You’ve heard that content marketing can be a boon for your business, but you don’t have to take our word for it. Not when you have a full range of analytical tools at your disposal that offer clear and precise insights into how every piece of content you produce is helping your bottom line.

Using tools such as Google Analytics and features offered by your Content Management System (CMS) and social media, you can get a clear picture of how content marketing helps SEO, generates leads and drives sales.

Why are these insights important?

Analysing the impact of all the marketing content you put out, from blogs to videos and podcasts, will reveal what type of content is working for you and what isn’t.

Don’t forget that content marketing is all about helping you achieve your business goals. Finding out which content is most successful enables you to focus your marketing strategy on what works, producing more valuable content and avoiding wasting time and money on less successful content.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, that’s the best place to start to gain insights about how content marketing is working for you. But it shouldn’t be the only tool you use.

What are the most important metrics?

Analytical tools let you measure your content’s success from so many different angles, it can be overwhelming at first. Not all of these metrics are equally important however, and narrowing your focus to what is important will give you a clearer picture of how your content is performing where it matters.

These essential metrics can be broken down into four categories, answering the questions:

• who is consuming your content?
• who is sharing your content?
• how does content marketing generate leads?
• how does content marketing drive sales?

1. Consumption metrics

These are the simplest metrics to measure, because it usually comes down to a number – how many people clicked on your blog post, watched your video or downloaded your file.

If you are publishing content to your own site, your CMS will inform you how many people viewed each piece of content. Many popular CMS platforms like WordPress also provide a more detailed breakdown of your audience, such as their location and the search terms that brought them to your site.

If you are publishing content to other sites, these often provide tools that can give you similarly detailed information on who is consuming your content, like YouTube Analytics for videos and Slideshare and Scribd for documents.

2. Sharing metrics

Measuring the success of content marketing doesn’t end at counting page views. You also need to know if people are sharing your content, as this will help it to reach a much wider audience and bring more traffic to your site.

Google Analytics is still the best tool for monitoring how your content is performing in the wider world, but you can gain more specific insights into the behaviour of your users by signing up to the social media sites where they are most likely to share your content.

If you’re not sure where your content is being shared, you can track inbound links through your CMS to find out how people are arriving at your site. If you’re new to social media, see our guide to Australia’s most popular social media sites for ideas where to focus your attention.

All the major social media platforms have tools that allow you to see how many times your content has been Liked, Retweeted, Pinned or +1’d, and you can encourage users to share your content by adding these social buttons wherever it’s published.

Of course, when it comes to encouraging people to share your content, the most important thing is to make sure you’re producing quality content that people will actually want to share.

3. Lead generation metrics

Content marketing isn’t a popularity contest, and it doesn’t matter how often your content is being shared and consumed if it doesn’t produce leads for your business.

Your CMS should include lead generation metrics that let you see how many people took further action after consuming your content, such as completing a web form, signing up to your newsletter, downloading an eBook, leaving a comment, subscribing to updates and other trackable activities. Google Analytics can provide further insights into less obvious ways your users’ behaviour can lead to conversion.

Comparing the conversion rates of your content marketing to your overall conversion rate will make it clear which types of content are the most successful and which are not performing.

4. Sales metrics

Finally, metrics can also tell you how content marketing is driving sales and making you money. Your ecommerce platform should make it simple to track the origin of online sales, and your CMS could also reveal what content users consumed before completing offline sales.

An effective way to trace sales back to individual content pieces is to include a unique Call to Action (CTA) and URL for each piece you publish. If you want to know whether more of your sales come from new or existing customers, you can offer your existing customer base exclusive or first access to content and monitor how it performs compared to public content.

Is content marketing helping you achieve your business goals?

Success is relative, and even if you are seeing leads and sales as a result of content marketing, you can evaluate whether this strategy is achieving the level of success you need by measuring its ROI.

This will tell you whether the investment you’re making to produce regular content is delivering as you hoped, or if your content marketing strategy needs an overhaul to help you reach a wider audience and convert more customers.

Read our crash course in content marketing to find out how to write winning content that will benefit your bottom line.