Content Marketing Metrics: How to Measure Success & Failure

What are key Content Marketing metrics

There are several metrics that your business should track to evaluate the success of your content marketing efforts at different touch points with your audience.

Key content marketing metrics include:

(Organized it from the first touch down to purchase)

User Retention Rate = (Users at end of period - New users) / Users at start) * 100

1. Click-through rate (CTR) - The percentage of people who click on a link to your content, usually from Google search results page (both Paid and Organic), or measured in email or social media campaigns.
   Formula: Click-through rate (CTR) = (Total clicks / Total impressions) * 100

2. Email open rates - The percentage of people who open and read your email marketing campaigns.
   Formula: Email open rates = (Total emails opened / Total emails delivered) * 100

3. Email positive reply rate - the percent of people who replied with interest to your email offer out of the total emails delivered.
   Formula: Email positive reply rate = (Positive replies / Total emails delivered) * 100

4. Traffic - The number of visits to your website, social channels, landing pages, or YouTube channel.

5. Engagement - The level of interaction with your content, such as shares, likes, comments, and time spent on the page, how many people read a social media post, and your average YouTube video view time.
   Formula: Engagement = (Total interactions (shares, likes, comments, etc.) / Total content views or impressions) * 100

6. Conversions - The number of visitors who take a desired action, such as signing up, filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, or making a purchase.

7. Leads - The number of visitors who provide contact information, indicating potential interest in your product or service.

8. MQLs - Marketing Qualified Lead measure the warm and relevant leads that actually have some basic interest in your product or solution (only relevant for B2B and high ticket sellers)

9. SQLs - Sales Qualified Leads are leads that met with your sales team and were verified as concrete potential buyers, interested and able to buy your product or service (only relevant for B2B and high ticket sellers)

10. Revenue or Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) - The amount of revenue generated from content marketing efforts. Annual Recurring Revenue is the aggregate yearly recurring payment made by a cohort of customers. It is how subscription or retention-based businesses measure their income.

11. Lead quality - The percentage of leads that became MQLs or SQLs (depending on how strict your measurement is).
    Formula: Lead quality = (MQLs or SQLs / Total leads) * 100

12. Cost per acquisition (CPA) - The cost of acquiring a new customer. Can be calculated per marketing channel, campaign, or even a single landing page.
    Formula: Cost per acquisition (CPA) = Total marketing cost / Total number of acquisitions

13. Customer lifetime value (CLV) - The amount of revenue a customer is likely to generate over their lifetime. This KPI is sometimes called LTV (lifetime value).
    Formula: Customer lifetime value (CLV) = Average monthly revenue per user * Customer lifespan (in month)

14. Average order value (AOV) - the average purchase value of the average cart, subscription plan, or service bundle.
    Formula: Average order value (AOV) = Total revenue / Total number of orders

15. Average contract size (ACV) - the average dollar revenue each lead brings in. If you manage to bring in B2B buyers with big price tags through your content marketing you’ll be the king of the hill.
    Formula: Average contract size (ACV) = Total contract revenue / Total number of contracts

16. Return on investment (ROI) - The financial return on content marketing investment.
    Formula: Return on investment (ROI) = (Net profit from content marketing / Total content marketing investment) * 100

17. Brand awareness - The extent to which your target audience is aware of your brand and its offerings. This is normally measured in the number of brand mentions on digital media, and aspects like logo design can help audiences remember your brand more easily.

18. User Retention - The percent of users that regularly consume your various content marketing channels, normally returning website visitors, newsletter subscribers, social media followers, and YouTube subscribers. Retention rate is normally by cohort for a specific month.
    Formula: Retention Rate by Cohort = (Users retained in the period / Initial cohort size) * 100

19. Reach - The number of social media followers, newsletter subscribers, returning website users, and affiliate referrals.

20. Visibility - the number of people that get exposed to your content, but do not necessarily consume it. This can include an aggregation of organic impressions on Google and other search engines, search and placement ad impressions, social media impressions, and more.

21. Inbound organic links - The number of external websites linking back to your content, which can improve search engine rankings and increase traffic.

22. Content quality - The perceived value and relevance of your content to your target audience, which can impact engagement and conversions (based on standardized regular user surveys)

Each of these metrics provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

For example, tracking traffic can help you understand which channels are driving the most visitors to your site, while monitoring engagement can help you identify which types of content are resonating most with your audience.

Conversions, leads, MQLs, and SQLs are critical metrics for understanding how content is contributing to your sales machine.

Revenue and Average Contract Size expose your contribution to the bottom line and business growth.