Underrated Content Marketing KPIs for New eCommerce Stores

Content marketing covers a wide variety of goals for an organization. You can raise brand awareness, connect with prospects, and direct leads to the point of sale. Content marketing Key Point Indicators (KPIs) let you know if you are inching closer to these goals.

As content serves an assortment of purposes in an organisation, there are many KPIs you need to track. The sheer number and variety of KPIs can be overwhelming sometimes. it often becomes difficult for businesses to determine which metrics are most important.

Most common content marketing metrics

Content marketers often try to evaluate all the popular KPIs. but they end up reporting on indicators that have no bearing on revenue. This happens because they fall prey to analysis paralysis. The confusion leaves them with the most popular ones that might not resonate with their strategy’s end goal.

How to Pick the Best KPIs?

There is no magic formula to determine which KPIs to track to forecast campaign success. It is important to have a clear understanding of the goals you want to achieve from your campaign. They can help track meaningful KPIs.

Once you’ve established distinct marketing objectives, you can link them to appropriate KPIs. You can narrow down the aim that you want to achieve and keep track of the corresponding indicators. Some of the common goals of a content marketing campaign are listed below.

Increasing Brand Awareness

You should focus on producing content that allows you to reach and engage a large audience. This means that you need to make your articles both relevant and entertaining. such pieces encourage people and make them want to read and share. Some common KPIs that help you measure these goals include:

1. page views
2. social shares and engagement
3. inbound links

Generating Meaningful Leads

One of the most important company objectives is lead generation. You should keep track of whether your content is generating high-quality leads. A few interesting KPIs that can help you do that include:

1. click-through rates
2. cost per lead

Driving More Sales

While brand exposure and lead generation are vital objectives, your content should be able to increase sales as well. After all, you want to turn your leads into clients and earn money for your company, right? Measuring KPIs like the conversion rate can help you achieve this goal through your content marketing campaign.

Let’s dive right into it and discuss some of the underrated KPIs. These are quite important in gauging the success of your content marketing campaigns yet remain underrated.

1. Unique Visits

Let’s kick off with a basic KPI that many eCommerce stores tend to forget about — unique page visits. When someone visits your website at least once during the specified time period, they count as a unique page visitor. These numbers provide an estimate of how many people your website actually reaches.

It is quite easy to identify the numbers. Google Analytics assigns unique users identity spaces that can be recognized by the browser. You can find the exact values under the Audience ? Overview ? New users tab in your Analytics dashboard.

Following these stats closely and comparing the values over time can show you whether your eCommerce store is easily discoverable by new visitors or if the traffic is simply coming from returning users. This is helpful to gauge the success of the content of your new campaigns or ads.

2. Pageviews

Pageviews are as important as unique visits. These are the raw counts of the number of times a page on your eCommerce website has been visited. An example can include visiting a specific blog you have tweeted about or clicking on a product page listed on Google.

Any instance of your page being loaded or even reloaded is counted as a page view in Google’s eyes. You can easily differentiate the website visits from the page views. For this, you need to understand that every time a user visits your website it flips a counter for the visit. But during that visit, if they browse five different content pages the counter for page views turns five times.

3. Scroll Depth

Scroll depth is the next KPI that does not receive the credit where it’s due. You can easily identify the amount of content your audience consumes by tracking where on the page they stop scrolling. This measure shows how thorough your consumer is and is mainly an indication of two factors. 

First is the readability of the content that you publish. The ease of reading of the content is directly correlated to how farther they scroll through the page. Second, whether the relatability quotient is able to pique your target audience’s interest like explaining how your eCommerce order fullfilment process works. This can encourage them to scroll the entire page because they are getting insights that make your business relatable. You can identify the ideal length of your content through the scroll depth as well.

You can keep a check on this KPI by installing the Scroll Depth Google Analytics plugin. It can track the percentage and pixel depth where the audience stops. Then compare this amongst devices with varying heights like smartphones and tablets. In addition to that, keep a check on your eCommerce website’s mobile responsiveness. This is because scrolling through your content is easier for the users when the UI is frictionless.

4. Time on Page

Time on-page is a vital performance metric that is similar to scroll depth in that it reveals how long users spend reading your content on average. This KPI, on the other hand, is measured in seconds rather than pixels.

If you’re developing a new content strategy for your blog, one of your objectives can be to boost the average time spent on new blog entries. The baseline assumption is that the longer someone stays on your page, the more engaged they are with your material, becoming a testament to the quality and accuracy of your content.

It’s essential to remember, though, that the amount of time spent is proportional to the length of the content. It is important to be mindful about measuring time spent on the page. A lengthy guide or newsletter will most likely have a longer time on page than a short blog. However, 50% of people may read the entire post against only 10% who read your entire guide.

5. Click Heatmaps

If you wish to know more about how your content should be placed on your website you should look into heatmaps. Click heatmaps are the perceptible depiction that reflects where the visitors are clicking. The colours in the heatmap speak louder than any data and show the areas that your customers are inclined to see or interact with first.

This information can help you determine whether visitors are interested in clicking on your CTAs or other buttons that allow them to complete the desired activity. It can also show you whether non-clickable things are distracting them. There are a few pre-established clicking patterns known to the marketers. For example, the F and Z shaped patterns that come naturally for most users.

You can optimize your content marketing strategy and tweak different types of content after the analysis of heatmaps. A/B test the placement of CTAs in your blog posts, or the designs on your landing or home pages to suit your audience’s responses.

1. Open and Click-Through Rates

These are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for tracking conversions and engagement in email marketing campaigns. Keeping a check on the click-through rate of your website content can help you grasp how effective your content is when it comes to lead generation.

The content of your website extends to all owned channels, including email. You’re squandering one of your rare opportunities to talk directly into a customer’s ear if you don’t define KPIs for your email marketing campaigns.

If you want to motivate users to click through to your articles and videos, you should include a clear call-to-action (CTA) at the end of every post. A compelling CTA can help you generate leads by letting the user:

1. visit a specific web page
2. contact you, downloading your gated resource
3. or taking any other action

2. Likes, Shares and Comments

One of the best barometers for assessing the performance of your material is social media. The higher the number of likes and shares on a piece of content, the better it performs in terms of engagement, which has an impact on your reputation.

Many things have an impact on social media. Promote different content pieces with the same amount of money to lookalike audiences at the same time of day if you want to measure the impact of your content solely on the merits of the content. If a piece succeeds, devote the remainder of your promotional budget to it. Then, similar to a successful article, develop more material.

If you produce a blog piece that resonates with readers, they’ll typically comment on it. You may learn what subjects resonate with users and inspire conversations by tracking this engagement KPI. It’s also crucial to engage with users in the comments area in the most natural and genuine manner. This engagement increases the value of comments as a KPI and helps to promote brand loyalty.

3. Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important content marketing KPIs and are often the most chased after for many writers. They’re also a good indicator of who respects or enjoys your content enough to promote it to others.

Backlinks are amongst Google’s top three ranking factors. It’s a wonderful statistic for determining the quality of your content because more backlinks to a piece of content indicate to Google that the content is valuable to users and is well received by your audience.

The more the number of such links on a page, the more organic traffic it obtains from Google. Consider the internet as a three-dimensional spider’s web, with each website representing the intersection of multiple single nets. The stronger a given weave is, the more nets overlap.

Backlinks are those networks. You’re providing engaging and quality content if you have a lot of links. These “votes” are also one of the most important variables in SEO and website ranking.

Every link, as SEOs often say, is a vote. Your readers are interested, and your reputation grows in the eyes of both readers and Google’s ranking algorithm when you acquire unsolicited backlinks from respected sites.

Summing up

These content marketing KPIs should not be the cemented parameters for determining the success of your content marketing strategy.  Campaigns and initiatives are curated for meeting specific goals and different objectives mean varying parameters for success. Etch out the goal for your campaign to understand the metric you need to track. 

If your strategy is aimed towards attracting new clients you should track unique page visits to know if it is working and if your goal is to increase the engagement, tracking time spent on page and bounce rate seems to be the perfect KPIs for your online store. Let’s chat in the comments about your go-to content marketing KPIs.