“What gets measured gets managed.” Those often-quoted words of renowned business consultant Peter Drucker inspired the data-driven culture most businesses and marketers live by today. Content marketing metrics can provide a wealth of knowledge about the health of your website, content program and even your business as a whole.

But with seemingly limitless available data, it can be challenging to identify the metrics that matter. Here’s how to turn the data firehose down to a steady stream of the most useful metrics and extract actionable analytics from them.

Identify Your Marketing Goals

You might have one or several marketing goals, and they may evolve as you learn from the data you gather. Pinpoint and prioritize what you want to achieve with your marketing in an actionable list. It might look something like this:

• Increase awareness of and engagement with your brand.
• Identify your audience segments and understand their needs.
• Build a wider following.
• Drive your audience to an action (such as making a purchase, becoming a member or making an appointment).

Revisit this list regularly. Your objectives may, and should, change over time. As new services or limited-time offerings arise, you’ll create short-term goals that come on and off your list.

Choose Metrics That Align with Your Marketing Goals

Not all metrics are relevant to your goals. To measure your progress, focus on data points directly related to your top goals, and look at all channels. Consider the following goals and metrics that may support them:

Goal 1: Increase audience engagement

• Metric 1: E-newsletter open rates
• Metric 2: Bounce rate
• Metric 3: Average time spent on your webpages
• Metric 4: Session length
• Metric 5: Social media engagement rate

Goal 2: Grow your audience

• Metric 1: Site visits
• Metric 2: Traffic source(s)
• Metric 3: Newsletter subscriptions
• Metric 4: Social media followers

Goal 3: Boost conversion rates

• Metric 1: CTA clicks
• Metric 2: Key page traffic (e.g., pages with conversion opportunities)

Distill Insights from Your Data to Answer Key Questions

Once you have mechanisms set up to capture data on your chosen metrics, you need to pull insight from the results. Analyzing your metrics produces analytics. These insights can help answer questions like:

• Is your content responsive across devices, especially mobile?
• How does your site rank in search results, especially your core offerings?
• Can visitors easily find what they’re looking for once they get to your site?
• Are your pages taking too long to load?
• Is your target audience seeing your social posts?
• Are your email lists clean?

Finally, act on what you find. Data is a powerful tool. Use it correctly, and you’re on your way to a healthier content program.

Ready to put your data to work, fill out the form below to download The Ultimate Guide to Reverse Publishing and learn how to leverage digital content metrics to optimize your print marketing.