Before determining how to measure your content marketing strategy success rates, we need to clarify what that means. As a small business owner, you’ve already launched a website for your company, as well as a presence on social media. You’ve written or paid a professional to write engaging webpages, and your company’s website offers a new, engaging blog post to read for your visitors. Moreover, you post regularly on X.com, Facebook, or LinkedIn, engaging with others in your field.
These efforts are part of your content marketing strategy for growing your small online business. You continue to do them because you’ve seen progress in your business endeavors. More people ask about your product now; more are ordering from your small business, while your website is becoming more popular by the week.
In the worst-case scenario, with all your content marketing efforts, lead generation has decreased and sales have diminished. However, whether your online business is thriving or not, a challenging question for you as a small online business owner may loom in your mind. What does success in content marketing mean? How do you measure your success in content marketing?
If decreases in visits, leads, and sales are a clear indication of failure, what we can say about the first scenario is not clear. Yes, more people are talking about your business, but is talking enough? Even though this talk about your small business must be beneficial, you may wonder if enough people are discussing it. The same can be said for sales. Having more sales means more revenue for your online business, but is the generated revenue enough? Maybe you’ve heard that your competitors have increased their sales even more.
How can you measure content marketing success if you aren’t sure what it means?
The Secret of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy: Start with a Goal
We want to tell you that there is no clear, objective, one-size-fits-all definition of success in content marketing. What you consider a successful content marketing campaign may be interpreted as time wasted by another small business owner. If your goal is to gain more clients for your small online business through content marketing, but all that you achieve is more visitors on your blog, then you need to change something.
Your goals determine whether your content marketing efforts are successful or not.
What do you want to achieve through your content marketing efforts? Where do you see them taking your company in the future? Maybe you wish for your company to become more popular. That’s okay. If you just launched your company and want people to hear about it, that is a reasonable goal for the first year. On the other hand, if you’ve been running it for at least five years, you are now thinking seriously about increasing revenue in the sixth year.
In essence, different companies have different goals, depending on age, size, and goals. How does content marketing help? Here is what small business owners often seek to achieve through their content marketing strategy.
> Brand awareness
>Traffic growth
> Engagement
> Lead generation
> Sales enablement
> SEO visibility
> Building authority
Tip! It’s best to focus on one main goal. For example, you might have just launched your company’s website. In this case, your focus can be brand awareness. In this case, you should focus your efforts on creating more brand awareness for your company. From this, you will build better authority for your brand, grow your traffic, and increase SEO visibility. But you need to focus just on brand awareness in the beginning.
Do you have a goal? What do you want to achieve through your content marketing efforts? Once you have answers to such questions, you can start measuring your success. If you’ve been writing blog articles and posting on social media, you already have an active content marketing strategy. The question that remains: Is your content marketing strategy successful?
Next, you will get to see some of the most important metrics to consider according to these goals listed above.
Brand Awareness—The Foundation of Your Content Marketing Strategy
Brand awareness is the foundation of content marketing success. If people don’t know you exist, they can’t read your content, join your email list, or hire you. The metrics that we will present here show how far your message is spreading and whether more people are becoming familiar with your brand.
The first metrics are those of impressions and reach. By impressions, you need to understand how many times your content was displayed to other users. It doesn’t matter on what devices and how they came across your content. What matters is that they engage with your content. On the other hand, reach refers to the unique individuals who have seen your content. It doesn’t matter whether a person has come across your content once or ten times, on a smartphone and on a laptop. What matters is that he or she is a single individual.
What matters here? If your impressions are growing each month, your brand is receiving more awareness. The reach is important because it denotes that specific individuals are becoming interested in your offer. In other words, your content marketing strategy is creating new followers for your brand.
Keep your eyes on how many people are searching for your offer on Google. Although the dawn of AI has broken Google’s monopoly, the search engine remains a good indicator of a brand’s online popularity.
Increased search volume is a strong indicator that your thought leadership, social content, and SEO are working together to make your brand memorable.
If the number stays flat, you may be attracting traffic but not building recognition yet. Also, for brand awareness, social shares are a clear indicator that more people are considering your offer. How many people are sharing your content on Facebook? If the number increases by the month, you are doing something right.
Also, shares on social media are probably the easiest way to get your content exposed to new prospects. A blog post that appears on a Facebook group of 10,000 people can be viewed by at least 1,000. Of those 1,000 people, at least one hundred will be interested in your small online business.
What does it mean that a piece of content gets high shares on social media? It can mean one of the following:
> Strong emotional hook
> Practical value
> Unique insight
> Memorable phrasing or storytelling
> Relatable experience
Remember that low shares don’t always mean bad content; sometimes, it means that the wrong platform is used or the audience mismatches.
On the other hand, backlinks are the backbone of any content marketing strategy. The more backlinks your content receives, the more authority your website has in the eyes of Google. This can lead to two things: more people get to find out about your business, and your website will be found by more people thanks to better rankings in Google’s search results.
The more backlinks you receive from trustworthy, relevant websites, the more brand awareness your business receives.
Finally, referral traffic plays a crucial role. It tells you how many visitors come from other websites. This is usually a direct result of backlinks, guest posts, partnerships, or mentions. If referral traffic increases, your brand is being discovered through external sources. This is especially powerful for small businesses because it builds trust faster.
Is your referral traffic low? Try doing the following to increase it:
> Guest posting
> Collaborations
> Listing your business in directories
> Being quoted in articles
Website Metrics—It’s More than Just Sessions
Are you interested in having more visitors on your website? Then, website metrics are the ones that will tell you whether your content marketing strategy is working.
Website traffic metrics help you understand whether your content is attracting visitors to your site (and, more importantly, what kind of people you’re attracting). Traffic doesn’t automatically equal success, but it’s a critical indicator of how well your content is performing across search engines, social platforms, and email.
For the best measurement, you will need a Google Analytics account. If you already have an account, you should check the metrics that indicate whether your content marketing strategy is paying off.
If you want to measure your website’s success, then some of these tools should be part of your arsenal:
> Google Analytics
> Google Search Console
> Ahrefs / SEMrush
> Email marketing analytics
> Social media insights
The first metric is the total number of sessions. This shows the number of times your website pages have been visited, including both new and returning visitors. It doesn’t matter how these visitors found the website. What matters is that the number of total visitors is increasing.
When the number of sessions rises, it usually means:
> Your content distribution is improving
> Your brand visibility is growing
> People are curious about what you offer
A relevant website metric is the number of organic traffic. If you are not accustomed to Google’s jargon, “organic traffic” simply refers to visitors who found your website through unpaid search results.
Organic traffic is one of the strongest indicators of content marketing success because it’s consistent, free, and compounds over time. Probably the most important aspect of your content marketing strategy is that it brings people with real intent. What’s better for a small online business than a prospect that visits your website voluntarily?
A rise in organic traffic means your SEO and content marketing strategy are effectively working together. Keep in mind that your organic growth must constantly grow. If it starts stagnating, you should consider what you may be doing wrong.
Another thing to consider about your website metrics is the difference between new and returning visitors. Why? This metric shows the balance between attracting new people and keeping your existing audience engaged.
Receiving new visitors means that you are expanding. Returning visitors show that your content is valuable and that your content marketing strategy is paying off.
What does a healthy balance look like?
> ~60–80% new visitors
> ~20–40% returning visitors
If this is what your Google Analytics shows, you are doing something right. If almost all your visitors are new, you may not have strong audience loyalty or newsletters that bring people back. If almost all visitors are returning, you may need to invest more in SEO or content distribution to reach a wider audience.
The last website metric that you must consider is traffic source. Where are the people coming from? How do they access your website?
Most likely, they arrive on your website from one of these sources:
- Organic search
- Social media
- Direct (people typing your URL)
- Email newsletters
- Referral (other websites)
- Paid ads
Why does this matter? Understanding traffic sources helps you see which channels are performing and which aren’t worth your energy.
A strong content marketing ecosystem often looks like this:
> Organic search brings consistent daily traffic
> Social media creates temporary bursts
> Email drives recurring engagement
> Referrals grow as your authority increases
If one channel dominates 90% of your traffic, your strategy is fragile. Ideally, traffic is diversified, so growth continues even if one source slows down.
Engagement Metric—When Website Visits Matter
Engagement metrics tell you how your audience behaves once they land on your website. While traffic shows how many people you attract, engagement shows whether your content is worth their time. This is important for your content marketing strategy, since the quality of your website’s visitors is more important than the quantity.
If people don’t stay, don’t read, and don’t interact, the content doesn’t do its job. Strong engagement is one of the clearest signals that your content resonates, delivers value, and builds trust.
What are some of the core engagement metrics that show that your content marketing strategy is working?
First is the time spent with each session on your website. If a visitor spends time on a page, the content is valuable, the visitor giving his or her time and energy to consume it.
How much time should a visitor stay on page, to consider the visit a good metric? For short-form content, a visitor should stay between one and three minutes. If the piece is long, the time spent can be between three minutes and six minutes.
If visitors spend little time on your website’s pages, you may need:
> A stronger hook at the beginning
> Better formatting (subheadings, bullets, visuals)
> Clearer writing and simpler explanations
> More relevant keywords that attract the right audience
Time on page is one of the best indicators of how valuable your audience perceives your content to be.
Besides the time spent on a certain page, the scroll depth is another important metric that shows the success rate of your content marketing strategy. The deeper a visitor scrolls, the more engaged that visitor is with your content. It’s one of the most honest engagement metrics because people can’t fake it — they either read the content or not.
The scroll can reveal how far visitors go beyond the introduction and when people lose interest in your content. It can tell you whether your content is too long or too short, and which parts of the page receive the most attention.
A healthy reading session might look like:
> 70–80% of readers make it halfway
> 50% reach the end
> 20–30% click something afterwards
If most readers drop off at the top, rewrite your opening. If they drop off near a certain section, that part may be confusing or irrelevant. Scroll depth helps you spot exactly where the content loses momentum.
Use this metric to assess whether your content marketing strategy is paying off.
One of the most important indicators for your content marketing efforts is the bounce rate. What does the bounce rate do? It shows the percentage of visitors who land on your page and leave without interacting further.
A high bounce rate signals one of two things:
- The content wasn’t what the visitor expected
- The visitor got what they needed quickly and left
This is why assessing whether a high bounce rate is a good thing or a bad thing depends on context.
Your high bounce rate may be bad if:
> Visitors leave after a few seconds.
> Traffic comes from irrelevant keywords.
> The call-to-action is weak.
> The page loads too slowly.
> The design is confusing or cluttered.
High bounce rate is normal when:
> The content is a quick-answer post.
> Readers came for one piece of information and found it.
> The article is purely informational.
What should you do? Focus on time on page and bounce rate together.
If time on page and bounce rate are high, people likely find what they need.
If both are low, the content misses the mark.
Lastly, you should consider comments left by visitors and other forms of interaction. These are great metrics because they show that the content was engaging. The visitors took the time and energy to consume your content, ponder it, and share an opinion. It also shows that you are building trust and are becoming a voice in your domain, an important indicator that your content marketing strategy is paying off.
This metric includes:
> Comments on blog posts
> Replies to newsletters
> Social media discussions
> DMs, emails, and mentions
If your blog posts are constantly receiving original, authentic comments. If people share your content on social media and share it. If your content is mentioned on social media or other websites. If you receive replies to your newsletters. Then your content marketing efforts are working from the point of view of engagement.
If people comment, reply, or share:
> Your tone is relatable.
> Your expertise feels authentic.
> Your content stands out compared to generic articles.
If engagement is low:
> Add stronger personal examples.
> Ask questions at the end of posts.
> Use storytelling.
> Make the content more conversational and human.
Meaningful interaction is often the first step toward conversion.
Other Content Marketing Strategy Success Metrics & Ending Remarks
Success in content marketing can mean different things to different people as you can already see. It is important to know what your business goals are and what you want to achieve through your content marketing strategy.
If you’ve just launched your online business, you should focus on building online brand awareness. If, on the other hand, your website has been on for at least six months, then a clear analysis of and strategy for increasing the number of visitors and creating more engagement are required.
Of course, there are other metrics to assess whether your content marketing strategy is paying off or not, some of them having to do with search engine optimization, email interaction, or funnel engagement. But if you are just starting to take content marketing seriously, the information presented here is more than enough.
We at Thumos Writing offer our business partners quality services in content marketing. If you are interested in growing your business, please contact us via email or through one of our social media platforms.
If the topic interests you, we have several articles on content marketing present on our blog.
-> Here is all you need to know about content marketing on a budget
-> This article shows you all you need to know about content marketing and SEO.
An online business isn’t built in one day. It takes time, effort, and dedication; and your content marketing strategy will only repay you if you do it consistently and properly.
