The 10 Content Marketing Benchmarks Worth Tracking

One of the beautiful things about Internet marketing is the ability to track the success of your efforts better than ever before. There are dozens of measurables that can be tracked during and after a content marketing strategy is employed. Here are 10 content marketing metrics worth tracking: 

Blog Traffic

Think of your blog as the foundation of your content marketing strategy. It's your company's everyday newspaper that should be regularly driving traffic to call-to-action buttons, landing pages and premium offers to produce new sales leads that are then nurtured by email workflows and salespeople. 

Monthly blog traffic will vary based upon your organization's size and industry, but a reasonable benchmark for beginning and middle-stage content marketing departments would be a monthly traffic increase of 5-8 percent. Your website platform should have a blog traffic measurement tool. If it doesn't, you can purchase HubSpot's marketing software or use Google Analytics' basic service for free.

Click Rates - Email and Social Media 

Click rates (a broad term that can refer to email open rates, email click-through rates, and engagement rates on social media) are some of the most important statistics to track in content marketing, because they're a good indicator of how appealing your social media and email copy is. Here are some benchmarks to aim for:

Email Open Rates: Aim for a 25 percent open rate on emails. For industry-specific open rate benchmarks, click here.

Email Click-Through Rates: Aim for a 4 percent click-through rate. For industry specific click-through rate benchmarks, click here. 

Twitter / Facebook Engagement Rate: Aim for a 3 percent engagement rate on Twitter and Facebook.

When measuring Facebook engagement rate, use post reach, not fans, as your denominator – an important distinction now that Facebook's organic reach is 6 percent for smaller business pages and just 2 percent for business pages with 500K or more fans.

Use Twitter Analytics or Facebook Insights to monitor this data.

Inbound Links

Inbound links are links to your website from other websites. Not only do inbound links represent a third-party endorsement, they are a key factor in determining your page's rank on search engines like Google.

The number of inbound links you earn is dependent on many variables, such as frequency of content distribution, content form (video, blogs, infographics, eBooks, etc.) and quality of content. Begin tracking them now and watch them grow as you produce and distribute more quality content in a variety of forms. 

Inbound links can be measured using marketing software such as HubSpot.

Social Media Audience

To benchmark a specific amount or growth rate of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, etc. would be a flawed strategy. Consider that your social media audience should always be on the rise. If growth happens quickly, great. If not, continue to create remarkable content that you distribute as regularly as possible.

Tools such as Track Social, and HootSuite are able to track the growth of your social media audiences.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is another metric that is difficult to properly benchmark, as it depends on the size and industry of the organization. But consider that if your organic search traffic is on the rise, your organization is producing quality content with accurate, popular search terms that are:

a. Earning repeat visitors who navigate to your page via search engines. 

OR (more likely)

b. The content you're creating (and the titles/headers that accompany that content) are resonating with searchers from all-around the Internet community that are interested in the space in which you operate.

HubSpot can also be used to track organic search traffic.

Indexed Pages

The number of indexed pages is the number of webpages your organization has that have been indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. For small-to-mid sized organizations, this number is typically a representation of how often your organization blogs. To give you a general sense, we are a 10 person organization that is ten years old and blogs 3-4 times weekly. We have 1,800+ indexed pages. 

HubSpot and Self SEO are two tools that measure indexed pages.

Keyword Ranks

Keyword ranks are important to marketing professionals and business owners alike – and for good reason. If you're a pizza delivery company in Atlanta, you want to show up on page one of Google when searchers type in "pizza delivery atlanta." Keyword ranks are especially important for low-involvement purchases and niche industries. 

To track your keyword ranks, visit serps.com, or just type your keyword(s) into a Google search and see where your organization ranks! To sufficiently track the progress of your keyword ranks regularly, you'll need more advanced marketing software such as HubSpot.

Employee To Guest Blog Post Rate

Employee to guest blog post ratio is a datum that is not measurable by any marketing software. For every 10 blog posts your company publishes, it should publish at least one guest blog post. This metric is highly important for earning inbound links, leveraging new audiences, providing fresh voices, and establishing credibility. It should be monitored regularly by your in-house team. To learn more about the importance of guest blogging, click here.

Traffic To Lead Rate

Traffic to lead rate measures the percentage of visitors who become a lead by filling out a form on your website. A good traffic to lead rate is 4 percent, and is dependent on many variables such as quality of content, call-to-action button location, form length, etc.

For more information, read "10 Ways To Improve Conversion Rates," or "How We Increased Conversions on Our Blog Posts by 78%."

Marketing software like HubSpot can help track your website's traffic to lead rate.

Lead To Customer Rate

Lead to customer rate will depend on a variety of things including:

• Industry
• Price of your product or service
• Level of communication between the marketing and sales departments
• The quantity and quality of lead nurturing emails after forms are completed

Tracking the success of all your marketing teams' efforts can be an exhaustive process. Use this list to keep up with the most vital content marketing metrics to help motivate your content production team and make proving ROI much, much easier.