You often hear a lot about content marketing ROI, and how difficult it can be to prove. Many compani...

1. The Essential Content Promotion Metrics to Track
You often hear a lot about content marketing ROI, and how difficult it can be to prove. Many
companies struggle with determining how effective their content efforts are. While it can be difficult
to prove ROI for all of your content marketing tactics, it becomes less of a daunting task if you break
it down granularly. A good place to start is your social media content promotion.
There's no shortage of content promotion metrics to track. You have anything from number of
impressions, to average CPA and beyond. To measure your content promotion success, it is
important that you keep the following things in mind:
While the exact content metrics tracked will differ based on your business objectives, the goals of
your campaign, and a variety of other factors, here are a list of the 8 essential metrics you must
track regarding your content promotion efforts.
1. Impressions
Impressions simply describe how many times the content was shown to a user. It is a standard
metric to focus on because it shows if your content is getting the kind of exposure that can elicit
results. It is also useful for future planning and setting benchmarks for metrics to follow it.
If the impressions are low, you'll need to figure out why it's not getting the exposure you expected
relative to the audience size. Is it because of a weak headline or poor image choice? Was it posted at
the wrong time? Or perhaps it was poorly optimized for a specific platform?
Each social media platform has their own ways for tracking impressions. On each of your profiles,
access the analytics function in order to find these metrics.
2. Engagement Rate

2. The engagement rate is the percentage of users who saw the content and then commented on it,
shared it, retweeted, liked or otherwise engaged with it.
This metric speaks volumes to the quality of content you're sharing or promoting. If you are seeing
low engagement, it could be due to low impressions (not enough of the right people seeing it), but it
also could be a result of uninteresting content. If you're getting a good number of impressions, but
little engagement, there is most likely something wrong with your message, headline, image, or even
the timeliness of the post.
In order to make your post more engaging, be sure to follow the best practices for each platform. To
learn more, read our blogs about best practices for Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube,
and Google+.
3. Clicks
Clicks are the total sum of people who have actually clicked on your link or ad. There are many uses
for tracking clicks as part of your content promotion performance. In addition to seeing how many
people actually clicked, it is also used as a base for measuring conversion ratio. Like the rate of
engagement, clicks are also a good indication of whether or not your posts and updates are
promoting the users to explore shared content further.
4. CTR
The CTR, or click-through rate, is the percentage of people who were exposed to your content that
clicked through. CTR is simply a ratio of clicks/impressions. If you were to track clicks only, there is
no clear picture of how your content is performing relative to the number of impressions that
content is getting. With CTR, you can determine the difference between, for example, 50 clicks per
100 impressions vs. 50 clicks per 10,000 impressions. The CTR is thus important because it
measures relative performance, and can indicate issues with your content, message, targeting or
more. This information can help you improve your content promotion effectiveness.
There's no standard CTR to aim for. It will vary based on your industry, the platforms you are using,
and your audience, among other variables. You will need to define a successful CTR for your
business based on your budget, previous campaign performance, and your business goals. Obviously,
the higher the CTR the better, so be sure to keep an eye on this ratio.
5. CPC
The CPC, or cost-per-click, is a very important content marketing metric, particularly because paid
content promotion is such a crucial facet of the marketing mix. If you're doing paid content
promotion, measuring this will help you plan your budget and allocation of your media spend. There
are a number of things that could drive the CPC up or down, including level of competition, audience
size, targeting, and more.
There isn't much you can do to alter the cost for particular keywords as pricing is typically auction
driven, but you do have control over how much each lead, subscriber or new customer is worth to
you. Analyze other marketing initiatives to identify what each lead costs from that specific channel
in order to set a benchmark. Ideally, you would want your spend for clicks to equal or be less than
this number.
6. CPA

3. The CPA, or cost-per-acquisition, helps you determine how much it cost you to acquire a new
subscriber, lead, or customer (this will depend on what you want to define and measure as an
acquisition). Riding the heels of the previous metric, this is a straightforward calculation that you
can keep simple, or make fairly elaborate. For the former option, simply calculate how much each
acquisition cost you by dividing the number of acquisitions against the overall campaign cost. More
complex versions can include other aspects like the cost of production of graphics, content, as well
as the time it took to get the campaign set up and launched.
7. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who go from viewing your landing page to
submitting a form, downloading an offer, requesting a quote, or taking some other desired action
that you have defined. Another crucial metric to track, it creates benchmarks for performance
measurement, future campaign planning and A/B testing. You should always be striving to improve
conversion rates, and therefore this should be an ongoing goal.
8. Total Spend
What did you spend on your content promotion campaign? Did your budget allow you to achieve the
results you expected? How did it perform against other marketing initiative and campaigns? Did it
produce the ROI you aimed for? You'll be able to answer these questions and more once you've run a
campaign or two, and compared it to your other marketing programs.
Conclusion
While these content marketing metrics are great for tracking the success of specific content
promotion campaigns, this isn't all they should be used for. They can also be very helpful in
evaluating the performance of each marketing channel and tracking progress toward your social
media marketing goals. With the right metrics and a good method for tracking them, you can
understand what's working and what isn't, better calculate ROI, and gradually - and continually -
improve your content promotion efforts.
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