What are KPIs for Content Marketing?

You are currently viewing What are KPIs for Content Marketing?

Using KPIs to Improve Web Content 

If you are a part of a business process, you are involved in a marketing campaign. These campaigns have certain goals. Certain metrics must be met, whether customer acquisition, retention, brand awareness, or something else. Luckily for us, there are plenty of online tools we can use to make our goals happen. In the digital world, all data is readily available. It is up to us to sift through it and extrapolate what we need. This is especially true for the more modern avenues of marketing. These include social media content, eBooks, blogs, etc. It is important to choose the right Key Performance Indicators in this vast pool of data. In this article, we will refer to these as KPIs for simplicity’s sake. Each piece of content needs measuring. Let us go over the basics of how to measure.

What are KPIs?

What are KPIs? Key Performance indicators are measuring metrics. Now, these metrics can be different from company to company, industry to industry, and niche to niche. What they might mean for you may not mean for someone else. Needless to say, you need to determine what metrics are important for you and your goals. You need to set up your KPIs according to the type of content you produce and your goals. The most common trap is to focus on the wrong KPIs. These can lead you in the wrong business direction. It can give you a false view of how your marketing campaign is going. Many issues can arise when you make the mistake of following the wrong metrics. You will lose time, labor, and money. Most importantly, it will lead to poor business performance. Therefore, tracking the correct KPIs is essential for successful marketing campaigns. 

How to choose the correct KPIs

As mentioned before, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It highly depends on several factors. These factors are integral parts of your business. What is it that you are trying to achieve, how to do it, and what means? These variables will be different for every company. We will touch on all of these more in-depth later. Firstly, you need to set up clear business goals. Then, you will need to understand how your revenue model works. Your sales process will be different from the competition. How do you maximize it? There are others, and we will cover those as we go along. Finally, you will need to define success for yourself. Do not make the mistake of blindly copying other people’s business practices. KPIs are here to analyze the audience, business practice, content, etc. with these; you can prioritize your content marketing strives. 

Knowing your business goals

KPIs are used to fulfill certain business goals. This is done by analyzing these metrics for progress. As mentioned before, you need to know what those goals are. Only then can you mold your content to achieve those goals. For instance, are you trying to acquire new customers? Maybe, your business model is more about retaining existing ones. Are you trying to increase your commerce revenue? Another goal is to use your content to generate more marketing and sales leads. Lastly, you may be looking to optimize your conversion process. This means converting a part of your audience into paying customers. A small portion of your entire audience will actually go through the conversion process. This is where most businesses struggle with. The more efficient this process is, the fewer resources you will need to invest in your entire business. 

What are KPIs for Content Marketing

What are KPIs for Content Marketing

Metrics for acquisition

Your website serves the purpose of attracting an audience. Acquisition metrics track how effective your website is in doing just that. All businesses constantly invest in various marketing efforts to attract people to their websites. An online presence is simply the most convenient way to get your message across. Naturally, your website is the point of the first contact for your audience. First impressions matter. Especially in a saturated, global, and digital market. Also, it is important to differentiate the generic traffic volume from meaningful traffic numbers. Acquisition metrics help us dive deeper into who is visiting, why, and where. It puts traffic numbers in a better perspective. You want to know how different sources contribute to the overall website acquisition. There are plenty of online tools just for that. Try Google Analytics for great overall insight. Break down your traffic by sources and campaigns.

Engagement

Customer engagement is a critical metric. It deeply affects your SEO rankings. To understand it, we must mention the opposite. The opposite of engagement is the bounce rate. People that bounce off of your site are the ones that were not intrigued. Needless to say, SEO algorithms pick up on this. We can measure engagement across multiple analytics dimensions. The easiest one is by traffic channel and source. This helps us identify the quality of traffic. Also, this metric shows us the types of visitors most likely to convert into paying customers. Firstly, your content needs to perform on the most basic level. This means it needs to provide value to the visitor. If your visitors can extract value from your content, they will have an incentive to keep coming. They will explore your website and your products and services. So make sure to experiment and optimize accordingly. 

Revenue models and the sales process

Typically, there are three basic types of websites. Ecommerce, ad-driven, and leads-driven websites dominate the market. We will focus on websites that need to generate leads and optimize e-commerce revenue. Ads are simple. These are bought and pretty much self-explanatory. All major analytics software tracks eCommerce revenue. From these metrics, you will be able to determine where most of your revenue comes from. This way, you can optimize profitable business practices. Equally as important, you will be able to ditch or repair ones that are costing you. Generating leads is a bit more involved. At least leads are easy to track. And if we can measure it, we can improve upon it. You will need to track your leads through each step. What makes them turn into a paying customer? Are there many processes or few? Are there any unnecessary steps that do not need to be there?

Content effectiveness

The quantity of your content is not the only metric. It needs to be of quality. Also, there needs to be value in it. Did a viewer spend five or ten minutes interacting with your content? How much did they browse through? Track your goal completions to determine how effective your site is at making conversions. Your content needs to incentivize visitors to take the actions that you want. Filter your goals and identify the most effective marketing channels. What are the specific web pages that made the most conversions? Also, track your events. Tracking events will help you understand the actions visitors are taking. More importantly, what specific pages are causing the events to be completed? Here are some easy metrics to follow. How many people signed up for email newsletters? How many pages are viewed? What is the average session duration? Lastly, how many completed purchases are there?

Page load times

This is where the more technical aspects come into play. Any quality SEO expert in Sydney will tell you that page load times are critical. Online, people’s attention span is concise. If your page is not loading fast, it will bounce and go to someone faster. Slow load times will make people leave. This will also tank your metrics and SEO rankings as well. Luckily for us, this metric is fairly easy to track. Compare your loading times to that of the competition. Constantly make strives to improve upon it. Maybe your website needs software optimizations. Or maybe, your hosting plan is not adequate anymore. With the increase in traffic, old hosting plans tend to become insufficient. To improve this vital metric, do everything in your power to reduce the webpage loading times as much as possible. 

Keywords

If we are talking about SEO, we cannot forget keywords. These are a metric for themselves. Keywords need to be tracked and measured. What are the key ones that are bringing the most traffic to your website? How can you improve upon those? Again, there are plenty of free tools online to track keyword rankings. Use these metrics to know in which direction to steer your online content. Generally speaking, the more specific your keywords are, the better. This is not always the case, but remember, we are in a heavily saturated global market—the more specific the group of people you are addressing, the better your chances for success.

No matter your specific goals, there is a metric to follow. These we can use to improve our business practices and marketing endeavors. Your dedicated teams need to know what metrics to follow based on your business goals. What matters to your company the most? Use these metrics, improve upon them always strive towards your goals.

Using KPIs to Improve Web Content – What are KPIs for Content Marketing?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Small Business Success

eCommerce FAQs

Passionate advocate for digital inclusivity, leading the charge at Understanding eCommerce to provide web accessibility solutions for businesses and organizations. Committed to making the online world accessible to all.