The One Content Marketing Metric To Look At In 2023 (Aside From Revenue Growth)

It's all about engagement!

The most important content marketing metric someone can track is engagement. Keeping in mind that any business’s ultimate goal is sales, engagement is the best proxy metric to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns (especially in a world of zero-click content).

What does engagement look like? For email, that’s replies to the emails you send (not just clicks and opens). For social, that’s comments, sends, saves, remixes, and shares.

Engagement is important because it allows you to measure how relevant and relatable your content is to your audience. I tend to track this using HubSpot, Sprout Social, and Google Analytics (measuring my channel performance). Any MarTech dashboard that charges you money should be able to measure this engagement (and the built-in channel analytics for each platform have this data too).

There's another engagement metric to think about

A metric that’s often underrated by marketers is dwell time (how long they're interacting before their thumb gets itchy). Another way of thinking about dwell time is seeing it as a way to measure how attention-grabbing your content is.

For ads, this is easier to measure, in FB Ads this metric is specifically “3-Second Video Plays / Impressions” and can be found in the Customize Columns section.

For organic social content, I’ve found that it’s too difficult to measure this (which is why I use engagement instead). Yet, marketers can also measure dwell time by using heatmap tools to see if a reader on their website actually scrolls down to the bottom of a page or blog post.?

As with engagement, dwell time is another metric you can use to track how relatable and useful your content is to your intended audience.