Content Marketing KPIs: The Comprehensive List

While the old marketing KPIs give way, a new way is emerging in the AI-age. And here’s all you need to catch up.

Content marketing is an ever-shifting maze. A labyrinth of people’s sentiments, business goals, and creativity. Some navigate this maze almost without effort, and many fall short. They create pieces with their heart, soul, and logic, only for them to underperform and not affect the business in any meaningful way.

It’s crushing, to say the least.

But teams can navigate the maze to the best of their capabilities using a simple solution: content marketing KPIs.

While marketing KPIs are often frowned upon for not providing a clear picture, the fault is not with the metrics or how they’re tracked. It’s how they are used in the context of your campaigns- whether these metrics align with your campaigns or are used because they are a market standard is the crux of the matter here.

Let’s start with the basics and move down to the nitty-gritty of the KPIs.

What are Content Marketing KPIs?

Content is abstract. Without directly looking at the person or their behavior after interacting with the content, teams cannot gauge what the audience feels. Marketing teams and designers need to understand what’s working and what isn’t. To capture this feedback, the teams had to create milestones, metrics, and “flags” based on user behavior data and business needs.

In short, content marketing KPIs are quantifiable metrics that measure how effectively your content drives business objectives and audience engagement.

Business Impact of Tracking the Content Marketing KPIs

KPIs provide clarity to teams, especially if the impact they want to track is intangible. This could range from customer satisfaction to brand messaging, with various means of tracing them.

A simple example would be YouTube’s comment and like functions, which provide a clear indicator of audience sentiment and behavior. However, many businesses don’t rely on YouTube for their content.

They use various touchpoints and channels to reach their desired buyer. To meet them where they want to be met and influence them on their terms. To gauge if your buyers are influenced, content marketing KPIs are employed and used to nurture relationships and close deals.

Businesses do this by:

1. Gathering relevant data on the buyers.
2. Allocating budgets and resources towards channels with better performance
3. Justifying cost and proving ROI.

But, honestly, this is easier said than done. Many organizations track the same KPIs as their competition and use them the exact way with little to no variations.

And that’s because they miss the larger context to view the KPIs with. If businesses really want to drive businesses with content, it’s about time they stop using these metrics like it’s 2020.

The complex buyers’ journey demands something more from you- the context in which they are buying and your intended message towards them.

Following hype and trends will only have you chasing vanity metrics- not business deals.

The Framework for Content Marketing KPIs

Caption: Content Marketing KPIs: Fighting for Relevancy

A framework is often considered a plan. A series of steps to reach where you want to go. That’s a very one-dimensional way of looking at it.

A framework is a reference point for you to create a strategy. As Michael C Porter, the father of strategy, says, “Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.”

And any framework should empower you to do just that.

While the KPIs you track won’t change much, let’s think of new ways of questioning them.

Awareness-Stage KPIs (TOFU)

In the TOFU stage, the KPIs can seem very surface-level. They are: –

Impressions and CTR

• We’ve decided to club impressions and CTR together for a few reasons.
• While many impressions are good for reach, are they translating to clicks?
• Of the clicks you are receiving, are they from your intended demographic?
• Based on your campaign, where are these impressions and clicks coming from? E.g., organic or referrals or paid
• In terms of email marketing, instead of impressions, you should track open rates and the CTR for the intended action they’re taking.
• Did the numbers reach your campaign goal? If not, what should have worked and what did not?
• Can you identify the missing piece of the puzzle and retry it?

Share of Voice

• Have conversations around your brand increased?
• Did the impressions, open rates, and CTRs affect the conversations you want to have with your leads/buyers?
• Do you see a positive growth in engagement and perceptions, even by 5-6%?
• Have these positive interactions increased activity on your website and other content formats?

Branded Searches
a) Have your branded searches increased?
b) What percent of those is your intended audience?

Engagement-Stage KPIs (TOFU+MOFU)

While the above KPIs have some semblance of engagement, it’s at this stage that a brand truly starts coming into its own.

Here are a few: –

1. Time on page/Avg Duration or Dwell Time

• Whether your content makes sense or not to the reader depends on the average time.
• However, if you want your page to rank for snippets or AI snippets, users may not read everything but only the answer to their query.
• But if your content wants to educate, inform, and entertain, having a longer dwell time is crucial.
• If not, is it the content that is losing them, or is it not reaching your leads through the correct channels?
• What can you optimize here?

2. Pages per Session

• Internal linking is fascinating. It connects your pages together but also gives your audience more content to consume related to their query. The opportunity is to push them inward.
• It shows if your audience is engaging with multiple pages at once.
• Pages per session let you observe this engagement- is your audience interested in more?
• Based on their searches and navigation, what can you make of their behavior and intent?
• If your average page per session is not satisfactory, can you identify the drop-off point?
• Are the sessions desktop or mobile-based?

3. Social Media Engagement

• Has your engagement in the SERPs affected your social media presence?
• Is your campaign goal to increase social media engagement, or is it a by-product of your positive interactions?
• Conversely, have your social media efforts boosted engagement to your website and other offers?
• Have conversations around your brand increased? And what content has facilitated it?
• A bonus point- can your sales team identify if there are any warm leads in your social engagement? (There should be)

Conversion-Stage KPIS (MOFU+BOFU)

For content marketers eager to prove ROI, this stage has to be the most exciting one. It shows the direct impact of content on sales.

1. Lead Generation

• Lead gen is one of the best KPIs in content marketing- it proves direct ROI.
• However, has your content converted your intended audience, and have they been deemed as leads?
• Are they ready to have conversations with sales, or do they need nurturing?
• What type of content is bringing the most amount of leads, and what is the relevancy of both the content and the leads it’s bringing in?
• What is the ratio of relevant vs irrelevant leads?
• What channel did they come from?

2. Sales and Cost

• Are the sales teams having satisfactory conversations with the leads that are coming in?
• Which channel is proving its ROI, and are there channels whose CAC: ROI ratio is disharmonious?
• Are there sales objections that directly stem from your content? (An excellent sign of engagement. And an opportunity to stand out)
• What percent of leads are coming from the content, and how many of them are converting into paying customers?
• What is the opinion of your sales teams on the lead quality?

3. Advocacy and Propagation

• Is your content creating a community around it, no matter how small?
• Is your audience sharing the content around, and which ones gain traction more than the others?
• Are they referring you and sharing particular content pieces with others?
• Are your pieces where they’re having personal conversations?

Advanced Content Marketing KPIs

Caption: Prometheus Gifts Fire

Content marketing is nothing short of magic- words and visuals on paper that affect readers’ emotions and logic. And these KPIs give you a glimpse into the inner world of the people consuming the content. However, the AI game is changing what content is. If people can have conversations with an encyclopedia that is personalized for them, they will prefer it.

But, human beings are notorious for our ability to do unexpected things- and many have turned to only human written content and information.

Why is that?

It’s our love for exploration.

And future content and its KPIs must account for this innate desire. It’s a desire that compels people to buy- B2B or otherwise.

The good news is you can track these innate desires. There are KPIs that have started to account for this behavioral change in buyers. Here are a few you can build on.

1. User Journey Flow Analysis

• Mapping the macro journey of the user is the easier part. But almost always, a lot of nuance is lost in this view.
• The user journey flow analysis KPI lets you break down the journey and identify molecular changes in the buyers’ journey with your products and offers.
• From identifying drop-off points to discovering common points of interest, this KPI is a mix of many small identification factors.
• With this, you can track whether your buyers are taking the intended action you want at every touchpoint and change your strategy if they aren’t.
• Free analytics tools like GA and Clarity offer exceptional functionality in this case. Similarly, Hotjar is one of the best tools to view and optimize user interactions and flow analysis.

2. User Engagement Pathways

• Similar to journey flow analysis, this KPI tracks and measures a granular approach to engagement
• They track pathways like – discovery, conversion, onboarding, exploration, etc.
• It answers questions like: what users are engaging in and why are they doing it?
• Are there any pathways that need optimization?
• What conversations are your users having about your tools/services while interacting with them? (These conversations can also be behavioral instead of verbal)

3. Content Discovery

• This deals with the question of AI and search.
• Are your content pieces visible to the users where they are searching? E.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s snippets.
• Is your content being discovered in the first place?
• Is your organic traffic sufficient for your specific campaign needs?
• Is outreach helping content discovery and business needs, and can you use it to boost discovery?

3. Intent Drift Tracking

• Intent drift tracking is a cornerstone of modern content marketing. It isn’t an ordinary KPI but a marker of interest.
• Intent tracking observes changes in buying behavior, whether their intent is changing while they are interacting with content online.
• Are they becoming more or less interested in the solutions you offer, and how can you track this change?
• What do you think they have become aware of between now and then?
• What does this mean for your service- is it positive or negative?
• What are the opportunities for you to influence this intent?
• Can you segment a chunk of this audience?

These advanced KPIs are designed to uncover behaviors of your buyers that you can leverage, and they can be tracked in real time.

However, don’t jump in to change your strategy. There are a lot of moving parts that require you to be patient. As important as data is, it is there to validate your intuition, not overhaul it. To track the behavioral change you knew was coming.

Zero-click searches are perhaps the most crucial content KPIs of the AI age.

Content marketing teams have seen a drop in organic traffic.

The reason for this is simple: SERPs and social media websites want users to be on their services for longer durations. And that AI is answering their questions- satisfying a need and providing a relevant answer.

And the statistics are staggering. Let’s look at two stats from SparkToro:
1. In the US, 58.5% of people don’t click on their query. Out of those, 37.1 click on nothing, and 21.4% move on to another query.
2. For the EU, 59.7% end in no clicks. Of which 37.4% do nothing and 22.3% move on to another search.
This shows an important factor- zero-clicks must be accounted for. They will be vital to track and complex to identify.

While tools play catch-up, you will need to actively optimize for AI and search and check whether you’re appearing for queries on these LLMs. On the other hand, LinkedIn, X, and other socials are also trying new things, and that’s killing reach for linked content and company pages.

They want people to stay on the website longer and gain knowledge from native players or thought leaders- individual contributors seem to be lucrative to platforms for some reason.

What are Zero-Clicks and AI searches saying- how do you track them?

People want quick answers in a crowded space. People are really good at one thing- pattern recognition.

And the crowded space has jaded them quickly. Many users are tired of looking at similar content that barely solves their pain points- AI is a quick fix here.

But human beings take time to articulate an idea and come to a conclusion. Let’s look at an example and then break it down to explore how we can track these searches and optimize them.

To research this blog, we did a few things:

• Gain resources by reading blogs and Google Scholar.
• Searching on AI for available data to back things up and summarizing scholarly findings.
• Asking AI for similar sources, which gave us a few links to blogs, websites, and data-study papers.
• However, some of those searches ended as dead links and low-quality content on referenced websites.
• Took a specific approach and used queries like SparkToro research for zero-clicks in LLMs- got results as well as a summary of what it means. Clicked on the article to gain a comprehensive understanding and view.
• Depth created more avenues for creation: asked LLM to pull up a report on how brands rank on LLMs to strengthen understanding and thesis.

This method shows a clear loop for brands. If they want to survive in the zero-click-AI era- they need to provide value for their audience, and this value must be tangible.

To track this, you will need to: –

• Create value-based content
• Check whether you’re ranking for that query, which has to be niche or solve the problem quickly.
• Check various AI search engines and see what you’re ranking for.
• Through GSC, understand if some queries are getting more impressions than clicks yet driving conversations. High impressions and low clicks might not be bad here, especially if you see an increase in abstract concepts like mindshare.

While many organizations observe a dip in traffic, they must understand that value is the driving force behind content marketing and that it is also a KPI.

Valueless and generic content, while effective at ranking in traditional ways, is losing relevancy. AI systems pull value- although some reference to outdated data is still the norm for LLMs- they will be weeded out by audiences who are inquisitive and want hard proof.

The KPIs work only when content provides value.

Without a value-based strategy, the KPIs above will not work. They might drive business on the surface, but sales objections will quickly thwart any hopes of making a business.

Content Marketing and its metrics exist to track if your customer finds you effective and what they want. Those businesses- especially ones in tech and marketing- who don’t want to be replaced by AI have to learn to provide what the user wants in a very unique way.

Fortunately, buyers are more self-aware, and they can be influenced to experiment.

What you need to do is create content that empowers them to do more with less.