Using a content marketing reporting dashboard is a great way to keep track of your company's marketing efforts. This visual tool aggregates and shows a range of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
In short, a content marketing reporting dashboard provides a centralized view of how well your content is performing in terms of driving engagement, traffic, and leads.
However, the software you choose will greatly impact how efficient a reporting dashboard is. To make a good choice, you need to research and try platforms where you can find and compare the best 10 SEO software solutions for your digital marketing needs. But even when you have picked one, it's important to customize it using the right charts and the most useful KPIs for your business. Let's find out more about it now.
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Key Performance Indicators for Content Marketers
Having a robust reporting dashboard that tracks the right KPIs is crucial for measuring the success of your content marketing efforts. Key metrics to track here include:
- Organic sessions and new users
- Top landing pages
- Like and share counts by platform
- Organic conversion rates
- Keyword rankings for your target topics and pages
- Number of leads, email signups, or content downloads - Indicates interest in marketing efforts
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) generated - Measures readiness for marketing or sales
- Conversion rate of content-assisted conversions - Shows content effectiveness in driving actions
- Revenue influenced, and deals closed that touched content - Tracks revenue or deals impacted by the content.
- Return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing program - Measures profitability of content marketing.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) of content-acquired customers - Measures the long-term value of customers acquired through content.
- Cost savings and time savings enabled by content (e.g., support and sales enablement content) - Quantifies savings in cost and time facilitated by content, such as support and sales enablement materials.
- Brand awareness and sharing of voice metrics - Evaluates brand visibility and share of voice in the market.
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“Flexible product with great training and support. The product has been very useful for quickly creating dashboards and data views. Support and training has always been available to us and quick to respond.
- George R, Information Technology Specialist at Sonepar USA
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Choosing Charts for Visualization in a Content Marketing Reporting Dashboard
Tracking and reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs) is a key component of SEO and content marketing. Using KPIs, digital experts can measure progress and offer insights, particularly to campaign stakeholders who are not always familiar with the complete marketing process. This requirement makes the content marketing dashboard essential. This tool presents in-depth data as clear visuals, with insights that make sense to the layperson. These charts are designed to facilitate vital data-driven decision-making. When choosing the right charts, you have many options to consider. For instance:
- KPI scorecards with single number callouts are great for highlighting a north star metric like total organic traffic or leads.Bar charts are ideal for comparing different categories, such as page views by blog post or conversions by landing page.
- Pie charts show composition, like breaking down organic traffic by device type.
- Line charts are best for displaying trends over time, such as weekly organic traffic or monthly leads.
- Gauge charts or bullet graphs compare a crucial metric to a goal, like leads versus target.
- Tables are suitable for displaying detailed data with multiple dimensions, like top blog posts by pageviews, time on page, and conversions.
Use color to draw attention to critical data points, like conditional formatting, that show above- or below-average performance. Keep the overall dashboard design clean and focus on the most important metrics.
Revenue and Conversion Metrics
Any marketing campaign aims to add to the bottom line, making tracking and reporting on generated revenue especially important. The data illustrates precisely how well the strategy is impacting the business.
The key revenue metrics are:
- revenue from content marketing
- average spend per order
- life time-value of acquired customers
Although revenue is the end goal, to achieve it, the content needs to move potential customers through the marketing funnel into fulfilling a conversion and beyond as returning customers. Using a content performance dashboard, you can determine how well the content is driving the desired action at each stage of the funnel.
Similarly, you need to remember that there are three essential metrics for tracking conversions:
- conversion rate from CTAs (calls to action): demo requests, trial signups, purchases
- lead generation: form filling and email signups
- engagement indicators: scroll depth and time on page
Engagement and Audience Metrics
Determining which content engagement and audience metrics to use depends on your specific goals, the nature of your content, and the platforms you're using to distribute it. Here's a breakdown of some key metrics across various platforms:
- Website/Blog:
- Pageviews: The total number of pages viewed by visitors. It indicates overall traffic.
- Unique Visitors: The number of individual users who visited your site within a specific time frame.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate may indicate that your content isn't engaging or relevant.
- Time on Page: The average amount of time visitors spend on a page. Longer time indicates higher engagement.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.
- Social Media:
- Likes/Reactions: Indicates how many people found your content appealing or interesting.
- Shares/Retweets: Shows how many users shared your content with their networks, extending its reach.
- Comments/Replies: Reflects engagement and interaction with your content.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link compared to the total number of people who viewed it.
- Engagement Rate: Combines likes, shares, and comments to measure overall engagement with your content.
- Email Marketing:
- Open Rate: The percentage of recipients who opened your email. A higher open rate indicates that your subject line and sender name are effective.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in an email.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of email recipients who completed the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
- Unsubscribe Rate: Indicates how many recipients chose to unsubscribe from your email list.
- Video Content (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.):
- Views: The number of times your video has been watched.
- Watch Time: Total amount of time viewers have spent watching your video.
- Likes/Dislikes: Indicates audience sentiment towards your video.
- Comments: Reflects engagement and interaction.
- Shares: Shows how many users shared your video with others.
- Podcasts:
- Downloads: The number of times your podcast episodes have been downloaded.
- Subscribers: Indicates the number of people who regularly listen to your podcast.
- Listener Engagement: Comments, reviews, and social media mentions related to your podcast.
- Retention Rate: The percentage of listeners who continue to subscribe and listen to new episodes.
Campaign Tracking and Attribution
The reporting dashboards make handling and responding to data much faster and easier, so marketing strategists can focus efforts on the elements they know will positively impact the bottom line. This means visualizing and using the data from the whole funnel and using attribution modeling that will optimize and drive the strategy, increasing the ROI. The marketing dashboard is a sophisticated tool capable of measuring true ROI.
The visuals mean marketing specialists and their clients are well-informed on a campaign's progress. To be effective means understanding the buyer's journey and what is most likely to drive them to purchase. This journey is mapped out by attribution, with a choice of models. The dashboard makes it possible to use several models at once.
Common models for applying attribution to measure true ROI are:
- First-touch: attributing 100% of the conversion value to the first content the lead interacted with
- Last-touch: attributing 100% to the last content element the lead interacted with
- Linear: attributing the percentage as a conversion credit spread evenly across all the content the lead interacted with
- Time-decay: attributing more of the credit to all the content the lead interacted with immediately before the conversion
- Position-based: Attributing more to the first and last touch, typically 40% each, with the remaining 20% evenly distributed across the middle touches
Customizing Dashboards
Many marketers choose a combination of models. This requirement is beyond the scope of many generic marketing reporting dashboards at a time when customization is paramount. In an overcrowded marketplace, aligning the dashboard to meet the client's unique needs could earn a competitive edge. Customization means flexibility not only in the reporting but also in the delivery of the campaign.
To customize your dashboard correctly, you need to pay attention to several points. For instance:
- Identify the key metrics for the client's campaign goals, for example, for raising brand awareness or driving conversions
- Segment data for deeper insights into performance and preferred content type or topic
- Visualize, for clarity and at a glance, understanding
- Set a schedule for reporting daily, weekly, or monthly
- Set for automated updates