11 Content Marketing Statistics You Should Care About

It’s the end of the month, time to review your content marketing results from the past 30 days and analyze…but what do you focus on? Of everything you could be reporting, which statistics should you care about? What do they mean, and how do you know if your findings are beneficial or not? Below are 11 content marketing statistics you should know that will make your end of month reports outstanding!

Landing Page Statistics

The purpose of a landing page is to get people to convert from visitors into leads. Keeping track of the statistics related to these pages is critical to your success.

1. Visit to Lead Conversion Rate

The visit to lead conversion rate (VTL) represents the number of new contacts divided by the number of visits for a given time period on a landing page. On average, these pages should be generating a 15-20% conversion rate. If it’s an extremely targeted page, that number should be higher. If you are not getting these results, evaluate what could be affecting them. Does your offer resonate with your audience? Is the CTA obvious to site visitors?

2. Lead to Customer Conversion Rate

This statistic is a big one to follow. The lead to customer conversion rate shows the percentage of contacts added during a given time period that have become customers. The point of marketing is to increase revenue and gain more customers. This statistic is way to see if your efforts are paying off. It’s difficult to pin down an industry standard for this metric as it varies. Choose a start date, set a benchmark specific to your company and gage from there.

3. Visit to Customer Conversion Rate

This statistic goes one step beyond the lead to customer conversion rate. The visit to customer conversion rate shows the number of contacts generated during a given time period who have become customers divided by the total number of visits during that time period. This gives you a full view to see how many people that have stopped by your site have actually turned into customers.  Like the lead to customer rate, it would be wise to set a benchmark for your company and compare results month over month to ensure your numbers are increasing as industry standards vary.

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Email Statistics

Emails can be one of the most beneficial tools you have in your toolbox to reach your customers, so you better be sure they are giving you the results you want. Two statistics to pay attention to are open rate and click rate.

4. Open Rate

An open rate measures the number of people who opened the email compared to the number of people it was sent to. Open rates can tell you if your subject line is compelling enough to get your audience to open it, and it can also be a way to ensure your contact list is current (if you have old email address the email may never make it to the inbox). As with most statistics, averages vary with industry, but a good rule of thumb to follow is to have between a 20%-25% open rate for your emails. Note, although this is a common statistic, it should not be used to judge whether or not your marketing efforts are working. The open rate isn’t always 100% accurate in that recording an open can only happen if the reader's email is able to display HTML with images, which must be turned on. Simply put, if you send text-only emails, the open rates cannot be recorded. It is also a vanity metric in that it shows that people open emails, but maybe they accidently clicked on it, or wanted to see if it was spam, etc. It doesn’t convey if people were actually interested in what you had to offer. 

5. Click Rate

6. Bounce Rates

Bounce rates represent the percentage of sent messages that cannot be delivered. Contrary to most other statistics in this post, you want these numbers to be as low as possible. A 6-10% bounce rate is average rate (varies by industry) and anything above that should raise a red flag. A way to avoid high bounce rates is to ensure your email list is current. If you don’t send an email for a while, some of your contacts’ addresses or domains may have expired. Another way to lower bounce rates is to have your subscribers enter their email twice when submitting their information. Often times the email won’t get to them because of a typo in the address when they filled out the form. If you follow those two rules of thumb, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

7. Unsubscribe Rates

Unsubscribe rates represent the number of people who decided to opt out from receiving your emails. A few of the many reasons people may unsubscribe are loss of interest in topics, your offers don’t correlate with their needs, and even that you send your emails too frequently that they come off as spam. Try to get your rate below 1% to be in line with industry norms. 0-.5% is ideal. Like bounce rates, the lower the number, the better.

Website Statistics

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The statistics below are general and can be applied across your website.

8. Site Visits

There are four different types of traffic you should focus on for your site: search, referral, direct and campaigns.

Search traffic represents the people who stumbled upon your site by typing in a keyword or phrase that you rank for in a search engine. There are many ways you can increase rank to attract this kind of traffic including search engine optimization on your site and blogging or posting new content on your site frequently with targeted keywords. If you’re blogging 3x per week with appropriate keywords, you should see 13% month over month traffic increase. If you are not seeing these results, the keywords may be too broad or are not relevant to your audience.

Referral traffic comes from sites that have URLs on their domains that link to your site. This will tell you which sites are promoting yours. If reputable and high-ranking sites are mentioning you on their pages, that could help your rank in search engines as well.

Direct traffic represents the people who are typing in your URL directly to access your site or that have your page bookmarked. This is an indication that people are seeing your URL posted somewhere on or offline and remember it to type in directly. To increase these types of visits, choose a domain name that is memorable.

By default you won’t have any campaign traffic, but if you set up campaigns with tracking codes in platforms like HubSpot or Google Analytics, this is a way to tell if your marketing efforts within these campaigns are working.

No matter where your traffic is coming from, keep in mind that a good overall  lead conversion rate from site visits is 2% of traffic.

9. CTA Click Through Rates

The CTA click through rate represents the number of times somebody clicks on a given CTA divided by the number of visits. This is a very useful number to review especially when you are A/B testing various CTAs. If one is performing far better than another, you should optimize and solely use the CTA that is delivering the best results. There isn’t a benchmark for this statistic since many things can affect performance (i.e. placement on homepage or landing pages), but it can be useful when testing two CTAs in the same place.

10. Bounce Rates

A website bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who leave after visiting one page. This number is typically a good indication that your site isn’t providing what the visitor wants or needs, that it takes too long to load, or maybe they just stumbled upon it accidentally, but your content didn’t keep them around. An average bounce rate is right around 50%. Anything above that should cause alarm. If it does end up above that, a few ways to lower your rate are:

• Develop a better website with easy navigation, a clear purpose, and quick load time
• Be savvy on social so more people will learn about your brand
• Deliver upon your audience’s expectations; give them exactly what they wanted when they came to the site

11. Average Time on Site

This metric correlates with the bounce rate in that it gages the visitor’s level of interest in the site and your content. For example, if the reader lands on a blog post and only spends 10 seconds on there, you know they’ve lost interest. Know however, this particular metric can be misleading as it doesn’t account for those who leave a tab open and walk away or look at content on other tabs. Use this metric as a guide over time, but not as an exact science.

The statistics above are always good to refer to, but keep in mind, numbers vary from industry to industry. It’s important for you to understand the trends and stats for your company as it relates to others in your field.