Content Marketing KPIs: A List of best Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in content marketing

Note: This article is part of the collection titled content marketing in less than 300 steps.

Anything measured can be improved. All the other things are subject to personal judgment and human errors.

Therefore, every content marketer has to specify his(her) own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

We can not determine the KPIs in the vacuum, and we shall choose them based on our goals:

• Whether do you look for brand awareness or more traffic?
• Whether do you look for thought leadership or just more readership
• Whether would you prefer to generate sales leads or to convert leads into customers?
• Whether would you like to call the audience to start their journey with you or just remind them the rewarding journey they had before?

I have a plan to prepare a comprehensive list of Content Marketing KIPs with the description of each one and some comments about their relevance to your mission and the way in which you can improve them.

This is the very first short draft of my compiled list and will complete it in the next days:

Reach

• Unique Visits
  • Branded Visits vs. Non-Branded Visits
• Geography
• Mobile Readership
• Total number of emails on our mailing list

Consumption

• Total Pageviews
• Total Downloads
• Total Video Views
• Total Opened Emails

Engagement

• Passive
  • In-Page
    • Bounce Rate
    • Time Spent
    • Heat Map
    • Click Pattern
  • On-Site
    • PageViews
    • Bounce Rate

• Active
  • Comments
  • Social Sharing
    • Number of shares
    • Contribution of each sharing platform
  • Social Mentions
  • Email Forwards
  • Inbound Links
  • Referring Domains
    • Traffic per referrer
    • Time on site for each referring domain
    • Conversion rate for each referrer
  • Number of Fans

Conversion

• Primary Conversion vs. Secondary Conversion
• Primary Conversion Metrics
  • Sales
• Secondary Conversion Metrics
  • Form Fills
  • Email Subscriptions
  • Following Social Profiles

Competitive Indicators

• SEO
  • Keyword Position on SERPs
  • Percentage of Organic Traffic
• Share of Audience

Financial Indicators

• Daily / Weekly / Monthly Revenue
• Revenue Per Visit
• Revenue per organic click
• Revenue per paid click