Marketers understand how important it is to gauge the performance of their content marketing strategy. A good strategy underpinned by excellent content can make a big difference for your campaign. Your campaign might go zero-60 at times, and sometimes the results might be a bit underwhelming.

In analyzing content performance, you will need to consider several KPIs to help you fully grasp how your online campaign is faring. Consider the following KPIs in analyzing your content performance.

1) Website Traffic

High traffic to your website might be a positive indicator that your content marketing strategy is working. However, if your high traffic comes with a high bounce rate, it might be time to evaluate your strategy as the traffic is unqualified. Tools such as Google Analytics and SimilarWeb can analyze metrics like the number of new users on your site and the pages they visited. These tools can further gather geographical data like where the unique users reached your site from and from which marketing channel. You can then use this data to optimize your online content strategy.

2) Onsite Engagement

Average session duration is an important engagement metric. Higher average session times typically means visitors are engaged with your content and their intent is being met. How many pages are visitors viewing in a session (also known as “Page Depth)? This metric helps you understand which pages are guiding visitors deeper into your site and which are not.

Bounce rate is another useful engagement metric. For example, if a ton of visitors land on your website and immediately exit, there’s something not right and you can expect your bounce rate to be high. A bounce rate is critical in determining if your content is relevant to your visitors or if something is wrong with your website. Analyzing this type of data can alert you to potential problems in your content funnel.

3) Conversion Rate

Every marketer desires high conversion rates such as email subscriptions or product purchases. That’s why it’s imperative your content is driving leads down your content funnel to ultimately convert. Using heatmap tools like Crazy Egg tell you how users interact with your site and what they care about. It can provide a better picture of where you can optimize your conversion rate. Some of these tools are free while others require a monthly subscription.

*Crazy Egg click data from heatmap report 

4) Returning Visitors

Returning visitors means people are coming back! This is a telltale sign that your content marketing strategy is working and the repeat visitors were satisfied with their first visit.

5) Backlinks or Referrals

If you generate good backlinks, it means that people trust your site enough to link to it. In measuring the performance of your online content, you need to regularly review the kind of websites linking back to your site.

Backlinks can help to improve your site’s ranking, make your website more discoverable and boost traffic. Using some common backlink analysis tools like Ahrefs, Kerboo and LinkResearch can help you keep track of your content’s backlinks performance.

6) Social Media Performance

To understand content performance, consider how much your content has been shared across social media platforms.

Tracking social shares and links is great for analyzing which content garnered the most reach. Comments, likes, retweets, etc are all good indicators of valuable content.

You can use tools like Keyhole to monitor usernames, hashtags and keywords on your Instagram and Twitter accounts. Other similar tools include BuzzSumo, Talkwalker, Hootsuite and Google Alerts.

In Conclusion

Knowing how your online content performs at every stage is as important as the campaign itself. You can use the results to understand the behavior of your target audience and refine your marketing strategy for improved results.