Content marketing is a fundamental part of any digital marketing strategy. A content marketing dashboard allows you to visualize your performance metrics so you can see what type of content is producing results and where there is opportunity to improve or optimize.
Let’s learn more about the importance of having a content marketing strategy and what are the advantages of having a dashboard to measure its performance.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a pillar of any modern digital marketing team. Content marketing is the process of planning, developing, sharing, and publishing content through various channels, such as a blog, social media post, or podcast episode.
Content marketing varies depending on the stage of the funnel it is created for, the questions it is trying to answer, and the overall content goals and KPIs.
Content marketing is not just a blog post. The most common types of content marketing are:
- Articles
- Podcast episodes or audio interviews
- blog posts
- Long content, such as ebooks or case studies
- Courses (via email or others)
- Email marketing
- Infographics
- Newsletters
- Social media campaigns
- Webinars
- Videos
What is a content marketing dashboard?
A content marketing dashboard is an information tool that allows you to visualize your most important content marketing metrics. you can measure your content efforts, such as performance and engagement, in a dashboard by viewing the metrics that tell that story.
How do you measure the ROI of content marketing?
Measuring the ROI of your content marketing is important. Let’s say you create and distribute great content, like an article or an ebook. How do you know how people interact with it once you send it? If you don’t track your content marketing KPIs, the truth is, you won’t know.
A content marketing dashboard allows you to measure performance metrics, such as organic traffic and search volume; engagement metrics, such as average time on page or bounce rate; and conversion metrics, such as test starts or form completions. There is also the ROI. This is one of the most important metrics to have on your content marketing dashboard.
Content marketing ROI shows you how much revenue you’ve made. ROI answers the question: are we recovering the time and money we have invested in developing and executing the content marketing campaign? If you can see how your efforts translate into revenue, you will have better focus on areas to optimize or improve.
How to create a content marketing dashboard
To build a content marketing dashboard, you need:
- Define your objectives
- Choose your metrics and KPIs
- Choosing a BI Tool to Track Your Content Marketing Metrics
- Explore your metrics and choose your visualizations from different types of charts
- Add your metrics to your content marketing dashboard and start tracking them instantly.
Below, we take a look at some of the top metrics content marketers can include in their dashboard:
1. Average time on page
Do people who find an article on your blog stay on your website after they get what they need? Are you generating real interest in your product or service? Average time spent on page is a good engagement metric to track. It is a clear way to measure whether or not you have piqued someone’s interest.
Track your average time on page over time and see if it correlates with any changes you’ve made to your content marketing strategy.
2. Page views per session
Page views per session will tell you the average number of pages a user views per session. This metric should be used to understand if a user is exploring your content beyond the initial page they landed on. Across all industries, the pages per session benchmark is 5. If your pages per session metric is around or above this benchmark, it’s an indicator that your content is engaging. You can segment this metric by channel or by user type. Both are useful ways to analyze your performance.
3. Bounce rate
Do users come to your website and then leave? Bounce rate is an important metric for content marketers. If you have a high bounce rate, it could be a sign that your content is not engaging and you need to review your content strategy: Is it answering the right questions? Does your message hit key pain points? Is your content optimized?
4. Organic Search Traffic
Organic traffic is another of the metrics that should be on your content marketing dashboard. Focusing on SEO and understanding the terms people search for means you can produce high-quality, valuable content that your users are actively searching for. And, if your content is serving the purpose and providing valuable search results, this metric should also impact your bounce rate and average time on page.
Quality content that answers the questions people are searching for = better performance and engagement metrics.
5. Referral traffic
Outside of organic search, how do people find your content? Is there any channel that surpasses the others? Are you seeing trends in referral traffic sources? For example, if most of your referral traffic comes from Twitter, perhaps you have an untapped audience and should pay attention to this channel to increase your engagement. Looking at your referral traffic will help you optimize your content based on the channel and know where you should focus your time and effort.
6. Backlinks
Backlinks represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. Backlinks are an essential component of SEO, which in turn, should be a critical component of any content marketing strategy. The more backlinks your content has, the more “trust” other websites and readers will have in what you say. Consider backlinks as a way to measure content marketing.
7. Conversion rate
Lastly, let’s look at conversions. If you put the effort into planning, creating, and distributing your content, you probably want users to take action from it. Whether it’s filling out a form, starting a trial, or purchasing a product or service. Tracking the conversion rate of your content at each stage of the funnel is an important way to see where users are engaging with your content before they take the intended action.
Use a content marketing dashboard!
Avoid having to log into Google Analytics or your CRM (like HubSpot) every day to update your content marketing metrics. Now you can create a content marketing dashboard that will automatically update to show real-time information that you can use for decision making.