Content marketing is, without a doubt, crucial to having your own business. Weekly blog posts drive traffic to your website, but how do you know if your readers are converting into customers? This is where content marketing analytics comes in. Learning to use content marketing tools will allow you to gauge the success of your strategy and tweak it to make it even more successful.

Traffic Metrics

The primary reason for loading your website with content is to direct traffic back to your website. You can determine how much traffic your website receives by using content marketing tools with traffic metrics. Traffic metrics tells you how many readers are on your website, how long they stay on each page and how many pages they click on. The main factors that influence traffic include the number of followers on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, your blog post’s page rank in search engines and the number of URLs that link back to your site. The main advantage of using traffic metrics in your content marketing analytics strategy is it shows you which blog posts attract more readers, ultimately directing more traffic.

Social Engagement and Interaction

It is very important to have a strong social media presence in order to drive traffic back to your website. Whether its tweets about special deals you offer or Facebook posts linking back to a blog post, constantly updating your social media accounts is key. There are analytics tools out there such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and AllMyPlus.com that display how many +1’s, likes and follows your content receives each day. Most of these websites already have built-in metrics that notify you whenever somebody liked your content. Keep track of this, for it is a fool-proof way to determine whether your social media presence is expanding and becoming more productive.

Backlinks on Content

Backlinks are a significant indicator that your content marketing strategy is beneficial to your business. People generally post links to content that they find interesting and informative in some way. If someone links back to your content, you know you’re doing something right. Backlinks are a good way to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy because the more backlinks you have, the more engaging and successful your content is. This also directs more traffic to you website and enhances your search engine ranking.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics measure how many readers are actually converting into customers, which is the ultimate goal. If you see a continuous trend of readers clicking away without buying something or at least browsing your services or products, then it is time to make a change. Conversion metric tools involve abandonment rates as well as goal completion, which will allow you to figure out whether or not leads are converting. From this information, you can swap out the bad content for the good and adjust your website as needed, which is extremely beneficial for your business.

Every business can benefit from content marketing analytics. If you put these content marketing tools to use, you will begin to see more traffic on your blog which leads to happy customers and thriving business.

Google Analytics is by far the best website tracking tool out there. If you haven’t taken the time to really understand how to use it and you are serious about your website traction dive in and take a look at the different variables the data can provide you. One area of Google Analytics that people tend to overlook is the content analytics portion. If you are a power blogger or have a great deal of website content you can see just how effective your efforts are through using this free tool — data like this can be priceless.

You can view everything from time on page to bounce rate and everything in between.

In this Google Analytics YouTube Video they discuss just how important it can be to track all your content.

Google Analytics Video