How to measure content performance: metrics that matter for business growth
Metrics guide decisions. Explore essential metrics for content strategy success and business growth.
Understanding if your content helps your business grow, especially through more sales, starts with knowing how to check its success. Before you can do that, it's important to pick the right ways to measure it. These ways should match the goals you set when you first planned your content.
In this article, we're going to look at the important measures that show how well your brand's content is doing. By looking at these measures, you can see more clearly if your content is interesting to your audience. This also helps make sure your content goals match up and can be checked over time.
Traffic metrics
Website traffic
This metric refers to the total number of visits to your website. It's a primary indicator of your content's overall reach and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. High traffic volumes suggest your content is attracting visitors, which could lead to increased brand awareness and sales opportunities.
Unique visitors
Unlike general website traffic, unique visitors count the number of individual people who visit your site within a given timeframe. This metric offers insight into your content's ability to attract new audiences, essential for expanding your customer base.
Page views
Page views measure the total number of times visitors have viewed pages on your site. This metric helps gauge the depth of interest in your content. More page views per visit indicate that your content is engaging enough to keep visitors exploring.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate may suggest that your content isn't meeting visitor expectations or that the landing page lacks engaging content or clear navigation.
Average time on page
This metric provides an average of how long visitors spend on a specific page. It helps assess content engagement and quality. Longer times suggest that visitors find the content valuable and engaging.
Engagement Metrics
Social media shares
Shares on social media platforms indicate your content's appeal and its ability to encourage user interaction. High share counts can amplify your reach and signal that your content resonates with your audience.
Comments
Comments on your content, whether on your website or social media platforms, reflect audience engagement and interest. They offer direct feedback and can stimulate community discussions around your brand.
Likes
Likes are a quick measure of content approval and popularity. While less detailed than comments or shares, a high number of likes indicates positive reception and broad appeal.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the percentage of people who click on a link to your content from an email, ad, or other digital locations. High CTRs suggest that your content is compelling and successfully encourages action.
Dwell time
Dwell time tracks how long visitors stay on your content before returning to search results or proceeding elsewhere. Longer dwell times can positively affect your SEO rankings, indicating content relevance and quality.
Conversion metrics
Lead generation forms
The completion rate of lead generation forms on your content pages indicates how effectively your content motivates visitors to engage further with your brand, a key step toward conversion.
Email opt-ins
The number of email opt-ins measures how many visitors subscribe to your newsletters or mailing lists. It's an important metric for building your audience and nurturing leads through targeted content.
Sales conversions
This metric tracks the percentage of visitors who make a purchase after engaging with your content. High conversion rates signify that your content effectively guides potential customers through the buying process.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC calculates the total cost of acquiring a new customer, considering all marketing and sales expenses. Understanding CAC in relation to content campaigns can help assess the efficiency and profitability of your content marketing strategy.
Not every metric is suitable for determining whether your content is performing or contributing to business growth. While metrics can present numbers and increases, they should be balanced with consistent monitoring to assess if the content is attracting a loyal audience.
As 37signals co-founder Jason Fried has stated, cultivating an audience requires a brand to focus on connecting with its audience through the sharing of expertise without expecting immediate returns. "So I think it has to be rooted in sharing and giving with no expectation, and then you can do some special things with that group of people that you couldn’t do otherwise." This approach builds trust, so when a brand highlights its products or services as solutions to problems, the audience is more receptive.
Atikah Amalia
Therefore, it's important not to view engagement or traffic merely as numbers. It's crucial that the people who visit your platform find genuine content that meets their interests.
This underscores the importance of ensuring your content creators know how to produce content that resonates. Depending on your business needs, you can identify the types of writers your company requires here.
Falencia Naoenz
Content Collision provides performance-based digital PR services and B2B content marketing services for tech startups in APAC and beyond. Book a discover call to learn more.
