29 Essential Content Marketing Metrics You May Not Know [Infographic]

Author and Founder of Conversion Sciences, Brian Massey once said, “in five years, marketers will be prized for their insight, not their creativity.”

Though I think creativity will always be important in marketing, I have to agree with the message this quote delivers about an analytical mind.

In inbound marketing today, the best marketers are those who can not only put together a beautiful, thought-provoking campaign, but those who can also read and make use of the numbers that result from them.  

Unfortunately, numbers aren’t everyone’s bag, baby.

I can safely say from experience that marketers occasionally get caught up in the completion of tasks without paying attention to their results.

Cranking out that new eBook on time or sharing that new blog article on social media...We can quickly check these duties off our list, but what about how they perform?

To be a successful inbound marketer, you need to be able to monitor, track, and analyze a variety of data depending on your organization’s goals. Not sure what numbers you should be looking at?

Thanks to the team over at Curata, we have this handy infographic outlining 29 of the most common content marketing metrics you should be tracking and why.

They are broken up into seven key categories: consumption, retention, sharing, engagement, lead, sales, and production/costs (and you may not have heard of all of them.) The detailed list includes:

• Unique Visits: Page views can be skewed by visitors who click through several pages or repeat visitors, so unique visitor stats tell you the overall size of your audience and how much of your traffic is repeat visitors.

• Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is calculated based on two clicks: the entry click and the exit click. If both those clicks occur from the same page on your site, that is counted as a “bounce” because the reader didn’t click on other links to explore your site.

• Email Forwards: Not all forwards can be quantified, because some users click to forward rather than using the “forward-to-friend” button embedded in the email. Still, this can give you an approximation of whether an email got shared relative to another campaign.

• Page Depth: This shows you how many pages your visitors are visiting per session. Are they just reading one piece of content and leaving? Or are they very interested and consuming several pieces of content?

• Existing Leads Touched: To find the number of leads touched, use your marketing automation tool and CRM to calculate how many existing leads in your database interacted with a piece of content.

• Pipeline Generated: Using a first-touch attribution model, you can aggregate the total dollar value of all opportunities where the first touch of the lead associated with the opportunity was a piece of your content.

• Content Throughput: This refers to the volume of content your team or individual team members produce over a given time (say a month.) It’s another metric to assess your team’s efficiency.

Check out the full list in the infographic below!