Marketers are drowning in data.

Pageviews, Facebook likes, time on site… the list of metrics is never-ending.

While a wealth of information is beneficial, it can also be overwhelming. Some points of data are superfluous and end up causing more confusion than value.

To combat this, marketers must select specific key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. After all, content is a tool, and a tool’s effectiveness must be measured. In addition, content can be used for a variety of reasons, including marketing, management, business intelligence, and communication. This means that different KPIs are needed depending on your content’s purpose.

It’s not enough to track the basics like bounce rate and click-through rate. Marketers need to dig deeper into their content analytics to determine their strategy’s success.

Defining a KPI: Going Beyond the Surface

Content marketing is full of surface-level data like:
• Number of social media followers
• Social media engagement
• Overall traffic
• Clicks

On the surface, these metrics seem important. After all, it’s vital to know how much traffic we drive to our content every month, right?

But top-of-the-funnel KPIs don’t tell the whole story. They don’t tell you how many of those visitors turned into loyal customers or at what point the user decided to leave your website.

This is why marketers must dig for KPIs that peel back the content curtain and show what’s truly going on within a campaign.

The best way to start is by considering who needs this data.

Is it your sales department? If so, track metrics related to qualified leads, content conversion rates, and user activity. Or, if identifying KPIs for your social media and communications team, look for information that provides insight into customer engagement and sentiment. Perhaps you are using 3rd party content to establish awareness or brand authority. Or using 3rd party content for business and market intelligence. What I have found increasingly through monitoring our customers at Vestorly is that content is being used in many new and different business applications.

Depending on your content’s purpose, consider tracking these KPIs:

1. Organic Traffic

While organic traffic seems to be a generalized KPI, going deeper into your traffic analytics will reveal a great deal about the success of your content marketing and analysis.

For instance, you can look at in-depth traffic data such as:

• Which channels or sources are driving the most traffic to your website?
• What pieces of content are attracting the most traffic?
• Which channels traffic sources are fluctuating?
• Are there prominent traffic sources our content analysis is overlooking?

The further you dial down your organic traffic data, the greater insight you’ll have into how potential customers access your content.

From public relations to sales, all facets of a company should know and understand how your website is driving traffic.

2. Business Intelligence

While most KPIs are quantitative, others are qualitative. Content KPIs also serve to gather intelligence about a particular aspect of a business, from the competition to media coverage and customer sentiment.

Using content discovery and filtering resources, companies can:

• Discover what types of content the competition is creating.
• Monitor brand mentions in news sources and on industry sites.
• Learn how influencers and relevant online outlets are talking about their product/service/brand.
• See what customers are saying about the product/service/brand online.
When you want to learn more about your competition, your customers, and even your brand’s public perception, look to your qualitative content KPIs for the answers.

As marketers, we get so wrapped up in how we drive traffic to our content that we often fail to look at our website’s internal success. With this in mind, consider adding internal link activity as a content marketing KPI.

For instance, you may notice that a significant portion of an article’s traffic comes from a product page link. Analyze what makes it perform better than other links on your website and implement that concept in future content opportunities.

By applying this principle, NinjaOutreach was able to increase their organic traffic by 40%.

4. Content Compliance

Depending on your brand’s vertical, you may need to operate within specific compliance regulations. This applies to the content your brand shares online, too.

Content-related KPIs for brands within the financial, legal, or medical sectors can also include how compliant a piece of content is with the company’s restrictions. Content tools can help you filter out content that is not within the guidelines and avoid a potential PR disaster.

5. Scroll Depth Percentage

Did you know you can use Google Analytics to see how far a user scrolls on your content?
Set up the scroll depth trigger and discover how far readers get on the page before leaving. Then, use this information to determine how to keep users more engaged with your content and on your website longer!

This KPI is ideal for companies using content as a method of education for clients or partners and for potential new customers. Scroll depth percentage helps you understand if readers are scrolling through all of the content. If not, what’s stopping them?

6. Customer Retention

The majority of content is written and distributed with the intent of attracting new customers. Chances are, a good percentage of your website’s content is geared toward that goal, too.

However, what about your existing customers? How are you using content relevance to engage them with your brand and keep them coming back for more?

Using your content marketing software, identify how many users became customers through your content and how many have remained loyal patrons. Then, target a chunk of your content strategy toward retaining those customers.

Content marketing is a fantastic way to achieve quick wins like leads. But to survive as a business, content and customer longevity must be a focus as well.

7. Return on Investment

Brands track the ROI on everything from merchandise to billboard advertisements. Yet, they always seem to forget about monitoring the return on their blog posts, social media content, email newsletters, videos, and more. A study by Gartner found that, on average, 26% of a marketing budget is spent on content marketing.

Calculate the ROI on your content by subtracting the total cost of content marketing by the revenue growth (within a specific period.) Then divide the result by the total content marketing cost.

Does this result justify the amount you’re putting into content marketing? If not, you need to make changes to optimize your content engagement and generate real results.

Start Tracking Content KPIs for the Ultimate Success

To truly succeed in business, you must track a variety of KPIs. And remember, these KPIs must go beyond the surface and track metrics related to the content’s purpose.

Identify which KPIs will give your team the full picture and make informed decisions using the results going forward. From organic traffic to content compliance, your KPI choices are never-ending!

Find out more about leveraging content effectively and how matching the right content KPI to your objectives by getting a free personalized demo of Vestorly’s Content Management Engine.