How to Create a Content Marketing Reporting Dashboard

Spreadsheets and presentations are a thing of the past.

We mean, who wants to waste time on manual data entry?

Luckily, you’re able to track your KPIs in a much more streamlined manner using different analytics and data visualization tools.

Suppose you’re leading your content marketing team. In that case, a neat, organized content marketing reporting dashboard will help you track your metrics accurately, create easy-to-understand reports, and act timely if there’s something to improve.

Since data visualization tools typically offer hundreds of metrics, your first task is to choose which ones you’ll add to your dashboard. Here’s what metrics experts consider essential.

1. Average Session Duration

If someone visits your website but leaves immediately, that might be a sign that your content doesn’t resonate well with your audience.

Measuring the average session duration on your website can help you determine if you’re able to keep users on your site by providing valuable content or you need to review it and make improvements. If the average session duration increases, it means you’re covering the right topics in the right way and have more chances of converting your visitors into customers.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Measuring your click-through rate can be helpful in various scenarios. Are you sending paid newsletters, publishing blog posts with CTAs, or running ads on Facebook and Instagram?

In all these cases, CTR can be a good indicator of whether your content is educative, entertaining, or inspiring for your audience. A high click-through rate tells you that you’re doing a good job helping your website visitors or social media users take the next step in their customer journey.

3. Number of Backlinks

The number of backlinks you get speaks about your content quality and authority in your niche. However, don’t forget that quality trumps quantity in this case, like in many others: it’s better to have just a few valuable backlinks than dozens that have little to no value at all.

Measure how many organic and authentic backlinks you get, as they’re of great importance. Nurturing them can help you establish yourself as a thought leader and increase your potential of going viral.

4. Dwell Time

Often overlooked, dwell time is a metric that says more about the quality of your content than the number of organic clicks, for example. A user may find your blog post using a search engine, but does that tell you if you’ve provided a valuable answer to this user’s question? It doesn’t.

Dwell time (or time that a website visitor spends on a page) combined with scroll depth can tell if your content matches the visitor’s search intent and answers their query. Google can also recognize that and reward you with a better ranking.

5. Bounce Rate

Although a high bounce rate may mean that your page loading speed isn’t optimal or that there’s a glitch in your website’s code, it can also indicate that your content doesn’t resonate with your audience.

However, a low bounce rate combined with other metrics, such as average time on page, can mean that your topics are on-point and that you’re providing quality content for your audience.

Choose a Tool and Get Started

Creating a content marketing reporting dashboard is relatively simple when you know what metrics to monitor and report on. Keeping it clutter-free is critical for creating clear and easy-to-read reports – only include the metrics that matter.

Another decision you need to make is what tool you’re going to use: Google Analytics, HubSpot, and SEMrsuh are just a few of the most popular ones. Make sure you opt for a tool that supports multiple integrations so you can streamline monitoring your overall business goals.

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