You produce and publish content for your brand like a champ, but how do you know if it’s effective? Well, you won’t unless you measure it. But keeping up with lots of data points from an ever-growing number of data sources can be cumbersome. When you have everything centralized in a content marketing metrics dashboard, it enables you to have access to real-time data and make smarter marketing decisions.
In building the ideal content marketing metrics dashboard, there are many considerations on what to include. Let’s dive in and find out what you should include to get a full picture.
What Is a Content Marketing Metrics Dashboard?
Just like you have dashboards to measure and monitor other marketing initiatives, you’ll need one for your content marketing as well. The goal of any metrics dashboard is to convey the most relevant information in one place so it’s easy to understand. When you can see what’s going on with your content, you’ll be better equipped to make smart decisions and take action to refine your content strategy and execution plan as needed.
But how do you build the ideal content marketing metrics dashboard that informs your future plan and proves the ROI of your past content marketing efforts? Content analytics help you tweak your content strategy and turn data into meaningful insights. And, your dashboard needs to be accessible for your team and your C-suite.
Developing a Content Marketing Metrics Dashboard for Your C-Suite
While your C-suite won’t look at your dashboard as often as your content team, it’s a good idea to create one just for them that aligns with business objectives. This way, they always have a view of the impact your content marketing efforts are making.
You start with your business objectives, which should be tied directly to your content marketing goals. When your C-suite gets a glimpse of activities and the traffic created, they should be able to easily understand if you’re hitting the mark. Being able to share with them on a consistent basis provides more proof that content marketing is the way to grow and sustain your business.
Which Content Marketing Metrics Matter?
There are many different content marketing metrics. They all have value and depending on what you are trying to accomplish, you’ll want to include some or all of these:
Lead quality
With well-developed content, you should be attracting the right audience, but you need to make sure. You can measure lead quality in several ways, most often by setting up goals in Google Analytics. Those goals may include things like downloading a gated asset, visitors completing the contact form, or whether or not users are navigating to your core product/service pages.
Web traffic
The traffic you generate to your site is the foundation of successful content marketing. Without traffic, there are no conversions. You not only want to look at the amount of traffic you are receiving but also what are the most visited pages and from where the traffic is coming. This will tell you how you are attracting visitors and what they most want to consume.
Engagement on the site
Now that visitors are on your site, how long do they stick around? You’ll want to look at the length of sessions by users, the number of pages they visit per session, as well as your bounce rate. If you see that your bounce rate is high, this could be an indication that your content isn’t interesting to your audience.
Social Media ROI
In addition to onsite engagement, you need to measure whether or not your social media efforts are translating to website traffic. Social media is one of your main areas of content distribution. When others like your content, they’ll engage with it, share it and comment on it.
The more activity you have like this, the broader your audience becomes. You’ll want to be able to see these metrics in your dashboard so you need to be able to build one that can aggregate multiple sources of data.
SEO
Another component to measure is how well your content ranks in search. The higher your ranking, the more likely people are to click on it, creating more traffic and more potential leads. For these metrics, measure things like how well your content ranks for target keywords, your domain authority, and the number of inbound links.
How Do Content Metrics Relate to a Real Dollar Value?
For your dashboard to be the tool you need it to be, it has to express metrics that relate to actual revenue. With the metrics you assemble above, you should be able to correlate them to actual sales with key conversion activities such as:
- Downloads of gated content
- Conversions via contact forms, free trials or demo requests
- Customer acquisition costs
- Customer lifetime value
- A contact’s process through the sales funnel
Building the Content Marketing Metrics Dashboard
To build your perfect content marketing metrics dashboard, you need to start with a content marketing software platform that enables you to construct custom dashboards. This will allow you to pull multiple streams of data into one place. It provides you with a real-time story of how your content is performing.
It should alleviate the manual frustrations you may currently be facing like aggregating data on your own or a lack of accessibility to metrics. You should also be able to share this with your C-suite and other stakeholders.
Your dashboard should be easy to assemble as well, offering you drag and drop features and simple ways to connect to the other systems you use like Google Analytics, CRMs, marketing automation platforms, social media, Google Ads, and more.
Ultimately, you should be able to handpick the metrics you want to see, as defined above, so that you know what to do next with your content marketing plan. You should immediately be able to know from your dashboard:
- Current content that’s performing and meeting your goals
- What content has the most traffic and why
- What content is losing traffic and why
- Underutilized topics that have the potential for new content opportunities
- How are you stacking up against your competition?
Your Ideal Dashboard Is Here
With the DivvyHQ content analytics features, we can help you build custom dashboards that can connect with over 150 different sources. The software is designed to make it easy to create dashboards, share them, and interpret them. Want to see how easy it is? Sign up for a quick demo today or watch our overview video on content analytics.