I always say, you cannot track what you don’t measure—especially when it comes to content marketing.

Creating great content is just your first step in the whole content marketing process. After all your hard work to produce and promote your material, you want to know how well you did by measuring your efforts. Why? Because it’s the key to knowing what works and tweaking what doesn’t so you can improve it.

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That said, there are dozens of metrics that you can track to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. I usually narrow it down to the categories below to make it easier to understand.

1. User Profiles

You always want to look at and track who your audience is. Knowing this helps you get more insight into what channels they use, and how often they visit your site or read your content. Take note, however, that this is just a jump off point. When you get a clearer picture of who you’re talking to, you can dive deeper and gain more insight into what they need and want.

I recommend checking the following metrics:

  • Pageviews to see what and how many pages audiences check and view on your site. This can help you monitor specific content performance and is especially useful for landing pages.
  • Unique views to track how many individual people visit your site so you get a better idea of audience size.
  • Demographics to give you a more detailed picture of who your audience is based on gender, age, and even general interest.
  • Geography to learn where your general audience is coming from and lets you adjust your communication accordingly.
  • Average time on page to get a better idea of the level of engagement your individual pages as well as content get.
  • Bounce rate to let you know how many people came to visit on your site and immediately left.

Instead of looking at the numbers as a standalone figure, I tend to review these metrics across a specific period of time. This way, I can track the progression of each feature as I adjust my strategy.

2. Social Shares

Social media as a marketing platform requires a specific set of metrics unto itself. Here are some key metrics to take note of:

  • Shares to track the value and reach of your content. Generally, the higher the share count, the larger your reach. It also implies that your content is valued and relevant.
  • Followers to indicate the success of your efforts. If you consistently deliver good content, you’ll notice a significant growth in your followers. The growth of your followers is the most critical metric to consider. A steady rise indicates that your content direction is effective.
  • Engagement, which can be in the form of comments and likes highlights how well your content resonates with your audience.

3. Lead Generation

These metrics should clearly show the return on investment of your content marketing efforts in order to make actionable improvements.

Prioritize the following:

  • Email open rates to know if your newsletters and emailers are being read. Anything with an open rate below 20 percent could indicate that you need to change your subject line or email frequency.
  • Click-through rate should show you the percentage of your audience who opened and clicked on your call to action.

There you have it. Hope this helps! If you have any questions, feel free to send an email or leave a comment below.