Content KPIs help you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing and evaluate the return on investment. Content KPIs provide you with information that you can use as benchmarks to measure the success of your content against your goal.

Measuring content KPIs helps you understand your content’s strengths, weaknesses, and overall strategy, as well as reveal gaps and areas where your content needs to be updated, which may be preventing visitors from converting.

It’s important to determine content KPIs for each goal you set in your content marketing strategy. And to do that, you need to know which content KPI is most relevant to each of your goals.

 Content KPIs give you insight into the benefits each of your content brings to your business. By evaluating your content using specific KPIs, you’ll be able to better direct your content efforts and make prioritization decisions that will maximize the value of your content assets.

In this article, we’ll identify 18 content KPIs by classifying them according to the goals they best fit, and we’ll show you how you can start tracking your content marketing efforts using these indicators.

What Are the Mains Contents KPIs Objectives?

Content KPIs can be classified according to four objectives:

• Awareness
• Engagement
• Lead generation & conversion
• Reputation

Each of these objectives has a few corresponding content KPIs, but some KPIs can be used to measure the success of more than one objective. Tracking the performance of your content is a tactic you should consider to reassure yourself of the results of your content marketing effort.

Content Awareness KPIs

1-Traffic

Traffic is an important KPI because it is from traffic that you can measure engagement and conversion. But traffic is an indicator of your content performance when you are able to measure its increase over time.

In Google Analytics, traffic is divided into four different categories: users and sessions, page views, and unique page views:

• Users this is the total number of unique visitors to your page. Unique visitors count a person only once in a given time period.
• Sessions count every time someone comes to your website, whether it is the first time or not.
• Pageviews are the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed.
• Unique page views is a metric that refers to whether a single user visits your page multiple times, those visits are combined into a single page view to calculate this metric.

You can use the raw data from these metrics to get a rough idea of how much traffic is coming to different pages on your site. You can also break down the data to see where your traffic is coming from geographically and how they found your site online and the type of device they used to view your site.

For example, you can tailor your future content to the visitors you receive from a particular location or tailor your content based on your follower data on any of your social media channels.

2- SERP Ranking

SERP ranking is the position of your page in the search engine results for a particular keyword. SERP ranking is one of the clearest indicators of your content’s performance and is probably the most important content KPI.

Because if Google likes your content and references it well, you can conclude that you are doing well. But rankings change constantly, however by tracking your rankings over time you can improve them and if you find a good position you start to gain confidence and authority.

When you appear high in the SERPs, you build your reputation both with Google, its crawlers, and potential visitors who browse the search results. This can result in increased traffic, leads, sales, and conversions.

To track your keyword rankings, there are many tools on the market. The tool I prefer and recommend is Jaaxy.

You can also use Google Search Console to identify the terms you are ranking for and track your ranking over time.

3- Share of Voice (SOV)

In general, the term share of voice ( SOV) includes all forms of measurable brand awareness, such as website traffic, number, and reach of online mentions, PPC, etc. Share of voice, as a content KPI, measures the visibility of a set of keywords on Google.

SOV determines how your content affects your brand’s exposure in the SERPs. The more keywords you get with high search volume, the higher your share of voice.

Knowing your share of voice is a great starting point for determining where your business stands in the marketplace compared to all your competitors. It’s a great KPI to monitor if you’re launching a brand awareness campaign or implementing a content hub project.

4-Page Views

Pageviews are the easiest way to measure the success of content, but they are closely related to other content KPIs. The more people visit your content, the more they engage with your brand and the more your reputation spreads the more likely you are to generate conversions.

There are several factors that can generate a large number of page views, among which a catchy title plays the biggest role. But beware, if your content does not meet the needs of users, the time spent on the page will not be very long, the number of pages per session will be low and you will probably not get any backlinks.

Content Engagement KPIs

Content Engagement KPIs help you measure how much your audience is interested in your content. To know if your visitors are really interested in your content, you need to know how much time they spend on your site and how many pages they visit in each session.

The longer your visitors stay on your page, the more content they consume. Obviously, your goal is to keep them on your site as long as possible so they can read more of your content. With Google Analytics’ session length metric, you can see how people are engaging with each of your articles.

In addition to the total number of sessions and visitors, you can see the average number of pages per session, the average session length, and the bounce rate. The more pages per session your content has and, depending on the length of your content, the longer the average session length, the better.

If you find that your content has a very short session length, it means that no one is getting to the bottom of your content and it’s time to rethink how you present it.

5- Comments

Commenting from your visitors is another important content KPI that helps you know which topics are resonating with your readers and sparking conversations. If you write a blog post that resonates with people, it encourages them to give their opinions or respond often in the comments.

Also, when your readers comment, they help create backlinks, which in turn generate traffic. Even though most of these links are no-follow links and therefore have little value, the process is still useful.   Comments also improve your SEO, especially if your content is recently published, they contribute to faster indexing on the web.

Quality comments make content a great SEO tool by containing quality outbound links and ranking keywords. It’s important that you engage meaningfully with your readers to build brand loyalty and further improve the value of reviews as a content KPI.

6- Scroll Depth

Scroll depth is another essential content KPI to know the level of user engagement on your content. Scroll depth analysis allows you to know how long users have been reading your page content,

For example, if you have long articles on your blog, tracking scroll depth can help you know if people are really engaged with your content or if they stopped scrolling and where exactly they stopped scrolling your page.

And if they did, it gives you an indication that you need to improve the structure of your content to keep your readers hooked and scrolling more rather than bouncing. Scroll depth is also a crucial KPI that you need to track to optimize the conversion rate of your content.

For example, it helps you determine where you should include CTA buttons or trigger popups in your content for maximum impressions and clicks. To analyze and track scroll depth, you can use tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Optimizely.

7- Average Time On Page

Average time on page is a similar content KPI to scroll depth, in that it tells you how much time users typically spend reading your content. In general, the more time someone spends on your page, the more interested they are in your content, which means you’ve managed to capture their attention.

On the contrary, if the time a visitor spends on one of your pages is too short, it tells you that visitors realize that your content is not what they were looking for and leave immediately. However, it is important to keep in mind that time spent is related to content length.

  To properly evaluate this time-on-page content KPI, you need to consider the type and length of content you have on each page. If one of your pages has a long, in-depth article that normally takes five minutes to read, the time spent on page metric should match it well.

If the time spent on that page is shorter than you want it to be, the reason may be because your content doesn’t incorporate the keywords users are looking for, or there are other user experience (UX) issues such as the load time of your page. Make sure that images or videos on a page load quickly.

Conversely, if the time spent on your page is longer, it means that users are likely to consume your content in-depth.  In this case, too, you need to ask yourself if this long session on your page is leading your visitors to perform the action you expect them to or not. You can compare your page with other better-performing pages on your site or other sites to see what is wrong.

Google Analytics is an ideal tool to help you measure time on page. It tells you how long a visitor spends reading the content of a single page. By displaying a number that is calculated by dividing the total time that visitors spend on your site, by the total number of visits to the site.

When a user leaves your page to go to another page, the clock for measuring the time spent on the page stops, and when loading the next page, the number of page views increase by one, and a new clock starts for that new page. Try to leverage this information and adapt your content strategies to fit your goals.

8-Pages Per Session

Pages per session is a content KPI that tells you how many pages each visitor views during a session on your website. It allows you to see how interested your visitors are in your content.

The design of your site is a key element in achieving a high page per session rate. The better your site looks, the faster it loads, and the easier it is to navigate to help your visitors reach their goal on your site, the better.

The goal of some sites is to gather information, while for others, the goal is to get users to buy a product or service. However, by reducing load time and increasing the clickability of your site, you improve the number of pages per session.

A higher pages per session rate indicates that your website visitors are interested in your content. By creating engaging content and linking to “related content” or “similar products”, you can encourage your visitors to interact with other pages on your website.

But don’t focus solely on per-session pages, or you risk driving visitors away. Asking users to click on a new page too often can hurt the user experience. If you break up your content into smaller chunks and ask your visitors to move to another page for the next part, they will quickly become discouraged.

To provide a quality visitor experience, it’s best to avoid this click-baiting tactic. Google Analytics can offer you pages per session statistics that allow you to see how effective your content is for your visitors.

Google Analytics stats show you traffic from all sources, including Google search, social media, or other links, and record every page load during a visitor session to show you exactly how many pages are viewed. This allows you to think of solutions to increase page views and clicks.

9- Inbound Links

Inbound links are an essential element in content engagement. Content that supports other content helps fuel a virtuous cycle in which people continue to read other articles while learning and receiving value. You need to make it as easy as possible for people to click through and find more of your content.

The strategy is to provide so much value in one article that when you link to another article, people assume that it also contains a large amount of value. The more clicks, the more effective your content is, and the longer visitors stay on your site.

10-Social Media Engagement

Social media is one of the best content KPIs that allows you to measure the success of your content in terms of engagement. Sharing your content is an important metric to track because every share of your content is an opportunity to reach a new network of people.

The more likes and shares you receive, the better the content will perform in terms of engagement, which affects your reputation. One way to measure this content KPI is to use social share button tools on your content that allows you to see how many times each piece of content has been shared on each platform.

By displaying social share buttons with counters on your content, readers can see how people have interacted with your content. It’s a good point if the indicator shows a high number which means your content is shared a lot, it suggests to visitors that the content is valuable and encourages them to read and even share it. 

You can even scroll through the share buttons as you read so that whenever the reader finds something interesting in your content, they have the buttons to share your content at their disposal. You can even use Google Analytics to measure the engagement of your content which shows you the amount of traffic you receive from social platforms.

Buzzsumo is another tool that allows you to track the shares of your content on social media and is an easy way to quickly identify the best-performing content on your site.

Lead Generation & Conversion Content KPIs

11-  Gated Content Downloads

Offering content through a form is a reliable way to get information about leads at the top of the funnel (TOF). If you’re writing content to generate leads, you need to create content that is so engaging and valuable that readers are willing to give up their contact information to get your content.

To do this, you need to know what they are looking for first and then what types of content generate the most qualified leads.

12- New Newsletter Subscribers

A newsletter subscription is one of the most valuable things you can have for your business. A newsletter subscription list, with the right processes in place, can be very beneficial to your business because it offers a strong return on investment.

When someone signs up for your newsletter, it is a clear sign that they are interested in your services and the content surrounding them.

13- Open and Click Rates

Open and click rate is a content KPI that allows you to measure conversions as well as engagement in email marketing campaigns. It is a good content KPI that shows you if your content is what your audience is looking for.

As Mailchimp states:

 “Open and click rates can give you a good idea of how your campaigns are performing with a particular audience. If an open rate is strong, it usually means your subject lines resonate with your audience. If your click rates are good, the message content is relevant to subscribers who open the campaign.”

Not considering this content KPI for your e-mail marketing campaigns is like wasting one of the few opportunities to talk directly to a customer.

14. Sales or Conversions

It’s up to you to decide what is considered a conversion. Your company may associate the conversion with a priority goal. In some cases, the goal of your content may be to achieve:

• An increase in website traffic?
• An increase in the number of qualified leads entering the sales pipeline?
• Increased share of voice among your competitors?
• An increase in brand awareness or positive brand perception among potential customers?

If the goal of your content is to make a physical sale, you’ll want to track the number of sales it generates. In this case, in the “behavior” section of Google Analytics, turn on “e-commerce” to get the average revenue each page generated for you when users went directly to make a purchase or fulfill another goal you’ve defined.

In these reports, you can also add the “landing page” to know how many people bought after clicking on one of the links in your content. If you want to know how many people viewed your content and ended up converting, choose the “transactions” option and if you want to measure sales as a content KPI, choose “revenue” to see results based on the amount spent by the customer.

Reputation Content KPIs

15-Authority

Authority isn’t as easy to measure as most other metrics, but it’s still important to try to increase your authority over time.  If the goal of your content is simply to build brand awareness and authority, you may want to focus more on metrics like social shares and engagement.

In this case, you can set goals in Google Analytics that allow you to track non-cash conversions such as filling out a form or signing up for a mailing list and see which URLs met the goals you set.

The high authority will not only improve your SEO, which means you’ll get more search traffic, but it will also help build your brand, increase trust and improve your conversion rate.

16- Influencer Mentions

There are other indications to measure your brand’s authority and presence, such as links to your content, mentions of your brand on social media, and media coverage. It’s also helpful to know if these mentions are positive or negative.

17- Returns Visitors

Return visitors is a content KPI that shows you the ratio of return visitors to your total visitors. Visitors who arrive on your site by email mainly return visitors, because they are people who came and signed up.

These are your loyal customers who know your brand, like it, ask for more, and can be at the intersection of reputation and conversion. It’s difficult to measure the impact of content on loyal customers, but you can use Google Analytics to set tracking codes from the thank you page to see what types of content such a group interacts with.

Visitors who arrive at your site via social networks are normally a mix of engaged people who follow you and people who arrive via links that other people have shared.

In general, to keep visitors coming back to your site, your content must be good enough to keep them coming back for more. If your content is good, a good portion of your direct search engine traffic can come from return visitors.

18- Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important content KPI. When you receive unsolicited backlinks from authoritative sites, your reputation increases in Google’s ranking algorithm, and readers become more engaged.

They are also a valuable barometer for assessing who respects or values your content enough to be willing to recommend it to others.

How Do You Collect Data from Content KPIs?

To collect your content KPIs data to leverage in your content marketing strategy, all you need to do is use a simple spreadsheet to manually aggregate all your data into a performance dashboard. Make note of all your published articles across content types, channels, and distribution formats in your list.

 Then, perform a qualitative assessment of your existing content against your customers’ needs and your goals.  This chart gives you an overview of how your content is performing against your goals. Of course, the criteria for successful content can vary from project to project, goal to goal and the evidence of benefit to your business depends on the goals you are trying to achieve.

The frequency with which you will collect your data is also important. To begin with, you can track your performance on a monthly basis and then adjust your program as necessary.

In fact, if you do it too often, you may not leave enough time for meaningful results to appear; and if you do it at too long intervals, you may overlook details that could prevent your content from reaching its goals.

Conclusion

By monitoring these 18 content KPIs mentioned here, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your content. The information from these content KPIs can be useful for your future content strategy.

As you’ve seen, there are many content KPIs, but these are not absolute values, as measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts is a long-term and ever-evolving process that requires a careful strategy to keep it in line month after month.

Measuring these content KPIs allows you to organize the data, identify key opportunities, make meaningful changes to make them more effective, your customers more informed, more satisfied, and therefore more loyal, which ultimately allows you to generate a return on investment.

To do this you must first identify your goals, then define the content KPIs you want to focus on, and finally, iterate and make adjustments to find the right combination of what works best for you.

Keep in mind, for your efforts to yield optimal results in the long run, you also need to evolve your skills based on new trends, tips, and tools.