Important Content Marketing Stats Your Company Should Be Tracking
Sarah Edwards
No matter how robust your content marketing strategy is, it will underperform if you don’t regularly evaluate its results. After all, if you don’t keep a close eye on various metrics, you won’t know what needs to improve so you can meet your content marketing objectives. But what marketing stats should you track?
Identifying and Leveraging the Right Marketing Stats
The first step to determining which metrics to track is to identify the purpose behind your campaign. Are you trying to increase website traffic, or are you trying to land a sale? Depending on your goals, some stats will be more important than others.
Once you’ve established your campaign’s overarching goal, you can choose relevant metrics to track and improve your progress. With that in mind, let’s look at various marketing stats you should prioritize.
Keyword Rankings
If you want your brand to be found on the front page of Google, a comprehensive keyword strategy is non-negotiable. You want your site to show up when a customer has a question, and if you use the right keywords that match their search, you stand a much better chance of being found.
However, you should be aware that the days of keyword stuffing are long gone. Search engines will consider keyword density, but they’ll also analyze how relevant the keywords are to your content. The key is integrating popular keywords into useful, relevant content that is made for users and search engines.
Traffic Sources
You might think that as long as your brand is being found, it doesn’t matter how. But if you don’t understand where your traffic is coming from, your efforts to convert them into customers will likely fall flat. And if you don’t know that 80% of your customers are coming from Facebook, you risk putting an already successful strategy at risk when you decide to revamp your social media strategy.
Once you’ve identified popular traffic sources, you can either capitalize on your top-performing platforms, or you can attempt to improve your underperforming campaigns on other platforms. Just keep in mind that different platforms demand different strategies — a prospect that you’re targeting on Instagram will likely respond in a different way than the audience you’re trying to reach with pay-per-click ads on Google, and if you try to apply the same logic to both, you’ll get nowhere.
Reputation
Trust is the ultimate online currency. After all, customers are rightfully wary of entering into business with a brand they aren’t familiar with. The best way to win over cautious consumers is by attaining social proof through reviews, customer interactions, and other people sharing your content on social media (word-of-mouth advertising).
Impressions
An impression is when a user sees your ad or post. By itself, it’s not a good indicator of the success of your marketing campaign — they may not actually click on your content and visit your site.
However, if you notice that the total number of impressions is lower than what you might expect, it’s possible that you didn’t optimize an ad for searchability. On social media, it might mean that you went too narrow with the target demographic and may need to widen your reach.
Where impressions become particularly useful is when considering click-through rate.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate measures how many people actually “click through” an ad to visit your site. It’s a percentage that’s calculated as the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.
This metric can tell you a lot about your marketing campaign. Was the copywriting compelling enough? Did you choose the right message for the right platform? Was the messaging relevant enough to the target search term? These are all questions you can start to answer when you examine the click-through rate.
Bounce Rate
Unfortunately, not every user will stay on your site for very long, and many will leave before viewing any other page — the percentage of users that leave represents the bounce rate. This indicates how successful your landing page is in grabbing attention and compelling users to take further action.
Conversion Rate
Whether the goal of your content is to add new prospects to your email list with a free download or to get visitors to make a purchase, it’s important to track your conversion rate — the percentage of users that fulfill a desired action. This metric will indicate the success of the entire customer journey, but it will specifically shed light on how compelling your website, copywriting, and value proposition are.
Make the Most of Your Marketing Stats With Write Collective
With so much to keep track of, marketing professionals may not have time to craft compelling content for their sites. That’s where Write Collective comes in. We specialize in crafting content for every step of the customer journey, improving every aspect of your marketing stats along the way. Check out our content marketing packages to get started today!
About Sarah Edwards
Sarah Edwards, the founder of Write Collective, is an SEO and content marketing expert with a strong track record in helping businesses, agencies, and individuals in every sector establish credibility online with strong links, optimized webpages, and superior copy.