Your content marketing success revolves around three main elements. Creating valuable content comes first. Next is publishing and distributing that content to the right channels. Then, when the first two elements are completed, you need to measure the success of your content marketing efforts.
So are you reaching your content marketing goals? As a small business owner, you need to track different metrics to ensure whether your content marketing initiatives have paid off. However, not because you can measure everything, you should. As a rule of thumb, only measure quality metrics that give you a comprehensive view of how well your work is performing.
Metrics for Measuring Your Content Marketing Success
Website Metrics
Chances are, most of your content is on your website. That being said, one of the key metrics should revolve around your website analytics. Without it, your content marketing strategy becomes unclear, leading to a waste of time and money for metrics that are not working.
In addition, no matter how easy on the eyes or organized your website is, you cannot determine if it is truly working without diving into the data and analytics. If you are not certain what to measure, a good place to start is with the page views. This is the biggest indicator of web traffic and the number of people visiting your website. By looking at your website’s traffic, you would see whether your website is growing, stagnating or declining. 
Once you’re comfortable tracking page views, you can move to checking other quality metrics such as bounce rate, page timings and traffic sources. Bounce rates will show you whether your visitors stick around or leave right away when they land your website or if they stick around and visit other pages. Page timings indicate how long your visitors are hanging out on your web pages and traffic sources reveal where your visitors are coming from – may it be from search engines through organic search, social media, referral (coming from another website), or direct (when they type your domain into the browser).
Social Media Metrics
You most likely also have social media pages linked to your website for easy content sharing. While measuring social media metrics can prove challenging with its never-ending updates, social media is one of the biggest sources of big data in the digital world. Thus, it plays a major role in your content marketing success. By using the right social media metrics, you can gain better insights into your content marketing performance.
While some platforms have specific metrics you need to work around with, some social media metrics are universal. If you are sharing original content to social media from your website or blog, it is crucial to track click-through rates. This metric will indicate that your content is compelling enough to capture the attention of your audience.
Another key metrics to measure would be track mentions and social share of voice. Through mentions, you are able to know how much people are talking about you and your brand on the social space. The social share of voice shows what percentage of mentions are about your business and what percentage are about your competitors. With these two metrics, you can get a clear idea on how well your social efforts are performing and make adjustments to your social media strategy.
Qualitative Data
How are your readers reacting to your content? Is your comment section flooded with thoughts and ideas or is it nothing by crickets? Once you have gone through all the important website metrics and social media metrics, it is time to go beyond the numbers. According to Content Marketing Institute, metrics without context is not informative. So find out exactly what your readers and visitors are doing on your website or social media pages.
If metrics show you what is happening, qualitative data tell you why it is happening. A good way to learn more about that is to check your comment sections and see how your readers are responding to your content. If it is filled with positive comments, then great. If not, then maybe you need to revamp your content creation strategies. On the other hand, if your comment section is empty, aim for a content that fosters discussions.
Whether good or bad, take any feedback as an opportunity to help you improve your strategies. If you want to reach content marketing success, concentrate on what your readers truly need.
Takeaway:
With all the charts, numbers and graphs, tracking all these metrics might seem intimidating. However, real content marketing success begins with good data. It would be difficult to know whether you are making smart decisions and using the right content marketing strategies unless you measure your performance. But of course, do not forget to measure qualitative data to lead you on the path to success.
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