Dedicating time and resources to content marketing is key for SEO success — but if you’re not measuring the effect of your efforts, you may be missing key opportunities.
The right set of content metrics can answer your burning questions — is your blog attracting the right audiences or is your competition nudging you out? Are your landing pages inspiring conversions or resulting in bounces?
I’ve put together a list of essential content KPIs related to online visibility, traffic, audience engagement, and conversions. By using these metrics, you can see how different parts of your strategy are fusing together and identify when to pivot so you’re always locked in on your goals.
Choosing Which Content Marketing Metrics To Track
You can measure all kinds of metrics, but if they don’t provide data about the things that matter to your business, you can’t make informed decisions. Focus on what you’re trying to accomplish and match each of your goals to metrics that tell the right story.
If your objective is to increase visitors through organic search, measure traffic from search engines. Trying to foster customer loyalty? Make sure you’re seeing an increase in engagement from return visitors.
To really leverage the data, break it down to get more precise insights. This is where things get intriguing because you can pick out patterns and tailor your strategies to specific user types.
For example, filter overall site traffic by location, channel, or audience. Is there a difference in how mobile and desktop users engage with your site? Are visitors more likely to convert if they come from search rather than social media? Personally, I liked to filter by channel and country to see which pages are attracting qualified organic traffic.
Examining your content marketing goals and KPIs from different perspectives can help you better optimize your content for particular audience segments and improve your processes so you can more easily connect with them in the future.
9 Content Metrics To Monitor
As your content marketing efforts take hold, more people should be learning about your brand, visiting your website, and interacting with your content. I’ve divided my recommended metrics into two groups to help you measure the impact of your content.
Visibility metrics give you an idea of the size of your audience and how many people you’re reaching with your blog posts and landing pages. This is especially useful if your goals are to raise brand awareness and expand your customer base.
Engagement metrics measure user interaction with your website and the relevance and usefulness of your content.
Visibility Metrics
1. Traffic: Sessions/Users
There are a few ways to quantify the size of your audience. Google Search Console tells you the number of clicks you get from the Google search engine results pages (SERPs), indicating how well you’re attracting organic traffic to your site.
Google Analytics (GA) gives you a broader picture of the number of users landing on your site through various channels.
You’ll see two different metrics in GA reports:
- A user is a unique visitor to your site. GA uses tracking IDs for each visitor, so if a person returns to your site, they still count as one user.
- A session is a distinct period of activity on your site. A session is counted when someone opens a page or screen on your website or app. Since the same user can have multiple sessions, your data may show more sessions than users.
If you’ve crafted valuable, relevant content and optimized for SEO, your content performance metrics should show an increase in users and sessions over time.
Check out the Traffic Acquisition report in Google Analytics to see users and sessions by session default channel group. You can also use a comparison or filter in your Landing Pages report to see which pages are driving the most organic traffic.
2. Traffic Sources
Audiences land on your website through various channels. Analyze your traffic sources to build on the success of popular channels and examine why other avenues aren’t driving traffic.
You can view this data in the traffic acquisition report in Google Analytics. GA automatically tracks different traffic sources and organizes them into groups for easy comparison. Some of the default channel groups are listed below, but you can customize your own traffic categories within the platform.
- Organic search (search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo).
- Organic social (social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn).
- Referral traffic (backlinks from external websites and directories).
- Direct traffic (users who use a bookmark or type your URL directly into the browser).
- Paid search.
- Paid social.
- Mobile push notifications.
- SMS messages.
3. New Users
New users are individuals visiting your website for the first time. This content KPI measures the success of your content marketing in acquiring new audiences and expanding your customer base. Google Analytics uses tracking IDs to identify new users and includes the data in both the traffic acquisition and retention reports. The retention report also includes information for returning visitors who have previously initiated sessions on your website.
Analyze new user data to see which channels are helping to grow your audience so you can build on those efforts. You can also look at their engagement data to see the type of content first-time visitors are interested in to improve their experience.
To see new users, head to the “User acquisition” report in GA4. This report shows new users by their first primary channel. Click the plus to add “Landing page + query string” to see where these users first interact with your site.
4. Keyword Rankings
Keyword ranking is the position of your web page in the SERPs when someone enters a particular keyword or phrase. Keyword ranking directly impacts your impressions, clicks, and traffic, as users don’t often venture far down the search results page.
Search Console tracks your average position for certain keywords, but consider an SEO tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush for a better picture of search visibility. These platforms can track your keyword rankings across different search engines and provide you with competitive insight to shape your content marketing strategies.
I like using these tools to see how competitors are faring in the SERPs. You can see if rivals are gaining ground on you for the same keywords, as well as discover search terms they’re targeting that you’re not.
If your content strategy KPIs show that your keyword performance needs improvement, review your content optimization. You may also need to update or refresh your content to boost quality and provide information gain.
Engagement Metrics
5. Engagement Time
Your KPIs for content marketing should include engagement time, or the length of time the average user spends on your site. When you publish quality content that aligns with what customers are seeking, engagement time should increase, giving you the opportunity to bring audiences into your sales funnel, build loyalty, and drive conversions.
Google Analytics considers a user engaged when your website is in the foreground in a browser. If someone navigates to another tab in the browser and is no longer viewing your site, they’re no longer counted as engaged.
If you have a mobile app, a user is considered engaged if the app is in the foreground on their device.
GA gives you the average engagement time for your entire site or app, which reflects how long a typical user is reading blog posts, watching videos, or interacting with your content. Average engagement time is calculated as the total engagement time across all sessions divided by total number of users.
You can also view average engagement time by page, but you’ll need to add it to a GA4 report following these steps. Just select the “average engagement time” metric.
Here are some tips to improve engagement time:
- Conduct a content audit. Make sure each page of your website contains relevant content. Remove out-of-date or stale content that could cause a user to abandon your site.
- Improve existing content. Review web pages for quality and readability. Enrich sparse content with images or video to make it more dynamic and compelling.
- Implement internal linking. Guide users to additional relevant content to keep them on your site.
- Address 404 errors and redirect chains. These annoyances could cause users to bounce. Fixing them will provide a better user experience.
6. Engagement Rate
Ideally, when someone lands on your site, they’re reading your content, navigating to different pages, or performing an action. This KPI for content marketing is known as engagement rate.
In Google Analytics, a visit or a session is considered engaged if it meets one of the following criteria:
- Lasts longer than 10 seconds.
- Involves a key event.
- Involves at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.
Google Analytics calculates engagement rate as the total number of engaged sessions divided by total sessions for a given period. The engagement rate is showing on the Landing pages and Pages and paths reports.
One point of clarification: In GA, bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate and refers to non-engaged sessions. Traditionally, bounce rate has been defined as any single-page session regardless of how long someone is on the page. To better measure content marketing, GA refined the definition of a bounce and introduced the concept of engagement to capture users who spend time reading a page but aren’t clicking anything else.
7. Pages Per Session
Pages per session gives you an idea of how many URLs users are visiting on your site before they leave. This metric is also known as views per session in Google Analytics.
Pages or views per session is calculated as the total page views divided by the total number of sessions for a given period. Higher pages or views per session suggests that your content is interesting and useful, and that your site is delivering a good user experience.
In some cases, however, an increased number of pages per session could mean users are clicking around and having difficulty finding the content they want. When you’re measuring content marketing, I recommend putting this metric into context by combining it with other engagement KPIs.
A low number of pages per session might suggest your site is hard to navigate or that your content isn’t meeting audience expectations. To improve this metric, consider:
- Revisiting your customer journey and adding appropriate links to relevant pages and calls to action. This can inspire users to continue exploring your site.
- Building content clusters to provide more depth to your site. This encourages readers to find answers to their queries without returning to Google.
This metric is not automatically generated in GA4 reports. You’ll need to edit the Pages and screens report to add it.
8. CTR
Click-through rate (CTR) is a content marketing measurement that compares the number of users who click on a link to the total number who saw it. CTR is most often used to track the outcomes of marketing strategies such as SEO, PPC ads, social media posts, and email campaigns. A high CTR means you’re driving traffic to your website and landing pages where you can encourage conversions.
If your CTR is low, your content isn’t making enough of an impression on your audience. You may need to rework headlines, images, or value propositions to make more of a splash, or consider whether the content is aligned with your audience’s needs. A/B testing is useful for comparing different versions of a campaign for effectiveness.
You can find the CTR of each of your pages from Google Search in Google Search Console.
9. Conversions/ Key Events
Most businesses use a sales content KPI to measure revenue-generating actions such as purchases, bookings, and reservations. But it’s important to track an array of conversions to see how you’re converting audiences throughout the buyer journey.
Depending on your goals, conversions can include:
- Newsletter signups.
- Free trials.
- Requests for quotes.
- Form submissions.
- White paper and ebook downloads.
- Video views.
- Event registrations.
- Account creations.
- Live chat initiations.
- Participation in customer surveys.
- Reservations and bookings.
- Purchases.
To use Google Analytics to track conversions, designate desired actions as key events. GA then collects data for those events so you can see how effective your pages are at driving customer action.
You can add your “session conversion rate” to your GA4 report by editing the pages and screens report and selecting it from the metrics drop-down.
Improve Your Content Marketing With Victorious
Content marketing and analytics go hand-in-hand to help you rise above the competition. At Victorious, we offer a full array of SEO content writing services that include strategizing, planning, writing, and optimizing. Lean on the expertise of our team to publish impactful web content, landing pages, and blog posts, all meticulously crafted with your customers and goals in mind. Contact us today to get started.
