Last Updated on 25th February 2024

To measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, make improvements and increase your ROI you need to track key metrics. These valuable stats tell you where your efforts are paying off and where your weaknesses are. But to turn this into better performance and extra profit you have to know what you’re looking for.
There is an incredible amount of data available from analytics tools these days. The trouble is this can all be overwhelming unless you know what to look for and what it means. While some metrics are more significant than others and to illustrate this let’s look at the key measurements of a content marketing strategy.

It’s all about conversions

Of all the metrics your marketing strategy can throw at you conversions are the most important. Whether it’s a purchase, subscription, email or some other action, these are the conversions you work so hard to achieve. Your ROI is essentially determined by the amount of conversions you can close and everything else is a simple stepping stone to maximised profit.

The signals of profitable content

The key metrics of profitable content include ROI, cost per lead, lead to close ration, customer value and retention rate. ROI is simply the profit you make on your marketing investment and the other metrics in this list play a vital role.
Cost per lead reflects the average expense of every visitor, message and other types of lead. While lead to close ratio shows how many leads turn into paying customers. These two numbers will tell you how much each customer costs you and as long as your average customer value is above this number you’re in the money. Finally, you want to track retention rate to see how many of your customers return to make further purchases and interact with your brand.

Measuring successful content

To track the progress of your content you want to focus on traffic – including total visitors, new visitors and channel specific data. You should see a steady increase of total visitors as your content strategy matures, with a healthy influx of first-time guests. Channel-specific metrics will tell you where they are coming from and which parts of your content strategy are performing most (and least) effectively.

Social metrics

Social metrics are a huge part of your content strategy and one of the hardest to prove an ROI. So it’s important you can prove success by tracking likes, shares and comments – as well as other social metrics. More importantly, you need to show your social efforts are driving traffic to your site, building brand awareness and contributing to conversion rates.

On-site engagement

Once a visitor lands on your site you need to keep them there and guide them long the conversion process. Bounce rate, time on page and pages per visit tell you how many visitors leave before they view a second page, how long they spend on each page and how many they view before leaving. All pretty self explanatory, but the these metrics indicate how effective your on-page content is at engaging with visitors and meeting your content marketing goals.