4 Content Metrics Every Marketer Should Care About

Is your marketing campaign generating the desired results?

At what rate are you converting leads to actual buyers?

Do you know how much you are spending on generating a single lead?

Let’s face it: There’s a lot to measure in a marketing campaign but not all metrics are a true reflection of the success of your campaign.

Here are the key metrics that will help you track and improve on the progress of your subsequent campaigns:

Channel-specific visits

Measuring the total traffic coming to your website will give you a general feel for how your marketing campaign is performing. In addition to measuring the total number of visits to your main website, you should also keep track of the total number of new and old users visiting other properties such as your landing page.

You need to go beyond the ‘big picture’ total traffic measurements and focus on the specific channels that are generating traffic to your site or landing page.

Keeping track of channel-specific traffic provides crucial insight into the different sources of traffic and how these sources are impacting your overall marketing campaign.

The four main traffic channels to keep track of are direct traffic through branded search, organic traffic through SEO searches, social traffic through social media, content marketing and search optimization, and referral traffic from joint ventures, guest blogging and links from other platforms.

Lead Generation Metrics

It is not enough to measure the number of people coming to your website; the success of your marketing campaign fundamentally depends on conversions. Two vital lead generation metrics that will impact your bottom line are the cost per lead and the total conversions.

The total conversions are essentially the number of visitors who have converted to leads for example, by signing up to receive content in the form of a newsletter, video, sales offers etc.

But, other types of conversions such as completing sales transactions can also be measured. Google Analytics allows you to set up goals to measure conversion rates.

The other type of lead generation metric to track is the cost per lead. This is the specific dollar amount it costs to generate a lead and it impacts directly on your return on marketing investment.

To calculate the cost per lead, consider the total cost of your monthly campaign and divide this with the number of leads generated that month. For example, if you spend $1000 on creating video content, and the number of leads generated is 100, the cost per lead would be $10.

Sales metrics

The close rate is a valuable sales metrics as it tells you the number of leads that have converted to actual buyers. It is one thing to generate leads but quite something else to convert those leads into customers.

The rate at which you are converting leads into buyers will certainly affect your bottom line—low lead-to-buyer conversions will result in lower returns on investment while higher conversion rates will have a positive impact on your returns.

To measure the close rate, consider the number of sales and divide this by the total number of leads. If the close rate is too low, it might be necessary to revamp your sales process so that you can focus on generating qualified leads and nurturing these leads through the sales funnel.

Overall return on marketing investment

The return on marketing investment is a big picture metric that tracks the financial success of your marketing campaign. The three metrics that have a direct effect on your return on marketing investment are the customer value, the cost per lead and the close rate.

For example, say your cost per lead is $10, your close rate is 60% i.e. you convert 60% of your leads into buyers and your estimated customer value is more than $10 , then you would generate a positive return on marketing.

On the other hand, if your customer value is lower than the cost per lead and the lead-to-buyer ratio is equally low, you will likely record lower return on marketing figures.

Content Marketing Success

Marketing success is not just about the number of people viewing your pages, liking your social media posts or watching your videos. It is fundamentally about the returns generated by your marketing efforts—no matter how many visitors you receive on your site, if the return on investment is disproportionately low, various elements of your campaign, such as the lead generation and sales processes will require improvement and re-strategizing. Keeping track of such data is vital and must be acted upon where appropriate to ensure your marketing efforts are worthwhile.