Intro to Content Marketing Analytics: Metrics and What Tools to Use

Until relatively recently, measuring the success of what we now call content marketing wasn’t easy.

The earliest form of Google Analytics, for example, didn’t make its debut until 2007. Before then, you might throw up a few blog posts, engage with a couple of commenters, and hope that some of those readers made their way back to the homepage to purchase whatever it was you were trying to sell. These days, the average content marketer has adopted an approach that’s a little more strategic than that.

In the age of artificial intelligence, with its AI summaries and all of the content it’s capable of churning out, there are those who think that the days of content marketing are numbered. While it might seem counterintuitive, content marketing is more important today than it was just a couple of years ago, not less. To misquote writer Mark Twain, reports of content marketing’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

As content production becomes more homogenized, creating compelling, personality-driven content is a key driver of success. As is using tools and metrics to figure out what’s working for your brand (and what’s not). Because, when you know what’s working, you can double down on creating more content like it.

In this post, we’ll cover some basic content marketing metrics, highlight several of our favorite tools for tracking them, and consider what the future of content marketing looks like in the world of AI SEO.

Which content marketing metrics to measure

When measuring the success of your content marketing efforts, there are various metrics you should consider. This list is far from exhaustive — and the importance of each will shift depending on the purpose of a piece of content — but these metrics are all fairly easy to track and are worth digging into:

• Number of unique visitors and pageviews 
• Time spent on the page
• Traffic sources (i.e., where readers are coming from)
• Keywords that are generating traffic to your page
• Number of social shares
• Event count (i.e., actions taken on a page)

On their own, these numbers don’t tell you a whole lot; that’s where the art of comparison comes in.

Think about what it is you’re trying to achieve with a piece of content — for example, lots of social shares, more newsletter subscribers, attracting backlinks — and which metrics best correspond to those goals. Then, once you’ve got several pieces of content live, you can compile data about each to dig a little deeper. 

Ask yourself the following questions, which the above data points can help you to answer:

• Do certain types of content appeal to your readers more? Which do they spend the most time with?
• Which social networks are your readers using (to both find and share your content)? Are you active there?
• Are readers taking action (e.g., looking at other posts, making a purchase, etc.) after reading your content?

Paying attention to appropriate content marketing metrics can help to influence the direction of your future content in a very real way. If they love breakdowns of your company’s growth, for example, or insights into new product features, you might want to double down on that type of content. The more you understand your audience, the more likely it is they’ll engage with pieces of content you create in the future.

Tools for measuring content marketing metrics

There are tons of tools out there that promise the world when it comes to measuring the success of your content marketing. Some of them are very useful, but they can be expensive and/or have a steep learning curve. For those who are just starting out, it probably makes sense to keep things as simple as you can.

When it comes to content marketing analytics — for beginners, professionals, and everyone in between — Google Analytics continues to be a benchmark. By adding a short snippet of code to your site, also known as a tag, you can access a wide range of analytics about all of the pages and content you have on it. 

Within Google Search Console, you can track everything from impressions, clicks, and acquisition through to traffic sources, engagement times, and conversions. It’s a very solid one-stop shop for measuring content marketing metrics that doesn’t require a ton of technical expertise or additional setup. For more in-depth keyword and backlink tracking, check out products like Ahrefs and Ubersuggest. 

In addition to expanding on the functionality of Google Analytics, Semrush and Moz are great for monitoring brand mentions and social media tracking. If the latter is a particular area of interest, you might consider a tool like Hootsuite for measuring the impact of your content marketing on social media.

For email marketing, such as trying to write emails that convert, the vast majority of email marketing tools (like MailChimp, Kit, and HubSpot) feature built-in analytics to help you measure performance. Building an email list is a great way to give your content marketing efforts a boost, and tracking what subscribers are clicking offers you another opportunity to measure how engaging your titles and topics are. 

The future of content marketing analytics

It’s always been easy to get swept up in all the content marketing tools for metrics and content generation that are on the market, and it’s only getting easier as innovative new tools make their debuts. Whatever metric(s) you want to measure, you can pretty much guarantee there’s a tool out there for tracking it.

Alongside features like rank tracking and keyword suggestions in content marketing tools, we’re seeing more and more AI-powered algorithms being deployed. Consider ContentShake AI and SE Ranking, for example, which both feature content generators that produce pieces of writing designed to rank highly.

But we’d advise against becoming too dependent on using flashy tools for your content marketing efforts. Although the ultimate goal of content marketing is to make sales, that process begins by building trust and conversing with your readers. AI tools simply aren’t (yet…!) capable of creating that rapport like a human can, which is why readers are still embracing storytelling and unique opinions over AI-created content.

Not to mention that search engines are well known for changing the goalposts when it comes to SEO…

Reddit’s traffic skyrocketed in 2024, for example, only to drop sharply as Google’s AI overviews began to prioritize sites like YouTube and LinkedIn over it. If you create content that adheres too tightly to today’s content marketing trends, you risk it being left behind as search algorithms evolve. (Which is a good case, by the way, for reviewing, rebooting, and rerunning your best web content every now and again.)

As the search landscape changes, chasing clicks and views alone is destined to fail.

Successful content marketing in 2025 is ultimately, as it’s always been, about creating content that resonates with people. Using content marketing tools to track metrics, without compromising on the personality that differentiates your content, is a great way to make sure that yours is doing just that.