15 Crucial Content Analytics Metrics You Must Monitor Post-Publish

Understanding the performance of your website’s content after hitting the ‘Publish’ button is a critical part of a successful content marketing strategy. You’ve poured hours into researching, writing, and refining your content to attract and engage your audience. But how do you know whether your efforts have paid off?

The answer lies in data. By tracking key content analytics metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your content, enabling you to adjust your strategy and achieve better results.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the 15 most important metrics you need to track and why they matter for your SEO agency.

1. Conversion Rates

Conversion rates should be at the top of your content analytics checklist. After all, the ultimate goal of your content is to turn visitors into leads or customers. If your content isn’t converting as expected, it might be time to reevaluate your content strategy and examine factors such as your calls-to-action, landing page design, and the quality and relevance of your content.

Remember, high conversion rates mean that your content is effectively addressing your audience’s needs and prompting them to take the desired action. It also indicates the successful alignment of your content with your conversion funnel.

Expert Insights:

If you’re seeing low conversion rates, look beyond your CTA buttons or landing page designs. Dive into heat mapping tools to identify where users lose interest or drop off. Moreover, A/B testing with various value propositions can give you data-driven insights into what actually triggers conversions.

Tools to Use:

Google Analytics, Crazy Egg

2. User Engagement

Engagement metrics provide insight into how your audience interacts with your content. High engagement signifies that your content resonates with your audience, encouraging them to interact and spend more time on your site.

Key engagement metrics include:

• Pageviews: This is the total number of views for a particular page or blog post. A high number of pageviews indicates that your content is attracting a substantial amount of traffic.
• Time on Site: This measures the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. Longer time on site can suggest that your content is engaging enough to keep visitors interested.
• Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can signal that your content or site is not satisfying the user’s intent.

Tracking these metrics will provide a more holistic view of your content’s performance and can guide you on where to focus your content optimization efforts.

Expert Insights:

Don’t just settle for knowing the time spent on a page. Use scroll-depth tracking to see how much of your content is actually consumed. This can be particularly helpful for long-form content pieces. If users aren’t scrolling down, it may be a sign you need to revise your introduction or break up content for readability.

Tools to Use:

Hotjar, Google Analytics

3. Total Revenue and ROI

Understanding the direct financial impact of your content is crucial. Tracking the total revenue generated from your content and the return on investment (ROI) can provide tangible proof of your content’s contribution to your bottom line.

It’s important to remember that not all content will generate direct revenue. Some content may play a more indirect role, such as building brand awareness or nurturing leads through the sales funnel. However, by assigning a monetary value to your content goals, you can calculate the ROI and determine whether your content marketing efforts are financially viable.

Expert Insights:

If you’re not attributing revenue back to specific content pieces, you’re missing out on understanding your ROI. Implement attribution modeling to understand how different touchpoints contribute to conversions and revenue. This will allow you to allocate resources more efficiently.

Tools to Use:

HubSpot, Salesforce

4. Social Shares

Social shares are a powerful indicator of your content’s influence and reach. When readers share your content across their social networks, they’re essentially vouching for the quality of your information and spreading your brand message. Monitoring social shares allows you to see which content is resonating most with your audience and can inform future content strategy decisions.

Moreover, having a high number of shares can help improve your content’s visibility and can have a positive impact on your search engine rankings, contributing to an effective SEO strategy. Don’t forget to incorporate easily accessible share buttons on your content to encourage this behavior.

Expert Insights:

While high share counts are excellent, they don’t tell the full story. Track where your content is being shared and by whom. Are industry influencers sharing your articles? That’s a strong signal of authority and quality.

Tools to Use:

BuzzSumo, Hootsuite

5. Ranking Position in SERPs

The search engine results pages (SERPs) ranking of your content is fundamental in attracting organic traffic. If your content consistently ranks on the first page of search results for relevant keywords, you’re more likely to attract high-quality, targeted traffic to your site.

Use keyword tracking tools to monitor your content’s ranking position over time. Observe any shifts and investigate potential causes. Have algorithm changes affected your position? Or maybe a competitor has published new content? Understanding the dynamics of SERPs is essential for maintaining high visibility.

Expert Insights:

Position 0 is the new Position 1. If you’re targeting high-traffic keywords, aim for featured snippets. Structuring your content in a Q&A format or using bullet points can increase your chances of capturing this coveted spot.

Tools to Use:

SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs

6. Total Sessions and New Sessions

These metrics offer valuable insights into your content’s reach and its ability to draw in visitors. Total sessions represent the overall number of user interactions on your site within a certain time frame. New sessions, on the other hand, represent the percentage of first-time visitors.

A steady increase in new sessions is a promising sign that your content strategy is successfully attracting fresh visitors. On the other hand, if you observe a substantial number of total sessions but fewer new sessions, it might indicate a strong base of recurring visitors, which means your content is compelling enough to retain them.

Expert Insights:

Monitor user flow within your analytics tool to understand how visitors navigate through your site. High numbers of new sessions with minimal follow-through to other pages could indicate a misalignment between the user intent and the content provided.

Tools to Use:

Google Analytics

7. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Understanding your Cost Per Acquisition is pivotal in evaluating the economic effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. This metric tells you how much it costs your business to gain a new lead or customer through your content.

By comparing the CPA against the lifetime value of a customer, you can determine whether your investment in content marketing is profitable. Lowering your CPA while keeping customer value high should be one of your main objectives. Strategies might include optimizing your conversion funnel, improving the quality of your content, or better targeting your audience.

Expert Insights:

If CPA seems too high, consider retargeting efforts. A well-placed retargeting ad, after a user has consumed some of your content, can significantly lower your CPA.

Tools to Use:

Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager

8. Content Lifecycle

Monitoring the lifecycle of your content is an excellent way to assess its longevity and sustained value. The content lifecycle refers to how long your content continues to generate traffic and engagement after its initial publication.

Content with a long lifecycle provides ongoing value and can significantly improve your SEO as it continues to attract backlinks and social shares over time. Evergreen content, for instance, can keep driving traffic for years after publication, making it a cost-effective content strategy.

Expert Insights:

Analyze your content’s decay rate, the rate at which traffic to a piece decreases over time. By understanding this rate, you can better plan when to refresh or repurpose content, ensuring it remains a valuable asset for a longer time.

Tools to Use:

Google Search Console, Google Analytics

9. Social Media Engagement

Tracking social media engagement — such as likes, comments, and follower growth — can give you an in-depth understanding of your audience’s response to your content. High levels of engagement often signify that your content is resonating with your followers.

Analyzing the types of posts that generate the most engagement can help you fine-tune your content strategy. Are how-to posts getting more likes? Do opinion pieces generate more comments? Use these insights to shape your future content and drive higher engagement.

Expert Insights:

Likes and shares are good, but comments are gold. Higher levels of comments usually indicate strong content engagement. This can also be an excellent opportunity to mine for future content ideas or even co-create content with your audience.

Tools to Use:

Sprout Social, Hootsuite

10. Email Engagement

If email is a part of your content marketing strategy, monitoring engagement metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions is essential. These metrics can help you understand how well your email content resonates with your audience and can inform improvements to your email strategy.

Higher open rates suggest that your subject lines are compelling, while high click-through rates indicate that your email content is engaging and prompts readers to act. By testing different email formats, subject lines, and content types, you can optimize your email engagement and drive greater results.

Expert Insights:

Are you segmenting your email lists based on engagement levels? Sending targeted content to highly engaged users can significantly increase open and click-through rates, leading to better conversions.

Tools to Use:

Mailchimp, Constant Contact

11. Backlinks

Backlinks are a crucial component of SEO and your content’s visibility. High-quality backlinks from reputable websites can improve your site’s authority, lead to higher search rankings, and drive more referral traffic to your site.

Remember to consistently check the quality of your backlinks, as links from low-quality or irrelevant sites can potentially harm your SEO. Using a backlink checker tool can make this process easier and more efficient.

Expert Insights:

Go beyond just monitoring the number of backlinks. Assess the relevance and authority of the sites linking to you. Non-relevant, low-quality links can actually harm your SEO.

Tools to Use:

Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush

12. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic represents users who find your site via a search engine. It’s a crucial metric to track as it can give you an idea of how well your SEO strategy is working. High organic traffic typically signifies that your site ranks well for relevant keywords and is considered authoritative and trustworthy by search engines.

You can further analyze organic traffic to understand which keywords are driving the most traffic and which pieces of content are most successful in attracting users, thereby informing your future content and SEO strategies.

Expert Insights:

Use cohort analysis to examine how particular groups of organic visitors behave over time. This enables you to tailor content more specifically to different segments of your audience.

Tools to Use:

Google Analytics, SEMrush, Google Search Console

13. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is a vital metric for understanding the appeal of your content in search results or on social media feeds. It represents the proportion of users who click on your content link relative to the number who see it.

A high CTR generally indicates compelling metadata (titles and descriptions) and high-quality content. If your CTR is low, you might need to refine your metadata for clarity and relevancy or improve the quality of your content to better meet user needs.

Expert Insights:

Boost CTR by experimenting with meta description phrasing and structured data. Enhancements like rich snippets can make your search result more appealing, thereby increasing clicks.

Tools to Use:

Google Search Console

14. Return Visitors

Return visitors are users who return to your site after their first visit. A high ratio of return visitors can suggest that your content is engaging, valuable, and satisfies user queries. Consistently providing high-quality content that meets your audience’s needs will help drive return visits and foster a loyal audience.

Expert Insights:

Use advanced segments in Google Analytics to differentiate between types of return visitors. Are they returning to read new content, or are they revisiting the same pages? The former indicates a healthy content strategy; the latter might point to a lack of clarity or completeness in your articles.

Tools to Use:

Google Analytics

15. Average Session Duration

This metric provides insight into how long, on average, visitors are spending on your site during a single visit. A longer average session duration can suggest that your content is engaging and encourages visitors to stay and explore more of your site.

If you notice that your session durations are shorter than expected, consider whether your content is genuinely meeting the needs of your visitors. Enhancing readability, including engaging multimedia, and ensuring your content is thorough and relevant can help increase the average session duration.

Expert Insights:

A high average session duration can be misleading if users are merely leaving tabs open. Check the percentage of idle time within the sessions to get a clearer understanding of genuine engagement.

Tools to Use:

Google Analytics

Conclusion

I hope this comprehensive overview of each metric provides you with a deeper understanding and proves helpful in your content marketing efforts. Remember, to maintain a successful content strategy, it’s crucial to consistently monitor and analyze these metrics. This will allow you to fine-tune your content and SEO strategies over time, based on real data and user behavior.