In order to understand the effectiveness of your Content Marketing efforts, you need to understand the effectiveness of each piece of content that you generate and promote. Since Content Marketing focuses on all aspects of the conversion funnel (awareness, interest, considerationand conversion), it’s very important to understand which key performance indicators (KPIs) you should monitor for each.

We will break down the top 5 Content Marketing KPIs by each element of the conversion funnel.

Awareness

Unique Visits (by Keyword and Content Piece)

One of the many long term benefits of Content Marketing is building up your website’s SEO. Your strategy should consist of both content on your blog and earned media. Each piece of content should be optimized for SEO and include relevant anchor text links that contain your targeted keywords. To gauge how well your content pieces are performing, you can track your unique visits by keyword and unique visits by content piece. These should be tracked over a period of time to see how well the content is ranking and which pieces are the most efficient in bringing in traffic.

Social Media Reach

Social Media is still one of the best and most effective ways to raise awareness about a company, product and/or service. In addition to raising awareness, it is a very effective platform for learning more about your customers and for them to learn more about you. For each piece of content that you promote on Social Media, you want to measure the overall reach and engagement per profile and per post. For example, for Facebook, how many likes, shares and people did the post reach? Take an overall average for your content and compare the traffic that clicked through to your website.

Interest

Overall Engagement

Engagement can be summed up and averaged to determine overall effectiveness. To sum up this KPI, you will need to add up and average:

• Bounce Rates

• Duration of Time

• Pageviews Per Visit

• Inbound Links and Shares

Once you have your number for each, that number is your target for a minimum engagement level – a baseline. Over time, you will learn which content pieces get the most engagement on each platform.

Consideration

Traffic to Lead Ratio

A great way to gauge how well your content is pre-qualifying the website visitors is determining your traffic to lead ratio. Filling out a lead conversion form needs to be quick and easy. A/B tests can assist in really understanding how to improve your landing page UI in order to achieve a favorable ratio.

Conversion Cost per acquisition If you are not achieving your goal cost per acquisition, you can utilize all of the data from KPIs 1 – 4 in order to better optimize your strategy. You also want to look at referral traffic and geographical CPAs. Proper targeting and distribution of your content is one of the key elements to am effective and successful Content Marketing campaign.

Content Marketing is an evolutionary tactic and strategy that includes both SEO, SEM and Social Media. Therefore, the KPIs are not as straight forward as they are for those marketing tactics individually. The top 5 KPIs for Content Marketing combine the best of the best from each tactic giving you a better overall picture of how to effectively reach your target audience at each phase of the customer purchasing funnel.