Keeping tabs on how your content is performing with various audiences is vital in determining which strategies work and which ones do not. It also helps give you insight into what types of topics and content your audience is more receptive to than others, which is necessary for determining how best to create content that will be shared, liked, retweeted and emailed. Many people think of a few basic metrics that are standard bearers of success, such as revenue, CPC, the number of leads generated, and the number of overall page visits. These are extremely important metrics to consider, and should never be forgotten. There are other metrics, however, that can be evaluated to determine with more nuance just how successful your efforts are at any given moment. Continue reading to find out more about these little-known content marketing metrics.

Social Trajectory of Your Website

Certainly you already have social sharing options enabled for all of your blog posts and pages. One key area to consider that many fail to evaluate regularly is your content’s social trajectory. You can evaluate how many likes, shares, re-tweets, and other forms of social engagement have occurred in order to determine just how well and where your content is heading in terms of popularity. This will help you determine which pieces of content are best-suited for social media, and which pieces of content should probably not be replicated in the future. You can use XML site maps or a website URL compiler tool to quickly start pinging links to pages on your site in order to gather this vital information.

Social Trajectory of Off-site Material

If you have a successful and thorough content strategy, then you certainly will have forms of content spread across social media and other websites. Between YouTube videos, SlideShares and Facebook profiles, you need to be acutely aware of how each of these elements is serving up your content. Please, take the time to hunt down all of the URLs belonging to your off-site content, and perform regular checks on it to see whether each piece of content is improving or falling behind. One excellent way to track this type of metric is through an RSS feed; you can find plenty of browser add-ons and standalone services that will help you organize these links and keep a constant eye on their performances.

Overall Speed

Last but not least, how fast do each of your pages load? It is very important to be aware of this, as it can affect everything from PPC costs, number of leads generated, amount of traffic, shares and even SEO. In regards to the last item, your position in SERPs on Google is directly related to the speed of a given page, so be sure to keep an eye on your website’s speed at regular intervals. Slow hosting providers and poor optimization can impact your ability when it comes to pinging links, so we recommend using a tool such as Google Insights for Search or Google Analytics to always be in the know.