You should pay close attention to these key content marketing metrics if you’re looking to improve your content marketing strategy attracting more visitors in the process.

You can’t expect to develop a successful, popular website that people actually want to visit without content. In fact, Google even says that publishing high-quality content is “the single most important thing you can do.” So if you’re looking to improve your content marketing strategy while attracting more visitors in the process, you should pay close attention to the following key content marketing metrics.

google page views

Pageviews

Of course, you’ll want to pay close attention to the number of pageviews that your content receives. If a particular article or blog post has a high number of pageviews, you can rest assured knowing that it’s relevant to your target demographic.

There are dozens of different tools and programs for calculating pageviews, although nothing works better than Google Analytics. Using GA, you can identify pageviews as well as other useful metrics.

Using Pageviews is a great way to figure out which marketing medium is doing the best job at attracting visits to specific content pieces. This will allow you to determine which posts are doing well socially and/or organically. More importantly it will help you determine how your existing content can be improved in order to gain even more traffic.

 

Quick Tip:

Select Page Views by Title – Doing this will allow you to quickly view which titles are getting the most clicks. From there you can make some assessments like; do your list-based posts perform well or maybe in-depth how to’s draw in more views.

 

Average Time Spent on Page

This metric is pretty much self-explanatory. If visitors only spend a couple seconds on your page before leaving, there’s probably something wrong with your content marketing strategy.

So, what’s a “good” average time spent on page? There’s no easy answer to this question, as it varies depending on factors like content length, topic, audience, and goal/intent. With that said, keeping it above 1 minute tends to work for most niches.

Pro Tip: It is important to note that using average time spent on page in GA is not an entirely accurate metric. If you really want to dive deep into uncovering the amount of time people are spending on your content then you will definitely want to check out “Real Time On Page Google Analytics – A Better Way to Measure Content Engagement with Google Analytics,” by Analytics-Ninja.com.

Bounce Rate

What in the world is bounce rate? The term “bounce rate” is used to express the percentage of visitors to a webpage or website who leave without visiting a second page on the site. For instance, if half of your site’s visitors leave without clicking through to a second page, your site has a 50% bounce rate. Keep in mind that a bounce may occur when one of the following happens: the visitor clicks the back button in their web browser; the visitor closes their web browser; the visitor remains idle for a prolonged length of time.

Ideally, you should work to optimize your site’s content for the lowest possible bounce rate, as a high bounce rate is usually indicative of an underlying problem (e.g. irrelevant content, exceptionally long load times, grammatical errors, etc.).

 

Other Metrics to Watch…

In addition to the pageviews, average time spent on page and bounce rate, here are some other metrics to watch:

 

  • Pages/Session – This is the total number of pages a user visits whilst browsing your website. This is a good indicator of the extent to which they are engaging with your content.
  • News vs. Returning – This is a good metric to indicate whether or not your content is being viewed by new visitors to your website as well as determining if your content was good enough to get people coming back to in byt the number of returning visitors.
  • Referral traffic – This is an important metric as it provides you with overview of the websites that are sharing and linking to your content.

 

Pro tip: You can use Content Grouping within GA to segment your content and streamline your insights with regard to the kind of content users are engaging with. For example, you can create content groups based on topics, content formats, and the average length of posts. Watch the video below for a quick tutorial on how to set this up:

 

SOCIAL MEDIA

  • Shares – A branch of referral traffic, social media shares encompass Retweets, Repins or any channel-specific social share metric that demonstrates the reach of your content. This is an important indicator as to whether or not your content resonates with your.
  • Comments – Commenting takes effort so it is also an important indicator as to whether your content is being well received by your audience.

 

Measuring the analytics of your content will help you improve your overall content marketing strategy so that you can make sure that you are getting the most out of it.