Content marketing spans material from blogs, videos, and social media posts through to web content and email campaigns. Some indicators of effective content marketing include:
Email Open/Click Rates
Higher open rates and/or click rates can indicate effective email content encouraging users to read and click through. If your subscriber list is growing over time, this is also a good sign.
Social Media Engagement
On social media channels, there are many metrics you can track to gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing. Reach is a measure of how many people are seeing your content. Follower growth doesn’t always correlate with higher reach, but it can be a sign of effectiveness. Engagements such as likes, shares, and comments are the biggest indicators of effective content marketing.
Website Traffic
Growth in traffic sources (such as organic traffic, referral traffic, and social media traffic) can be a sign of effective content marketing, as is overall audience growth.
Website User Behavior/Consumption
Metrics like the average number of pages per session, average time spent on page, bounce rate, and the ratio of new/returning traffic are worth tracking. The more engaged users are, the more effective your content marketing is likely to be.
Bounce rate is the average number of visitors who only visited one page on your site. Depending on the purpose of a page, a high bounce rate could indicate users leaving after viewing the page because they found the information they needed quickly, and didn’t need to explore further. However, it could also indicate issues with usability that led them to give up before going onto a second page.
Goal Completions/Conversions
From downloads to signups or purchases, the ultimate test of a website is whether users are taking action. A conversion rate that is increasing over time is a good sign of content effectiveness.