looking at blog content, you can use a tool such asBuzzSumo或者ahrefs.

5. Email Opt-in Rates

Click-through rates are important to know if your readers are taking action on your content by visiting your website. However, if they don’t buy right away, are they giving you the opportunity to capture their information and connect with them in the future?

When your content marketing is performing well and truly doing its job, readers will be comfortable sharing their contact information with you and eager to hear more of what you have to say, and potentially purchase your product or service in the future. Youremail marketing software可以给你这个指标。

6. Bounce Rate

Ideally, once people land on your website, they’ll take the time to explore, digest some of your content, and buy. Sometimes though, you’ll see a high bounce rate because people have navigated away from your website immediately after they were directed there. This could be due to slow-loading, a poor user experience, or different content than they expected.

It’s important to know your bounce rate and thenunderstand what’s causing it. This helps you avoid putting all the time and effort into creating quality content, only to find that something on your website is turning off potential customers.

7. Keyword Rankings

内容营销的很大一部分是为您所需的受众选择正确的关键字。最终，问题是“您的潜在客户在Google上寻找什么？”一旦弄清楚，就可以将这些单词纳入您的内容中，理想情况下，可以更轻松地找到。

However, keywords change over time and you’ll need to make sure that you are being successful in your endeavors. Review the keyword rankings usingSEMRush或者Google Search Console和调整你的关键词或内容的时候not performing well.

Content Marketing Dashboard

If you’re looking to keep your metrics and data organized, consider creating acontent marketing dashboardwith up-to-date visuals of the key metrics you want your team to track. When content marketers are clear on their goals, they are in a better position to meet and exceed them.

The ideal content marketing metrics for you to use will be determined by what your goals are with your content marketing strategy. If you are looking to increase brand awareness, you will utilize different metrics than if your primary goal is to increase sales of a specific product or increase turnout for your next event.