Content marketing may be easier to dive in, but it is tricky to accurately measure the benefits it brings. Most of its advantages are intangible, for example the increased exposure and brand building.
These, while, essential to online success, are hard to gauge.
Yet at the same time there are ways you can determine the specific benefits you get from content marketing. Factors that will help you decide on how much to invest into content marketing in terms of time and money, and how often to engage.
Here are 5 important stats that you should be tracking:
Social Shares
Perhaps the most obvious metric. It can be easily observed if you have set up social share plugins on your websites and blogs. Needless to say, the more an article or a post is shared, the more results it will bring in terms of visitors and rankings.
Comments
Another obvious measurement that is easy to track. A high amount of comments on a page, blog post, YouTube video, or any other content shows high user engagement. This is, again, a clear indicator of just how useful that particular piece of content is for users.
Time on Page
Average visitor duration is a little known, yet highly important factor that affects search engine rankings. The more people like your content, the more they will stay. And this is good enough for Google for a rankings increase. Drill down in Google Analytics to find out which content is popular.
Bounce Rate
Measuring this factor also helps you find what topics resonate with your audience. In layman terms, bounce rate is the ratio of one-page visits to the number of total visits. The lower your bounce rate, the more it means that your content is engaging enough for visitors to stay, browse around and subscribe.
Backlinks Generation
Much has been written on the vital importance of backlinks in SEO, and this factor still is ace when it comes to content. Make sure you create highly useful content, because the more backlinks it attracts from other authoritative websites, the higher it will be ranked, resulting in more traffic.