What are the most important content marketing KPIs which support the success of your campaigns?

Measure to improve! Your marketing strategy needs numbers in order to stay in line with your objectives: these key performance indicators, or KPIs, enable you to understand what's working well or not so well, what needs to be improved, continued or abandoned. As a marketing and content creation pro, you spend time developing an effective content strategy, creating impactful content, distributing it and promoting it on all relevant channels. You need to generate a certain return on investment (ROI) to demonstrate to your hierarchy that all the marketing actions undertaken are having the desired result. So what are the most important KPIs to consider?

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Based on videos, infographics, blog posts, social media publications and more, content marketing supports the growth of your business in many ways. Your content is there to pique your audience's interest in your brand, reinforce their engagement with your content and drive conversions. With all the objectives they help to achieve, it can be complex to know how to see their direct impact on the growth of your business and the progression of your sales.

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Here is a selection of KPIs adapted to your content marketing strategy to measure its effectiveness. As this list is not exhaustive, it's up to you to choose the most relevant ones according to your company's objectives, and your distribution and communication channels. In this way, they will guide you towards ever more effective, impactful and sustainable content creation!

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Why track content marketing KPIs?

Content marketing KPIs are indicators that measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns: they help you understand whether your content creation efforts are delivering the expected results. By tracking them, you'll obtain data that will give you valuable insights, such as:

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- Are the channels you're using relevant to your target audience?

- Does the content you create match what your target is looking for?

- Which types of content are most successful, and which are most likely to be stopped?

- Are the strategies you adopt effective?

- What is the ROI (Return on Investment) of your content marketing?

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KPIs give you a basis for understanding more precisely how the different components of your strategy interact. They help you make informed decisions and optimize your results, ultimately increasing the ROI of your campaigns.

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What's more, analyzing your KPIs helps you make the best choices in your content production, so that you don't disperse your efforts, but focus them on what will produce the best results. By selecting only the most relevant actions, you can focus on the essentials for greater digital sobriety, and make your marketing strategy more sustainable.

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So, in order to deliver the greatest value to your target audience, take the time to:

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- Define the KPIs most relevant to your objectives

- Determine the right metrics for each campaign/channel/content type in line with your objectives

- Analyze the performance of each resource

- Identify what boosts your performance (SEO, social media, Ads, etc.).

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What are the most important content marketing KPIs?

KPIs for evaluating your website

- Number of page views

- Volume of website traffic

- Recurring visitors

- External mentions and inbound links

- CTA click rate

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KPIs for analyzing your emailings and newsletters

- Newsletter subscriptions

- Deliverability rate

- Open rate

- Email click-through rate

- Unsubscribe rate

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Social network tracking KPIs

- KPIs for Facebook

- KPIs for Twitter

- KPIs for Instagram

- KPIs for YouTube

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KPIs to compare your different channels

- Engagement rate by channel

- Conversion rate by channel

- Length of purchase journey

- Content consumed by current customers

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This selection of KPIs must be set against your corporate objectives, your business model, your sector of activity and so on. The most important thing is to clearly define what you want to achieve with your campaigns, so that you can match the right KPIs to your objectives, for example:

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- Improve brand awareness

- Increase audience engagement

- Boost conversions, etc.

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Some of these KPIs can be included in the monthly marketing report to make visible the progress and impact of the work carried out by the marketing teams on the company's results. So, without further ado, here's our selection of important KPIs to track, broken down by channel!

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KPIs for evaluating your website

Page views per visitor

With a tool like Google Analytics, you can measure the number of people viewing content on your sites. This enables you to determine whether the content you create is attracting more and more visitors to your pages. It's advisable to track the increase on an annual rather than monthly basis, to get a more objective view. You can also segment your visitors by channel to find out where they're coming from. If the number of page views is increasing, your audience is growing and so is your brand awareness. This will enable you to check whether your marketing efforts are having a more global impact on your growth.

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Volume of website traffic

Share of organic traffic

To appreciate the effectiveness of the content you publish, the volume of traffic to your website from search engines is a very interesting indicator to track. In fact, if you produce quality content optimized with the right keywords, you'll improve the natural referencing of your website's pages. If the share of organic visits is increasing, then your content and keyword strategy is showing itself to be relevant and well-designed for the SEO positioning of your pages.

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Social traffic share

The volume of traffic to your website comes not only from search engines, but also from the social networks on which your brand is present. As such, it's advisable to track this indicator, which reflects the number of visitors acquired through content sharing on social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). The links shared via this content enabled users to land on a page on your site. This KPI gives brands an overview of the social networks on which their audience is most active, so they can focus their content production on those that generate the most traffic.

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Share of email traffic

With this KPI, you can track the volume of traffic generated by a link placed in an e-mail, which readers have clicked on. Tracking this KPI helps you assess the performance of your emails, better target your email campaigns and make the necessary adjustments to increase this share of traffic (e.g. email subject line, relevance of shared content, CTA text or placement, etc.).

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Recurring visitors

As we've already seen, tracking your organic visitors is a valuable tool for campaigns designed to increase your brand awareness. That said, among all your site's visitors, some return to consume more content and continue to learn about your offer. If the proportion of visitors returning to your site is increasing, it's because your content is succeeding in moving them along the marketing funnel.

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External mentions and inbound links

Is your content mentioned on other websites? Inbound links are external links from other web pages that point to a page on your site (also known as backlinks). The more inbound links you have, the more users will appreciate your content; and the better the links, the greater your credibility in your market and the better your SEO. This indicator shows that, thanks to the content you create, you're becoming a reference in your field and attracting a qualified audience.

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CTA click-through rate

CTAs (Call To Action) are buttons placed in convenient locations on certain pages of your website to redirect visitors to a landing page, where they perform an action: fill in a form, purchase an offer, etc. How effective is your CTA? That's what a high click-through rate indicates. To optimize a CTA button, you can modify parameters as simple as its size, color, shape or the text it contains, all of which can be tested using A/B testing methods.

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KPIs for analyzing your emailings and newsletters

Newsletter subscriptions

Your content is a hit, and the user wants more! By subscribing to your newsletter, users are indicating that they'd like to continue receiving news from your brand, that they appreciate the content shared and that they trust it. Track the growth of your subscriber base to see the increase in engagement of your targets.

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Deliverability rate

The deliverability rate of an email campaign is measured by looking at the proportion of e-mails that have successfully arrived in recipients' inboxes, rather than landing in junk mail or not being delivered at all. A good deliverability rate is an indication of the quality of your e-mails, their ability to get through anti-spam mechanisms, and the quality of your sending infrastructure (such as the reputation of your servers' IP addresses).

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Open rate

Once an e-mail has been received, the open rate gives an indication of the number of people who actually opened it. Influenced by factors such as the catchiness of your subject line or the personalization of the e-mail content, a good open rate provides you with valuable data on the attractiveness of your offer and the relevance of your e-mail content. This indicator also reflects the proportion of your contacts who are more or less interested in the offer you're proposing.

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Email click-through rate

This is the key indicator for measuring the proportion of your recipients who have clicked on a link in your e-mails. It reveals your readers' keen interest in your offer, and their desire to find out more and consume more of your brand's content. A good click-through rate is strongly correlated with a high open rate and effective link and CTA enhancement.

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Unsubscribe rate

This KPI tracks the number of people who have clicked on the "Unsubscribe" link in your emails, no longer wishing to receive emails from you. A relatively low proportion of unsubscribes is not a very worrying signal, since it allows you to keep recipients who are still interested in your offer. That said, in the event of a high churn rate, studying the progression of this KPI will help you understand why your contacts are turning away from your brand.

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Social network tracking KPIs

Many types of indicators can be tracked to assess the relevance and impact of your actions on social networks. Once again, it's a question of identifying the ones that will best assess the success of your strategy, according to the objectives you're trying to achieve. These KPIs vary according to the specificities of each social network.

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KPIs for Facebook

On Facebook, it's mainly the reach and impressions of your posts that you'll want to analyze, to check that they're being seen. Similarly, all interactions on your posts (clicks, likes, comments, etc.) and the engagement they generate will tell you whether your fans have found interest and value in your content shares.

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👍 Main key performance indicators on Facebook:

- Number of fans

- Growth in number of fans over a defined period

- Interactions

- Impressions

- Organic reach

- Rate of engagement

- Response rate

- Sentiment, by analyzing fans' emotions based on their comments.

KPIs for Twitter

On this network, it's important to monitor the growth of your account, i.e. the increase in your number of followers over a given period, which contributes to your notoriety. The performance of your tweets is also something to keep a close eye on, notably by tracking the number of retweets, or saved tweets, as well as indicators that show growing interest in your brand, such as mentions.

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🐦 Main key performance indicators on Twitter:

- Number of subscribers to your account

- Growth in the number of followers over a given period

- Retweets

- Mentions

- Saving tweets to favorites

- Number of impressions

- Engagement rate: number of interactions for a tweet / number of impressions for this tweet x 100.

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KPIs for Instagram

On Instagram, it's essential to track the number of followers and the engagement rate of your publications. As a KPI specific to this network, you can study in detail the mentions, hashtags, and shares of your publications (regrams), to see which types of content and content appeal most to your audience (reels, stories, carousels, photos, etc.).

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🤳 Main key performance indicators on Instagram:

- Number of followers

- Growth in the number of followers over a given period

- Regrams

- Mentions and hashtags

- Engagement rate: number of interactions for a post / number of impressions of this publication x 100.

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KPIs for YouTube

For this social medium, as for other social networks, an important KPI to track is the number of subscribers to your channel. As YouTube's flagship content is video, you can measure its performance by studying the number of views, shares, likes, dislikes and comments.

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▶️ Main key performance indicators on YouTube:

- Number of subscribers to your channel

- Growth in the number of subscribers over a given period

- Number of views generated per video

- Number of shares per video

- Number of likes/dislikes

- Comments and feedback.

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KPIs to compare your different channels

Number of subscribers and followers

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You can track this KPI, which measures the size of your community on each of your social networks: fans on Facebook, subscribers on Twitter and YouTube, followers on Instagram, etc. To compare and define your most promising social networks, take a closer look at the proportion of these subscribers who are part of your core target: where is your ideal community present? Identifying the channels on which they are found will enable you to focus your marketing efforts on these channels to offer them as much value as possible, thanks in part to your content.

Engagement rates by channel

The number of shares of your content is a very good indicator of whether your content is in line with the expectations of your target audience. If the number of shares is high, it's a strong signal that the content you're publishing is appealing to your audience and reaching the right people. You know what kind of content they're interested in, and can keep producing it to maintain their interest.

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Also take into account all the interactions users have with your content on social media: depending on the network, as we saw earlier, this could be a like, a comment, a click, a retweet, etc.

Growth in click-through rates on links, the number of comments and likes, are all interesting signals to follow to see which content has aroused user interest.

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To refine this analysis by channel, the study of your content's performance helps you to better manage your content production. In fact, it provides you with invaluable information on the ideal frequency of publication, the format most appreciated by target audiences, the most engaging topics, etc.

Rather than relying on quantitative measures (number of subscribers, number of clicks, etc.), it's worth taking qualitative measurements thanks to content scoring. For example, by analyzing your audience's behavior in relation to your content, on each channel. You'll be able to extract information such as which channel (website, social network, newsletter) provides the best engagement for which type of content (videos, images, carousels, etc.).

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This enables you to fine-tune each piece of content with a view to reaching your target audience. Is your content adapted to the channel? To its target? Advanced features of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform like Wedia offer you this in-depth analysis of your digital assets.

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Conversion rates by channel

Monitoring your conversion rates allows you to see which of the media you're creating are bringing you the most conversions, and on which channels. According to your objectives, a conversion is the completion of a specific action by a prospect, such as downloading a resource, registering for a demo, or making a purchase. For each piece of content you publish and distribute, you can use tools such as UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules), codes or snippets to identify the content that converts best. You'll then know what type of content to create to improve your results.

Purchase path duration

Evaluating the length of the buying journey helps you understand the average time it takes for a prospect to become a customer. This is because your prospect goes through several stages, progressively following his discovery of your brand, then his interest in your offer, and culminating in his purchase, at the bottom of the marketing funnel. Your aim is to make this time span as short as possible. You can observe the evolution of your leads in each stage of the sales funnel, and identify the contact points or channels that lead to sales the fastest, so that you can exploit them as a priority and speed up the process.

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To analyze your prospect's online journey, you can observe different KPIs according to the three main marketing stages, and how long on average your prospect stays in each phase:

Discovery KPI: at the top of the marketing funnel, this is the stage at which your brand and content capture your prospect's attention online. Content is key to extending your brand's visibility, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts and so on. For example, the following KPIs give you insights into this discovery phase:

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- Number of page views on your website,

- Average session duration on your website,

- External mentions and inbound links on your website,

- Reach and impressions of your social network posts, etc.

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The more visible your brand is on the channels on which your audience consumes your content, the more easily and quickly users identify you, which can help accelerate their progress through the buying journey.

Engagement KPI: at this stage, indicators show the degree of interest and consideration visitors have for your offer. Interactions on social networks play an essential role. Tracking them enables you to monitor and understand the transformation of users into prospects - which channels are the fastest to do so? Look at the following KPIs, for example, to track your target audience's engagement levels:

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- Interactions on social networks (likes, comments, shares, etc.),

- Growth rate of subscribers / fans / followers per network,

- Opt-in and read rates for your newsletter,

- Share of repeat or known visitors to your website, etc.

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Did your content reach a wider audience, or did it encourage them to keep the link and consume more? Observe, by channel, which content engages the most, which visitors are most active on, and for how long before progressing down the funnel.

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Conversion KPI: at this stage, it's a question of studying the bottom of the marketing funnel that generates conversions, i.e. leads for your sales teams or sales, as the case may be. Indicators reflect this decisive moment, when the prospect moves on to the act of buying. You can observe how long it takes for a visitor to be converted into a lead, by channel, and how long it takes for them to become a customer. Numerous KPIs can be tracked and compared, including:

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- Lead volume and growth by channel

- Visitor > lead conversion rate by channel

- Lead > customer conversion rate by channel

- Average sales per customer, per channel, etc.

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The content you distribute plays a big part in moving leads down the funnel, and some of it has high conversion potential (e.g. webinars, white papers or demo videos, etc.). Have your efforts convinced your audience to take action? Look at how long it takes for your users to become customers, by channel.

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Content consumed by your existing customers

For each of your channels (website, newsletter, social networks, etc.), is the content you distribute being seen/consumed by your customers? This information can be tracked, for example, by examining whether paid users of your service are consuming your content. Based on this data, you can deduce whether your content strategy is effective in keeping your customers engaged, depending on the channel. What's more, it could even invite them to recommend your offer, and become ambassadors for your brand.

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Track the performance of your marketing content with a DAM

Finer, more targeted analysis data

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Tools can help you study the performance of your marketing content in more detail! A Digital Asset Management platform like Wedia, for example, enables you to track all the key metrics of your multimedia content and gain a deeper understanding of the engagement created by your media.

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Your web analytics tools provide you with data on your audience, the traffic generated on each of your channels, but they have limitations: what information can you extract from your media and content precisely?

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This is where the DAM comes in: centered on data, the software offers you a wealth of information on your media and audience behavior (reports, KPIs, analytical dashboards), which can be leveraged to improve your strategy and content production.

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For example, you can obtain information such as:

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- The number of views for each piece of content published from your DAM, and its evolution over a given period

- The distribution of views by geographic location or reference domain

- Distribution of views by format (image, video, etc.) and by content type.

Thanks to the KPIs integrated into Wedia's DAM solution, you can easily identify the best-performing content. You can measure user engagement throughout your sales funnel and at every touchpoint, so you can continue to produce the most relevant content that will reach the right audience.

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One step closer to digital sobriety

As we've seen, DAM provides you with key analytical data to gain an optimal understanding of your media. The solution enables you to measure the performance of the media you distribute, so that you can improve them with a view to achieving greater digital sobriety in your digital marketing actions. You can rely on two types of KPI:

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- Measuring the actual consumption of digital assets: for example, for an image, you can observe whether a download was carried out in HD, and for a video, the actual viewing time.

- Analysis of audience loyalty, based on the regularity of visits and the behavior of these visits across all channels (websites, blogs, social networks). For example, we can examine the amount of content consumed in a single session.

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This data feeds into content scoring, which is essential for content analysis and production management. You can improve your content strategy by identifying the formats or topics that most engage your audience. By understanding which media/formats work more or less well, and on which channels, you'll know where to direct your efforts and how to get to the heart of the matter, so you can aim to minimize the environmental impact of your digital marketing campaigns.

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