Measure These 2 Most Important Metrics of Content Marketing

In this analysis, I delve into the critical metrics for measuring content marketing success. It underscores the importance of going beyond traditional metrics like views or shares to focus on lead generation and sales metrics. The article provides insights into how these metrics offer a more accurate reflection of content marketing's impact on business growth and customer engagement. This guide is essential for marketers looking to align their content strategies with tangible business outcomes.
metrics of content marketing

Did you know that your content marketing strategy is likely to impact all of your customer service interactions?

Too many websites are built meticulously, but, end up using content that does not connect with the customer. If you are seeking to expand your business reach, drive sales and increase profitability by using the Internet as a medium, your website and its content are the main aspects that can make or break your business’s profitability and reputation.

So, how do you measure the results of your content marketing efforts or your content marketing strategy?

To begin with, you need to know the metrics behind content marketing. With my experience, most of the content marketers measure unique visitors, page views by visitors, page views, time (spent exploring on the page), shares, bounce rate, ad clicks, and comments. However, they seem to be missing out on sales and lead generation metrics, which happen to be the key metrics used to track content marketing results.

lead generation and sales metrics

A Content Marketing Strategy That Drives Results

metrics of content marketing

While readership and ad revenue were the accepted yardsticks for content’s success in the past, but, today some sort of conversion and brand awareness are also taken as vital metrics for measuring the success of a content strategy.

You’ve written a great article about one of the trending topics of the day. You have been able to garner views as well. But no one has shared your content, and no one is talking about you or the article.

This raises a question?

How come your target audience does not feel the need to share your content or promote you among others?

In my opinion, this could be attributed to a number of reasons, your content is dull, you are not talking to the right audience or you are not promoting your blog in the right channel. What you need is a content strategy, one that is held together by measurable goals including increased traffic to your website/blog. You should be able to develop a strong online brand presence, improve credibility and drive more social media traffic.

Track Results Using Google Analytics

Between creating a content strategy and implementing it, you need to benchmark key measurables (which might vary depending on your strategy) and use appropriate tools such as Google Analytics to measure page views, visits, traffic volume and time spent on site. You can even use the Goals feature in Google Analytics to measure the success of content on your website. If you want to measure these metrics of third party website, then you can use tools like, Follow, you can find my review of Follow.

measure metrics with google analytics

Also, there are a number of social monitoring tools which you can use to manage, measure and analyze social media and content marketing initiatives.

Finally, the Essential Metrics That You Should not Miss

metrics of content marketing

So, by now you might ask, what are some of the essential metrics? I must say, there are four types or categories of content metrics, namely consumption, sharing, lead generation, and sales. Even among these, there exist overvalued metrics, like the sharing metrics. But you can rely on lead generation and sales metrics to determine the potential business from your content. Content strategy metrics and the KPIs you are likely to gauge your content marketing success are essential to prove ROI. You can easily figure out which of them align with your goals and add value to the content you produce and finally measure it based on them as well.

Ankit Prakash
Ankit Prakash

Ankit is a seasoned technology entrepreneur and founder of Aritic and EasySendy. With over 10 years of experience building product-led B2B SaaS companies, he is focused on ambitious goals and bringing innovative platforms to market. As a Principal Founder, Ankit leads product, engineering, marketing, and strategic partnerships for Aritic's suite of sales and marketing automation tools. He has grown the brand to over $120M valuation and $8M+ in revenue since 2015. Ankit is passionate about analyzing and reviewing software to provide readers with authoritative, in-depth insights. His articles cover martech, SaaS, entrepreneurship, and other technologies based on his hands-on expertise. He stays on top of industry trends and best practices in product marketing, performance marketing, inbound marketing, and content marketing. His work has been featured in leading publications including G2Crowd, Scoop.It, Brandvertisor, Martech Advisor, Smart Insights, and more. Driven by a dedication to shaping the future of B2B SaaS, Ankit enjoys translating his experiences building, marketing, and scaling companies into actionable thought leadership.

7 Comments
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  1. Always did I wonder, most of the newcommers in marketing never use to measure these important so metric for content marketing. Implementing content strategy takes time, but, measuring its effectiveness is most important.

    • Alexander, all content produced has some goal attached to it. If the goal is measured effectively, then, it gives right direction to the content marketer.

  2. How to ensure progress on the content marketing efforts? Directly focus on the sales lead and sales lead generation along with other basic constraints of content marketing to get the best result.

  3. There is a need for something like benchmarking the key measurable while making a strategy to create the content and implement this strategy. The users should also use some suitable tools like Google analytics for measuring the views of the page and knowing about the visitors and the traffic of the web-site.

  4. Does the metrics of content marketing remain same for all type of websites or there can be a priority or specific metrics for different types of website? For example Ankit, if I have a business website and the other one is blogging website then will there be unique analysis tricks for both or the same analysis trends will be used?

    • Robinson, we can divide the content website metrics for 3 different type of business:
      1. Content for B2C websites
      2. Content for B2B websites
      3. Content for Publishers
      All of the above 3 have different kind of target audience and 3 different targets itself.

  5. Content marketing is an integral part of any business. Though, CONTENT IS THE KING in today’s world of business you need to make sure that we take care of the metrics that can help you improve your content quality.

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