1. What’s Your Content’s Impact?

Firstly, you need to understand the reach of your content, how it is being accessed and how potential leads are engaging with it. This includes:

Unique Visitors

This tracks the number of individual users who have viewed your content over a set period of time. Each user’s visit is only counted once - no returning visitors are included. It’s a great way to see whether your content’s audience is actually growing or not.
Remember - the value of these unique visits will depend on the stage a customer is in your pipeline. For example, the number of unique visits to one of your case studies from end-of-the-pipeline users will stand a higher conversion chance compared to the number of unique visits to an introductory brochure at the start of your sales funnel.

Traffic Source

If you’re trying to grow your pipeline, you’ll need more leads going into it. But to do this, you need to know which traffic sources are driving users to your website in the first place. How many of your leads coming from social media channels or PPC campaigns? Have users found your blog via organic traffic?
Segmenting your website’s traffic by the different sources will enable you to set more specific and effective key performance indicators (KPIs) for the types of content you’re producing. And if you have channels that are outperforming others, you could even create content to complement these channels specifically.

Unique Shares & Sends

Aside from being useful for measuring a potential customer’s engagement, unique shares are a useful asset for seeing which content is most shared and valued by your sales reps.
If there’s a particular eBook that all your reps share to prospects frequently, it’s clear they find it a big help in closing a sale. However, if there’s an introductory video they’re not sharing with prospects, chances are it’s proving to be unhelpful for your sales team.
You can also use this metric to encourage your sales team to increase the amount of content they share to relevant customers.

2. Are People Engaging with Your Content?

Knowing whether your audience is engaging with your content is key to improving how it performs. In fact, 73% of B2B business have listed creating more engaging content as their top priority.
Generally speaking, the more engaging your content is, the better it’ll perform. These are the metrics you’ll need to track to ensure your content is actually engaging:

Time on Page

This metric measures the average time a user spends on a particular piece of content. If you notice these numbers are low, it means users are visiting your content - probably based on its headline - but they’re not finding the content engaging.
However, it’s worth noting there’s no strict amount of time you can measure here. How long it takes for your prospects to read the content will entirely depend on its subject and format.
For example, if you have a 3,000-word blog post that’s got an average time of less than a minute, your prospects are not reading it.

To gain actionable insights from this metric, figure out the average time spend on each of your content pages. You can then determine which pieces of content your prospects have spent the most and least time on. What do the high engagement posts have in common? What practices can you learn from them?
You’ll also want to track the “length watched” for any video content (e.g. webinars) you send throughout the customer journey. This way, you can track the average amount of time a viewer watches your video before leaving it.
Or, if you’re sending eBooks and brochures, use “average session duration” to view how many pages your prospects browse on your website before they contact you or drop off.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate determines how useful your content is by measuring the percentage of users who navigate away from your website after viewing only one page.
For example, if a potential customer read an eBook on your site then decided to navigate through your service pages or contact you, your content obviously matched what they’re looking for. But if they leave your website after reading the content, it probably wasn’t helpful to them.
You can separate bounce rate into individual challenges, pages and content pieces to drill down your data further.

3. What Content is Working?

Volume-based metrics might indicate how many users are viewing your content, but they don’t actually show how useful your content is to prospects. Yes, unique sends might measure how helpful your content is to your sales reps, but this isn’t necessarily the content your customers like best.

Repeat Visits

If you’ve got a prospect who’s regularly visiting a specific piece of content, it’s likely they’re interested in what you’re offering. This is a useful metric for leads who are further down in the pipeline, as your sales reps can follow up with them to act quickly and close the sale.

Number of Shares

Normally, when we talk about shares, engagement is typically measured through the number of likes and comments you receive. But just because someone’s liked a piece of your content, doesn’t mean they’ve clicked through to read it. You need to focus on shares.
When a piece of content (e.g. blog post or whitepaper) has been shared by a prospect, this is a very good indicator that it’s been useful to them. So useful that they’ve been encouraged to share it with their own audience.
Always include share functionalities on your content webpages to encourage your prospects to do so.  Be sure to monitor which social media posts receive the most shares per platform.
And with effective sales enablement software from suppliers such as Data Dwell, your sales reps can track if any content sent directly to leads has been shared with others in their business.

4. Have You Checked Demographics? 

To fully understand how your content is performing in your pipeline, you’ll need to drill down into your audience’s demographics. You can segment your content by:

• Age
• Job Title
• Location
• Sector

Using this data, you can identify the audiences that’ll be more or less receptive to certain types of content. For example, if you have a marketing strategy eBook that’s had particularly low engagement with CFOs, it’s probably because it’s more suited to marketing managers or CMOs.
Or, you might have to look into the narrative and how top-level the content should be depending on your audience.

5. How’s Your Content Performing in Your Funnel?

Last but certainly not least, you’ll need to measure how effective your content is at driving conversions and, ultimately, closing sales.

Click-through Rates

This measures the percentage of users who have clicked on a link within a piece of content to move onto the next stage of their journey.
In general, a click through rate of anything above 3% indicates that users have been highly engaged with your content and wanted to know more.

Comments/Queries

Although a much more qualitative metric than others, looking at the amount of comments proves that prospects were engaged enough to express their thoughts and feelings on your content.            
For example, if you’ve got a blog post that’s received positive comments, you’ll know it’s done its job. But if you have one where readers have left negative feedback or contacted your sales reps for further clarity, this could suggest your content hasn’t quite matched your audience’s needs and requires improvement.

Conversions

Conversions is the ultimate metric for determining whether a piece of content has helped a prospect in your pipeline turn into a sale.
The more conversions you have, the better success rate your content has had. But if you have a piece of content in the final stage of your pipeline that hasn’t achieved a conversion, you’ll know that it’s underperformed.
Of course, simply calculating your total conversions isn’t enough. Be sure to measure their quality when filtering leads through the pipeline.
Set up Goal Completions in Google Analytics to measure to what extent your content has met the needs of your target audience. You can use reverse-goal path in Google Analytics to see which pages a prospect visited before they converted.

Content marketing might be a go-to strategy for businesses nowadays, but this doesn’t mean they’re effectively measuring their success. By tracking the right metrics, you’ll know how successful your content is throughout your pipeline and provide your sales team with the resources needed to convert leads into customers