4 content marketing metrics you should be watching carefully — here's how to track them
Live content marketing dashboards make metrics easier to access and monitor
If you're a content marketer, you likely already track marketing metrics like impressions and goal conversions.
The problem with these metrics is that, even where they're actionable, there's often uncertainty about what actions to take, in what order, and with how much effort.
If you've been publishing for a while, you've probably asked yourself:
What can I do to improve all this content?
Where should I start?
What's the ROI on this effort?
Over the past few weeks we've been introduced to some valuable new reports in Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console, which have helped us answer these questions.
They've come to us from content marketing experts through research we're conducting to build best-in-class content marketing dashboards.
It turns out there's a wealth of data available in GA that can help you identify underperforming content, prioritize what to improve first, and forecast the return on your time investment.
You just have to know where to look.
But there's a second challenge.
Even when you know where the data is, it's not always easy to access. As Andy Crestodina explains in this awesome article, you often have to dig into GA, and in some cases export to a spreadsheet, to view results against targets, benchmarks, or historical trends.
That's not ideal when you're trying to improve content quickly.
So more questions arise:
How can I get to the GA data quickly and turn it into readily available information?
How can I operationalize this information so I can make informed, timely decisions about what content to improve?
Our response has been to build dynamic data visualizations and dashboards with Klips, referencing data from our Google Analytics integration and Google Search Console.
This saves us from diving into two or three layers of these tools and adjusting dimensions and parameters every time we want to know how we're doing.
The result: we always have a clear view of how our content is performing and where our biggest improvement opportunities lie.
Below, I'll walk you through some of the most valuable content metrics for content marketing we've been tracking, and how we track them.
Click Through Rate (CTR) improvement opportunities
Most digital marketers track content performance based on metrics like organic search ranking and click-through rate (CTR).
When content ranks highly — say, top three results for a particular query — satisfaction sets in and improvement efforts pause until rankings drop significantly.
But what if, despite ranking highly, your content isn't pulling in high traffic?
Would it concern you to know that your top-ranked post for a given query is only capturing 10% of all clicks for that query?
It concerned us.
According to a CTR study by Advanced Web Ranking, content ranked first on an organic search query draws about 30% of all clicks for that query. Content ranked second tends to generate a CTR of about 15%, and third-ranked content usually achieves around 10%.
This research confirms what you probably assumed intuitively: the higher your content ranks, the higher your CTR should be.
The research also gives you specific benchmarks to strive for:
| Organic search rank | Benchmark CTR |
|---|---|
| 1 | 30% |
| 2 | 15% |
| 3 | 10% |
| 4 | 7% |
| 5 | 5% |
So now you know what to look for: content that ranks high in search results but has a low click-through rate.
Because as much as that's a problem, it's an opportunity.
Consider a situation where you have content ranking second for query X, and 100,000 people search that query each month. On average, you should be receiving 15,000 clicks (100,000 × 15%). If you're only receiving 2,500 clicks, you're capturing just 2.5% of available traffic.
Raising the CTR on that content from 2.5% to 15% could drive up to 12,500 more visitors each month.
So how do you monitor average SERP position and CTR to ensure you're attracting clicks that match your ranking?
You can go to Google Analytics: Acquisition > Search Console > Queries. It's not difficult, but constantly jumping in and out of the tool takes time. It also requires several steps to set up the report, and GA won't show you where there's a discrepancy between SERP position and expected CTR.
We automated the retrieval of this data and built this visualization in Klips for a quick view of our performance:
View on a live dashboard
This visualization gives us quick visibility into how our top-ranked content is performing or underperforming based on CTR.
It pulls the following data from Google Analytics dynamically:
Column 1: Search engine queries for which we have high-ranking content
Column 2: Total number of clicks our content has received (last 30 days)
Column 3: Average position of our content in SERPs (last 30 days)
Column 4: CTR based on total impressions (last 30 days)
Column 5 is a custom column we built in Klips. It highlights where our CTR is low relative to our SERP ranking. A formula displays the difference between the actual CTR in column 4 and the expected CTR based on the position in column 3. Red indicators flag where we're missing significant opportunities.
Looking for tips to improve your CTR? Check out point two in this post.
Search rank improvement opportunities
The difference between ranking on the first page of organic search results and any page after it is significant. Research suggests that only 1% of search traffic makes it past the first page of results.
That said, pushing content up many positions can take considerable effort, especially in competitive keyword categories.
To get the most out of your content improvement efforts, focus on content that ranks at the top of page two of search results. Moving those listings to page one will deliver the greatest ROI.
How do you monitor content ranking at the top of page two so you can prioritize improving it? Use a tool like our Search Position Improvement Opportunities klip to surface this data automatically.
In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > Search Console > Queries. Filter the results to display only listings with an average position of 11 or 12 (Advanced > Add a Metric > Avg Position). This is the content sitting in the top two positions of page two of search results.
We automated the retrieval of this data and built this visualization in Klips:
View this data visualization on a live dashboard
This visualization helps us prioritize which content to improve for the highest ROI.
It pulls the following data from Google Analytics dynamically:
Column 1: Search engine queries for which we have content ranking in positions 11 and 12
Column 2: Average position of our content in SERPs (last 30 days)
Column 3: Total impressions our content has received in these positions (last 30 days)
Column 4: Total clicks our content has received in these positions (last 30 days)
Column 5: Click-through rate, calculated as column 4 divided by column 3
Top posts by page views and conversion rate
Your top traffic-generating content is often not your top converting content, and vice versa.
In these situations, a smart content strategy is to pair posts that bring in high traffic with related posts that convert well.
How do you identify high-traffic and high-converting content so you can pair them?
You can find your top content by page views in GA: Behaviour > Behaviour Flow > Site Content > All Pages. To filter for a specific content type, like blog posts, enter the path (e.g. "/blog") in the search bar next to "Advanced."
Identifying top content by conversions takes a few more steps. Go to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path, then use the "goal option" dropdown to select the goal you want to track — blog subscriptions, trial starts, ebook downloads, or whatever you have set up.
To build a linking strategy, you'll want to see top content by page views and top content by conversions side by side.
You can export each report to a spreadsheet and align the data manually, then repeat the process every week or so. Or you can build a visualization like this in Klips:
View this data visualization on a live dashboard
This visualization lets us quickly toggle between top-performing content by page views and conversions, so we can think through a logical linking strategy.
It pulls the following data from Google Analytics dynamically:
Bar chart
Filter: Number of page views
Y axis: Top blog posts ordered by most page views
X axis: Total number of page views per blog post
Table
Column 1: Top blog posts
Column 2: Total page views per blog post
Column 3: Total blog subscriptions (a goal we have set up in GA)
Column 4: Conversion rate (column 3 divided by column 2)
Behaviour flow and flow-through rate
What top-of-funnel content inspires a user to learn more about your product, service, or company?
One way to measure that is to track where users go after consuming an initial piece of content. Do they leave your site, or visit another page?
Tracking how many pages a user visits after that first content experience tells you whether you're drawing them deeper into the marketing funnel.
Google Analytics' Behaviour Flow report can help you understand what path users travel through your content, and how effective your top-of-funnel, high-traffic content is at attracting the right audience and pulling them further into your site.
Access this report in GA through Behaviour Flow > Pages and Events. In the second dropdown next to "Pages and Events," select the web page you'd like to report on.
While this report displays useful information, it's not readily accessible in GA, and the default visualization isn't the most intuitive.
We built a version of this behaviour flow visualization in Klips, focused on the specific metrics we wanted to monitor.
This visualization shows us which top-of-funnel content drives the deepest engagement, based on how many internal pages are viewed after the first page visited.
It pulls the following data from Google Analytics dynamically:
Column 1: Top blog posts by page views
Column 2: Total number of users (last 30 days)
Column 3: Percentage of users who went on to view a second piece of content after visiting the first
Column 4: Average number of web pages viewed after the first page visit
A low "Avg # of interactions" (highlighted in red) tells us that users are reading our top-of-funnel content and then leaving — something that needs to be addressed.
We didn't always track these content marketing opportunities
Our path to these real-time visualizations and dashboards was a bit circuitous, and we had a lot of help along the way.
Interested in building your own dashboards with Google Analytics data? See How it works and visit our Google Analytics Integration page.