KPIs for Content Marketing: How to maximise your ROI
Establishing KPIs (key performance indicators) allows you to review how your content shifts in SERPs and optimise it properly for better results. Read on to learn how to select and utilise the best KPIs for your content marketing strategy.
Why KPIs Are Vital to Content Marketing Success
We’ve all heard the saying, “Content is king.” While that may be true, realising its positive effects can take much longer than you might expect. Content marketing is a long-term strategy that often requires numerous rounds of optimisation for maximum online performance. While this extended waiting period can seem frustrating, tracking your content’s performance can help you establish benchmarks, understand weekly progress and meet monthly targets. When you establish key performance indicators (KPIs), you’re able to review content gaps, identify how your content shifts in online rankings, as well as decide how to optimise it properly for better results.
As with any great marketing strategy, KPIs are crucial to advancing your agenda, as they provide defined goals that can be measured and balanced. KPIs for content marketing help you track the success of your content while reminding you what metrics are important in order to reach your overarching objectives.
What are marketing KPIs?
A key performance indicator is a measurable value that shows progress toward an intended result, specifically strategic objectives within the marketing department. Having clear and well-defined KPIs for content marketing is vital to its long-term growth and success.
Examples of online marketing KPIs include:
- Organic website traffic
- Brand awareness
- Page duration
- Bounce rate
- Search rankings
- Links
- Average session
By measuring the correct KPI of your choice, you will be equipped to make intelligent decisions regarding your content marketing strategy. Doing so will help increase exposure to your website and ultimately improve conversions.
How should you establish digital marketing KPIs?
The answer to this question depends on numerous variables. As your clients make their journey through the client lifecycle, from lead to buyer and then into retention, content campaigns will require different KPIs. By evaluating individual campaign goals, you can easily determine which KPIs should be of focus.
Choosing what to measure is crucial in setting a digital marketing KPI, not just in the UK but worldwide. If your goal is to raise brand awareness, then one of your KPIs should be regarding social media signals and engagement, such as likes, shares or comments. If your goal is revenue, tracking conversion rates is probably a smart idea. Focus on measuring the factors that will impact your UK organisation’s targets and goals.
What are the best KPIs for brand awareness?
Brand awareness KPIs are the easiest to track and will help you determine if your content strategy is working as expected. The greater your industry brand awareness, the higher the interaction with leads, clients and expanded target audiences. You can measure brand awareness using a few different KPIs for content marketing.
1. Website traffic
Both direct traffic and referral traffic increase to a single page when content is gaining traction. Clicks, dwell time, session duration and page scrolling can also increase during this time. These metrics are all directly related to how new website traffic and users interact with your content.
2. Mentions
Mentions or shares refer to how your brand is introduced across social media, news, and industry publications. The goal is to encourage and compel consumers to mention your brand so that you can track what and how often people are talking about your business.
A drawback of brand mentions is that it doesn’t show if your content marketing campaigns are leading to the desired outcomes. Engaging in social media conversations can help to ensure that the correct narrative is being told while helping you establish a proactive approach to potential negativity.
As a tip, setting up a Google Alert for your company or brand name is an excellent way to track brand mentions.
3. Inbound links
If your content is being linked to via other platforms or websites, then you know your content is hitting the mark. Receiving inbound links to your content means that others view you as a credible source within your specific niche or industry. Inbound links will also boost your domain authority and positively impact how Google evaluates your site based on its E-A-T-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) search engine algorithm.
There are many ways to check inbound links to your site. By searching on Google, you can find no-cost backlink checkers that provide metrics on your inbound links.
What are the best KPIs for engagement?
Any content marketing strategy aims to bring consumers back to the content creator’s website. If they don’t return, then your content is probably not leaving a great first impression on your target audience.
1. Returning Visitors
Tracking new organic visitors is always exciting, but what percentage of visitors are returning to your website to read new or existing content?
If your content is exciting and engaging, you should observe a higher number of returning visitors. Google Analytics is a great tool to use for tracking the percentage of new visitors versus returning visitors.
2. CTR (Click-through rate)
Organic click-through rate (CTR) refers to the percentage of users that click on a search result.
For example, if your webpage receives five clicks after one-hundred impressions, your CTR is five per cent. As a quick note, impressions measure the number of times any URL from your site appears in the search results and is viewed by a user.
Studies have shown a strong correlation between organic CTR and higher position rankings. A high CTR tells Google that your content answers the search query.
3. Page duration
Ever wonder how much time consumers spend reading your content? You should. According to Google, time on page is the “average amount of time users spent viewing a specific page or screen, or set of pages or screens.” By analysing dwell time and page duration per visitor, you can easily discover if you are attracting the right kinds of users or just unqualified leads.
A shorter on-page duration time could indicate a problem. For example, your content may not align with the associated search term or not match the user’s intent. As a result, visitors are likely to be confused or dissatisfied and leave your website quickly. However, what if your analytics show on-page visits being too long? A longer time spent consuming your pages is generally considered a positive thing.
But, if your visitors are not taking the actions you are hoping for, this may be a sign of concern. These actions could include purchasing a product, filling out a contact form or downloading an eBook. Understanding your intended goals for each piece of content can help you determine where and how to succeed while helping you uncover goal-completion obstacles your users may be facing.
Why Content + KPIs = Success
By choosing the proper KPIs, you should be able to reach accurate conclusions based on what your key performance indicators are telling you. Only then will it be possible to adjust your content marketing plan to match what it is that your website visitors are expecting to see there. If you’re still not sure what’s best for your business, Textbroker can help! Our team can help you develop content ideas and useful KPIs — and then create the content that will deliver results. Let’s get started!
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