How to Measure Content Marketing Performance

Measuring content marketing performance does not have to be difficult. In fact, measuring content marketing performance can be very simple if you decide upfront what matters to you most. At Demandwell, we recommend you measure the success of your content marketing with revenue. Content marketing can be an effective channel for creating new revenue, so tying content marketing performance to revenue can help keep you focused on your bottom line.

However, revenue isn’t the only thing you can track for measuring content marketing performance. Tracking engagement metrics and conversion goals can be important for monitoring performance, especially internally for the practitioners involved with content marketing. We’re going to explore the additional metrics you can track, and we’re going to explain the difference between brand content and performance content.

Brand Content

The goal of brand content is to explain the “why” of your business. Why does your business exist in the first place? Brand content impacts revenue in a big way by delivering your message to the world. However, it can be difficult to directly attribute revenue to brand content. Instead, you may want to monitor the performance of brand content by using engagement metrics. Discover how many people are interacting with your content and digesting its message. Focus on the engagement metrics that are easy to track.

• Social media shares: Brands are interacting with consumers on social media more than ever. The number of times your social media content is shared is one of your most valuable engagement indicators.

• Comments: Comments under blog articles, social media posts, or other forms of online content are another indication that people are engaging with your content.

• Downloads: If you offer downloadable content like an ebook, case study, or training course, tracking the number of times it’s downloaded is the best form of content measurement.

Remember, brand can be hard to measure, and a lot of its benefits are intangible. So, what’s important is having a clear goal in mind before creating brand content. Brand is a continuous effort, so it is easy to get lost down a rabbit hole wasting valuable time in resources. Brand projects need to have clear objectives and definitive due dates to keep you on track.

Performance Content

Performance content is heavily optimized to improve organic search traffic through the process of search engine optimization (SEO). The goal of SEO performance content is to drive organic traffic to your site.

Organic search traffic is one of the very best channels for driving revenue. If you haven’t been tracking the impact organic search has on your business, you might be surprised to learn it may already be one of your top sources of traffic.

You can use demand generation metrics to determine what kind of impact your SEO content is having on your bottom line:

• Site traffic: tracking site traffic tells you which pieces of content are most successful at leading prospects to your business’s website. More people viewing your site is a good outcome, but it’s also a valuable opportunity to learn from your top performers and improve future content.

• Keyword Ranking: Where you rank for targeted keywords can be a very clear indicator of how well SEO performance content is working. Tracking keyword ranking is a matter of progress. Given an effective SEO strategy, consistent publishing translates into consistent progress, so monitor the progress in your keyword rankings to measure the success of your SEO performance content.

These two metrics aren’t the complete picture when it comes to generating revenue with SEO performance content. What happens when keyword ranking is high but site traffic is (relatively) low? This means you should start focusing on conversion rate optimization (CRO) to improve site traffic and conversions. You can use site traffic and keyword ranking as metrics to measure the success of SEO performance content, but keep in mind that the work doesn’t stop after you publish.

It All Comes Down to Revenue

The ultimate content marketing metric is revenue. The other indicators we’ve mentioned are great metrics to track, but none is more telling than the revenue your business is generating. If your performance content is working, it should be pulling in leads, securing conversions, and driving revenue upward.