For SaaS businesses, content is more than a 'good-to-have'—it's a business asset. A staggering 92% of marketers acknowledge the importance of content in the growth of their business.
But, merely recognizing the importance is not enough. You also need to understand what effective content marketing is, how it catalyzes growth, and what metrics can measure its effectiveness.
In this article, we’ll look at the top content marketing metrics and KPIs you need to measure for content effectiveness and success. Let's get started.
What are Content Marketing Metrics?
Content marketing metrics quantify the effectiveness of your strategy and content marketing efforts. They offer an understanding of how well your content—whether blogs, emails, videos, etc.—is engaging your target audience and converting them into customers.
As you continue to scale content, tracking these metrics should be of utmost importance, especially for SaaS marketing teams.
These metrics provide clarity about the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and can help you measure specific attributes of your content that your target audience likes—guiding your future content decisions.
Most importantly, content marketing metrics serve as a gauge for your content's impact on your business success, helping you make data-driven decisions and strategic adjustments to enhance the ROI.
Why Your SaaS Company Needs to Track Content Metrics
Content marketing metrics provide key insights into what's performing, what's not, and where you need to make changes. Metrics help you:
- Understand Your Audience Behavior: Stats like page views, time on page, and bounce rate paint a clear picture of how your audience interacts with your content. Are they hooked or leaving quickly? What content pieces are they consuming? And how can this data help create content that aligns with our audience's preferences? These insights help you create content that better fits what your audience wants.
- See Content Performance: How do you know if your content is successful? Social shares, comments, and conversion rates show whether your content resonates with your audience and leads them to sign up, download, buy, or any other goal you may have.
- Plan Future Content: By tracking metrics over time, you spot trends and patterns to shape your future content plans. For example, if one type of content always does well, create more of that type of content.
- Optimize Your Content: Tracking metrics allow constant optimization of your content. You can test different strategies, see their impact, and refine your content based on what works best.
- Prove ROI: Content marketing costs time and money. Metrics such as revenue, leads generated, and customer acquisition cost help show it's worth the investment. Execs want to see returns.
Next, let’s explore the types of metrics SaaS companies should monitor.
The Metrics Guiding Your B2B Content Strategy
As a B2B company, content marketing metrics are your compass to success. They show how to navigate the sea of content and connect with your audience. Here we explore the five types of key metrics to measure:
Consumption Metrics
These are the most basic metrics and provide insights into how your audience consumes your content. These metrics also look at the frequency and depth of their content consumption.
Stats like pageviews, sessions, and referrals reveal how many view your content, how often, and the channels they use.
Engagement Metrics
With engagement metrics, you can determine how your audience interacts with your content. They also help you guide your future content creation decisions by understanding what content is attractive to your audience.
Data on likes, shares, comments, and session duration are a few examples of engagement metrics. Keep track of these metrics to ensure steady growth and to build influence over time.
Retention Metrics
Once your audience has consumed and engaged with your content, they can either bounce off to never return, or keep coming back for more. Retention metrics help you understand how many of your users return to your content or website for more.
Data on return visits, subscription rates, and churn rates signal how valuable your audience finds your content.
For a SaaS business, retention can be difficult as competitors are prying for opportunities to copy your effort. But once you develop a content moat (think Hubspot or Drip), you have a strong business asset that prevents your customers from going elsewhere.
Cost Metrics
Next we come down to the metrics that tell you how valuable the content is for your business. These numbers include the cost per lead (CPL), cost per click (CPC), return on ad spend (ROAS), ROI, and others.
Cost metrics show whether your content achieves outcomes efficiently. It also helps you understand how long before your content starts generating positive ROI for your business and can help guide your budgeting decisions.
Lead Gen Metrics
Businesses create and distribute content to bring in leads. Lead gen metrics tell you how many leads your content has generated.
These metrics include lead volume, lead quality, and conversion rates indicating your content's impact on your business.
While these metrics may work individually, a combination of these metrics gives you a holistic view of your content performance. They steer your strategy by revealing what's effective and what needs refinement.
Content Marketing Metrics vs. KPIs: What’s the Difference?
Metrics and KPIs are words commonly thrown around in the marketing world. But what’s the difference? While KPIs and metrics are both quantitative measurements, they serve different purposes.
While all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics are KPIs. Understanding the difference between these two can help you better track and measure your content marketing success.
12 Content Marketing Metrics and KPIs SaaS Companies Should Measure
Now that you have a grasp on the types of metrics in content marketing, let’s look at the 12 most important content marketing metrics you need to keep track of to ensure your decisions are backed by the right data.
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the number of visitors who land on your website from unpaid search results.
This metric is a testament to the quality of your website's search engine optimization (SEO). It's a reflection of your website's relevance and the quality of its content. The higher your organic traffic, the more opportunities you have to generate leads and conversions.
Suppose you have recently started a blog to drive more organic traffic. You look at a tool like Google Search Console or Factors to see that your website has received 5,000 visits from organic search after a month of content efforts.
This indicates that 5,000 people found your website through a search engine and visited your site, demonstrating the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Here, you can also check the keywords and terms that people search for to find your content.
2. Impressions
Impressions represent the number of times your ad or content is displayed and viewed by users. In the context of digital marketing, impressions give you an idea of the reach of your content. It's a measure of potential audience size, giving you insights into the potential reach of your content or ads.
Factors helps you see the exact number of impressions for all your campaigns in a single place. It makes it easy for you to take a holistic decision on what campaigns are working and how you can optimize your marketing channels with the best ads.
Consider that you run a LinkedIn ad campaign and your ad has 10,000 impressions. This means LinkedIn showed your ad to 10,000 people. It also helps you decide if segmenting further or broadening your keywords and audience can improve reach and targeting.
3. Clickthrough Rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is a ratio that compares the number of times your viewers click on a specific link to the number of total views on a page, email, or advertisement.
It's a key performance indicator for ad campaigns and provides insights into the effectiveness of your ads or emails. A higher CTR indicates that more people are clicking on your link, which could lead to higher conversions.
For example, an ad that was displayed 10,000 times (impressions) and received 200 clicks has a CTR of 2%. This means that 2% of the people who saw your ad ended up clicking on it. With this metric, you understand how well your ad copy or content is working for your audience on the platform.
4. Content-Assisted Demos
Content-assisted demos are the number of demos that were influenced by your content.
This metric is part of the marketing funnel and helps you understand the effectiveness of your content in driving leads and sales. It's a powerful indicator of the quality and relevance of your content, as it shows how well your content is able to engage potential customers and lead them further down the sales funnel.
Let’s assume you've published a blog post about the benefits of your product and included a call-to-action (CTA) to schedule a demo. Of 10,000 people who visit the blog post, 500 book the demo.
That gives you a CTR of 5%. However, attributing it to your content could be difficult. A tool like Factors can help you visualize the marketing funnel and tell you exactly how many of your leads came from your blog posts vs your website home page.
5. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who land on your website and exit your website without looking at other pages. In other words, they "bounce off” instead of continuing to other pages within your site.
While this could indicate that your content solves the need that a user came in for, it also tells you that there’s more you can do to retain your visitors. The average bounce rate hovers around 50%.
To calculate the bounce rate, you divide the total number of single-page visits by the total number of entries to a website. The resulting figure is then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
Let’s assume one of your blog posts attracts 100 visitors a month. Of those, 40 left after reading just that one post. In this case, your bounce rate is 40% which means 40% of your visitors don’t interact with your site beyond the initial page they landed on. You can improve retention by looking at the time on the page, scroll depth, and tracking overall website behavior.
6. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost of resources and efforts a business allocates to gain new paying customers.
CAC is a critical business metric for determining the resources required to acquire and onboard new customers, and it helps assess your company’s overall health and profitability. It's calculated by dividing the total costs associated with acquisition by total new customers, within a specific time period.
Let's consider that you offer a project management tool. Your monthly marketing budget is $10,000, which includes costs for ad spend, content creation, and marketing software. In that month, you acquire 200 new customers.
The CAC would be $10,000 divided by 200, which equals $50.
This means you spend $50 on average, to acquire each new customer. This is an important number for understanding the efficiency of your marketing efforts and for planning future marketing budgets.
7. Unique Visitors
Unique visitors are the number of individual people visiting your website over a certain period of time.
This metric is critical for understanding the size and reach of your website's audience. It's different from the number of visits, which counts the total number of times your website has been visited by both new and old visitors. Instead, the unique visitors metric tells you just the number of users that have visited your website — avoiding double-counting those who visited multiple times.
Factors’ web sessions view
Suppose you recently started a blog to drive more organic traffic. A tool like Factors can measure that your website has received 3,000 visits in a month, but only from 2,000 individual users, some of whom may have visited multiple times. This means that your unique visitors for that month would be 2,000, indicating the size of your audience and the effectiveness of your user acquisition strategies.
8. SERP Ranking
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking refers to the position of a website's content on the search engine results page.
The lower the number (for example, 1 is better than 7), the better your search visibility and the higher the chances of people visiting your site organically. It's a direct reflection of your SEO efforts, keyword relevance, backlink profile, and website quality that influences your ranking.
Suppose you offer a project management tool, and your blog post titled "Top 10 Project Management Tools in 2023" ranks 1st on the SERP for the keyword "project management tools 2023". You can view the SERP position by either directly searching on Google for your keyword or checking Google Search Console. Rank 1 means your SEO efforts have been successful in making your content highly visible to users searching for that specific keyword.
By employing a professional SEO tool like SE Ranking, you gain the ability to analyze the pages that currently hold top positions on the SERP. This valuable insight helps you understand the strategies and tactics that contribute to their success. Continuous monitoring of your competitors' rankings ensures that you stay informed about the dynamic landscape of search engine results.
9. Pages Per Session
Also known as page depth or depth of visit, pages per session reveal the average number of pages a user views during a single session on your website.
This metric tells you the effectiveness of your site content in keeping viewers engaged and navigating through your site. A higher number of pages per session indicates compelling content and an intuitive site design that encourages exploration. However, do note that most of your visitors will view a single page and leave.
Factors pages per session report
Suppose your marketing analytics tool shows an average of 5 pages per session. This means that users, on average, visit 5 different pages on your website in a single session. This could be a result of effective internal linking, engaging content, or a user-friendly site layout that encourages navigation.
10. Average Time on Page
Average Time on Page measures the average time users spend on a specific page before moving on to another one or exiting your site.
This metric helps you understand your users’ engagement with your site content. A high average time on a page generally indicates that users find your content valuable and engaging. However, the ideal duration will vary depending on the type of content you're offering and the goals of your website.
Let's consider that you've published a comprehensive guide on "How to Use Your SaaS Product". A month after publishing, you note that the average time on this page is 7 minutes.
Depending on the length of your guide, this may indicate that users are likely reading the entire guide or at least skimming through the important parts you may have highlighted. You can dive deeper into this by looking at click maps or scroll depth.
This shows that users are finding value in your guide and you should continue producing similar assets for your business.
11. Traffic Source
Traffic Source is the origin or medium through which visitors arrive at your website or digital platform. Knowing your traffic sources helps businesses know exactly what channels the marketing team should double down on and what channels are not generating enough ROI to keep going.
For instance, consider an e-commerce store that sells handmade home accessories. The store owner has implemented various marketing strategies like social media, paid advertising, organic search, and email marketing to drive traffic to the website. To evaluate the effectiveness of these promotional efforts, the store owner needs to analyze traffic sources to determine which is bringing the most visitors and which source results in the highest conversion rate.
Factors can indicate that 1,000 website visitors arrived from the following traffic sources—500 from social media, 200 from paid advertising, 200 from organic search, and 100 from email marketing campaigns. Based on this information, the marketing team can focus more on their social media strategy.
12. Scroll Depth
Scroll depth is a measure of how far down a webpage a user scrolls. It indicates how much of your content is being consumed and can provide insights into user engagement.
Scroll depth tracking in Factors allows you to see how much of a web page your visitors actually view.
For example, if you have a blog post that is 2000 pixels long, and users on average scroll 1000 pixels, your average scroll depth would be 50%.
This means that on average, users are viewing half of your content. If the scroll depth is low, it might indicate that users are not finding the content engaging or relevant, prompting you to optimize your content strategy. Along with this, you can create a custom report in Factors plotting how the scroll depth has improved as you update your site content and UX.
Unlock The Full Potential of Your Content Strategy
A data-driven content strategy is fundamental for any SaaS company seeking to maximize lead generation, website optimization, and business growth. A focus on metrics and KPIs paired with a comprehensive content analytics tool like Factors can help you gain deeper insights into your audience's behavior, content performance, and ROI.
Along with the basic metrics, Factors also helps you discover anonymous accounts visiting your website. This data can help you further optimize your account-based marketing efforts giving you a list of customers with the highest potential for conversion.
So, do not let valuable insights slip away—detect opportunities, gauge your success, and set your sights on new heights with Factors by your side.
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