If you’re involved in SaaS content marketing, metrics are vital to your strategy. You need to be able to quantify your actions to trace their impacts and have a clear idea of what success looks like. 

However, just as looking at call center KPIs throws up unexpected metrics, content marketing has overlooked metrics of its own. Give your content marketing a boost with these new approaches to performance tracking.

1. Qualified Visitors

This refers to how many users are likely to buy something from you. It often encompasses users from countries you deliver to. If geography isn’t a concern, it might be users who visit important product or service pages. 

If these qualified visitor numbers are high (but aren’t matched by sales), what you offer might not be attractive to them. Consider what you can do to change this – try highlighting delivery options, for example, or revising product pages to include more information. This can form part of a customer nurturing campaign that targets frequent pain points for customers. 

2. Repeat Visitors

Take a look at how many website visitors have visited before. High returning numbers are a good sign – you want people to pay regular visits. It shows they value what you have to offer and are receptive to your product or service.

However, if the site’s bounce rate is also high, it suggests your content schedule needs amending. Make sure you have a steady stream of content that justifies repeat visits, or your visitor numbers could start to trend downward. A daily stand-up can generate new content ideas or troubleshoot existing ones.

3. Pages Per Visit

As part of your content strategy, you want to keep people on-site for as long as possible. The longer people are on your site, the more they will learn about your business and the more likely you are to make a sale. A low pages-per-visit metric means customers are being kept in the dark about your merits.

Aid people’s understanding of your business with internal links to other relevant content. This is a great way to keep users on your site and, more importantly, give them something useful in return. 

4. Content Syndication Effectiveness

As the name suggests, this refers to the impact of syndicated content and guest posts on your users. These kinds of content are an excellent way to enhance your brand awareness and expand your audience base by tapping into readers of the publications your content is being placed or syndicated on. But, like anything else, we need to scrutinize them for effectiveness.

To track the impact of syndicated content, you need to add UTM tags to your content (which track the campaign’s source and medium). This, in turn, will tell you where searchers are coming from and what drew them to you in the first place.

To turn this effectiveness into a metric, divide your total number of site visits by the number of leads delivered over a given period and then multiply this by 100. The resulting percentage helps you compare the impact of different partners on your business.

5. Content Engagement

The time spent with your broader content offering is also instructive. See if there’s a mismatch between the average consumption time for your content and the time spent on its page. If there is, this can give you an insight into the quality of your content.

You can get a good sense of how long it takes to read an article by looking at its word count. The average reading speed of an adult is 275 words per minute. Add 12 seconds to the total for every image you include in the article.

To get your content engagement metric, divide the average time spent on a page by the content’s average consumption time, and multiply it by 100. A low percentage suggests your content isn’t engaging. A high percentage suggests your content is difficult to consume.

If you’re seeing differing reception to your written and video content, collaboration software can bring your teams together. Sharing your approaches – and the lessons learned – might help identify ways to improve your content. 

6. Attribution

Today’s businesses have numerous channels for marketing – social media, email campaigns, paid search, and so on. But are all of these useful for your business? You need to be able to attribute sales to specific marketing campaigns for them to be of value.

While this is a complex area, it’s best to use a multi-touch attribution model to track this metric. These look at all the steps a user takes before purchasing from you. The right attribution model depends on your specific business.

7. Open to Click Comparison

Do you offer multiple content types (for different parts of the sales funnel) in emails? This metric lets you see if people are interested in what you’re selling – and how you’re selling it. You might send different ebooks to customers in different parts of the sales funnel, emphasizing savings or product features as required.

Calculate this metric by dividing your clicks by your opens and multiplying the resulting number by 100. By calculating this metric for each of your content types and messages, you can get a clear sense of how receptive your audience is. It can also help you better gauge customer lifetime value, i.e., how much value each customer actually brings you.

Since a user won’t know the value of most content before viewing it, the problem may lie with the sales message. If this metric is unusually low, consider rephrasing your email messaging to better serve your customers. A virtual whiteboard is a great way to collaborate on effective messaging. 

8. Mobile Entrances

Mobile browsing is very popular with today’s internet users. Are you tracking how many people are coming to a content page via mobile? If this number is high, check in on your site’s mobile optimization. 

This is important for both content marketing and general site ranking. Google prioritizes mobile page load speed in its assessment of your website, which is a key consideration for mobile users. 

Pages also need to display well on mobile, which they should if you have a responsive website. 

9. SERP Ranking

This isn’t a metric you can calculate in the conventional sense. However, your position on a search engine results page is a pretty good barometer for your content’s value and, therefore, the visibility of your site. After all, users can’t do business with you if they can’t find you!

A good SERP ranking can help to strengthen the perception of a startup business. A strong website, active social media presence, and professional logo are all essential. But ranking highly in SERPs also contributes to your authority and expertise.

By tracking your content’s movement in a SERP, you can get a clearer sense of whether that content is valuable (or seen as valuable by Google). Featured snippets contain content of exceptional value and can help you to usurp clicks from top-ranked content. 

Image source

As such, creating content that’s featured-snippet friendly is an excellent way to bolster your content marketing strategy. 

Conclusion

An effective content marketing strategy takes a holistic look at the content being produced. You can’t just look at the quality of the content itself; you need to see the nuts and bolts of how (and where) users engage with it.

Good businesses also appreciate their content creators – virtual celebration ideas can help keep teams motivated.

By taking such a broad perspective, you’ll be able to create content that truly serves the needs of your many customers. 

Author Bio

Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications system that provides valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Here is her LinkedIn.