Content marketing metrics are a common point of contention.
That’s because there’s a nearly infinite number of content marketing metrics you could feasibly track – from pageviews, bounce rate, click-through rate, social media engagement, etc.
What KPIs you use to define the success of your program depends on whether your content marketing strategy includes SEO, landing pages, referral traffic, backlinks, or whatever else.
As an agency founder, I think a lot about what metrics to track, and more importantly, which ones to aim towards.
What Are Content Marketing Metrics?
Content marketing metrics are numerical indicators of success for your content marketing program.
How does a metric differ from a KPI or a goal?
Metrics, in my opinion, are the highest level of performance measurement. You can have a variety of metrics you keep an eye on, but a KPI is a honing in of the most important metrics.
Typically, you only want one KPI or a few KPIs.
Goals, in turn, are targets you define based on the metrics and KPIs you find most important.
For example, your metrics may include bounce rate, pageviews, return visitors, SEO keyword rankings, conversion rate, number of leads from content, and social media shares.
But your KPIs for your content marketing program might be narrowed only to include SEO keyword rankings, organic traffic, and conversions from content.
Then your goals might be the following:
- Rankings: rank 1,000 new keywords by the end of the quarter
- Organic traffic: add 5,000 sessions per month
- Conversions from content: increase qualified leads by 25%
Goals are time-bound and specific, often set as either aspirational aims or as a function of a content growth model (working backwards from what your business needs to succeed).
How you define your metrics will depend on how feasible it is to track various measurements and also how important they are to track.
Defining your KPIs is a function of your specific content marketing strategy. Defining specific goals is a little outside of scope for this post, but depends on how you structure incentives at your company, your company stage (goals will be very different at a public company), and your ideal growth rate.
So in the scope of this article, I hope to define TK content marketing metrics that are either popular to track or, in my opinion, are underrated.
You can then choose whether these are important enough to define as KPIs, and if they are, how to establish quantitative goals with regards to your content KPIs.
I’ll split this post into two sections: input metrics and output metrics, starting with output metrics. The KPIs you choose from your output metrics should determine your input metrics.
Output metrics are indicators of program success; input metrics are the levers you control to get you to those goals.
17 Output Content Marketing Metrics
To reiterate, output metrics are visible, quantitative measures that are results from the efforts put forth in your content marketing program.
Sure, there are indicators of success that aren’t measurable or aren’t quantitative. In fact, some of the most interesting ones are qualitative – for example, people telling me on sales calls they listen to the podcast and it compelled them to reach out.
However, winning content marketing programs need quantitative metrics to track in addition to the unmeasurable and anecdotal.
1. Social shares
Lots of blog posts are produced with the proximate goal of triggering social shares. This is explicitly the case with most “journalism” (in quotes, because I’m referring to the click bait kind designed to go viral on social media) as well as business thought leadership. Any company producing a lot of infographics is probably trying to optimize for social shares.
Social shares signify…something. The problem is, it’s hard to tell why someone shared a piece of content. Was it to dunk on it? To, by association, show how smart the sharer is? Was it simply so useful that it needed to be shared?
Social shares are desirable, clearly, because they can add to your content distribution, albeit being unpredictable and also only resulting in temporary traffic spikes.
However, sharing something on social media has two problems: first, it doesn’t necessarily correlate with business value. Second, it sets up poor incentives for content quality. Just because something is shared widely doesn’t mean it’s high quality or telling the story you want to tell. Often, in fact, the most viral content is the most vapid.
Metric quality: Poor
Pros:
- Easy to measure
- Social shares correlate with traffic
- Social shares can help reach your target audience
- Social shares can provide an initial “boost” upon publishing content
Cons:
- Social shares set poor incentives
- In most cases, social shares don’t bring a lot of traffic
- Poor targeting and often unclear business results
2. Keyword rankings
If you’re writing for SEO as a distribution channel – and your probably should be, even if SEO isn’t your main focus – keyword rankings are your best leading indicator as to whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off.
Before you get traffic to a blog post, it needs to rank and rank highly. Before your convert readers to your offer, you need to be in a place where they can find your content. Thus, keyword rankings as an objective measurement that you’re on the right track.
I like keyword rankings as a metric. It’s hard to game them, so long as you’re writing content that actually matters and is relevant to your business. You need a strong website in terms of performance, site speed, and backlinks. And you need to be targeting appropriately difficult keywords as well as writing high quality content that matches search intent.
A healthy website should be steadily growing keyword volume over time.
To track keyword rankings, you can use a free tool like Google Search Console or any number of SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or GrowthBar. Google Search Console can also show the click through rate (CTR) of your rankings, which is also a potential content marketing metric. However, CTR is so low on the totem pole for me I’m not even including it as a separate item on this list.
Metric quality: Great
Pros:
- Correlates directly with organic traffic
- Hard to game
- Forces customer understanding through matching search intent
- Builds long term, compounding traffic
Cons:
- Can incentivize high volume but less relevant keywords
- Keywords are only one form of content ideation; can limit scope and create boring programs
3. Backlinks
Obviously there are other factors, but when it comes down to it, SEO content comes down to two big things: content quality and backlinks.
Backlinks – links from other websites pointing to your domain – help Google identify both the relevance and importance of your content. The more high quality and relevant backlinks you get, typically, the easier it is to rank for your keywords.
Backlinks are almost an input metric in this way. Backlinks, by themselves, don’t mean anything. Sure, you can get some referral traffic, but backlinks are more so an ingredient that is necessary for a successful content marketing program focused on SEO.
So while I think backlinks are incredibly important, they’re probably not your key performance indicator (with some exceptions – large companies with dedicated link building and digital PR teams, and conversely, those at the earliest stages who need to build their domain rating in order to compete in content).
Metric quality: Moderate
Pros:
- Objective and difficult to game
- Factors into your ability to rank competitive keywords
- A core ingredient in long term SEO success
Cons:
- Quality of a given backlink is unclear
- Not a true output metric in that links are only an ingredient in other success metrics
- Links are also a function of good content; i.e. if you already rank, you’re going to get more links (so it’s not eminently controllable)
4. Time on page
Time on page is a metric you can find in Google Analytics that shows, well, how long someone spends on your page. Session duration is another similar metric.
I think this is a horrible metric.
For one, I’ve done many correlational analyses on this, and I’ve never found a significant correlation on average time on page with business metrics like conversion rate. That’s even true of landing pages, where you’d expect more average time on page to equal more engagement. So as a predictive metric, it just fails every test.
And second, sometimes content answers a question quickly and the visitor leaves. That’s not a bad thing. You did your job in answering the question.
Average time on page shouldn’t be used as a KPI in content marketing.
Metric quality: Poor
Pros:
- Easily findable in Google Analytics
- Could identify optimization opportunities
Cons:
- Zero correlation with content marketing ROI
- Incentivizes rambling, long form types of content when in fact, that may not be the most successful path
5. Bounce rate
Bounce rate is also a horrible metric. I’ll just start with the truth.
What does a high bounce rate signify? Really – what does that mean?
In most cases, bounce rate is best used as a debugging metric for your Google Analytics setup. Zero bounce rate or an extremely high bounce rate might just mean you’ve set up events poorly or are splintering your sessions through internal UTMs.
At best, bounce rate can be used to identify and optimize landing pages. But one must be careful of the intent of the landing page or blog post.
Like I mentioned in “time on page,” sometimes a quick answer is all someone needs. And that type of content serves a purpose. Imagine you write a blog post on “content marketing statistics,” and a blogger pops on for 10 minutes to find a quick stat and leaves. That’s a bounce, but you got a backlink out of it. Successful, right?
You can diagnose the maturity of a content marketer by how much they rely on bounce rate as an indicator of anything important.
Metric quality: Poor
Pros:
- Easily identifiable and understood in Google Analytics
- Could identify data implementation mistakes
- Could identify page optimization opportunities
Cons:
- Essentially, a total waste of time strategically
6. Blog post engagement
Engagement metrics can be defined in many ways, but typically it will be one of two:
- How many comments the blog post gets
- How many retweets or comments a blog post gets on social media (usually Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn)
Depending on your content marketing strategy, this isn’t necessarily a bad metric. If you, for example, run a community, you want to trigger engagement. If you’re writing thought leadership, your blog posts should trigger engagement (else it’s not really resonating).
So engagement metrics can be worthy metrics if it suits your strategy. You’ve just got to be careful that it doesn’t supersede business metrics.
Metric quality: Moderate
Pros:
- Signifies resonance among your audience
- Builds community and conversation
- Can trigger new blog post ideas and sharpen your content quality
Cons:
- Very difficult to predict
- Very difficult to correlate with ROI-based outcomes
7. Reach / brand awareness
Brand awareness, by and large, doesn’t mean anything.
Or rather, the term “brand awareness” is an umbrella term that covers many separate metrics depending on who is using the term.
For some, it means the overall reach of a campaign. Some people think it means direct traffic. And others – perhaps someone who works in CPG or got an MBA – uses classical measures like share of voice.
Because of its ambiguous definition, I have to put this as a low rung metric.
Tautologically, of course brand awareness matters: you have to be aware of a brand before you engage with it, and you have to be aware of the brand before buying.
But as a metric or core KPI, this is overrated and typically used as a way to justify a marketing campaign that failed on other metrics.
Metric quality: Poor
Pros:
- Brand is a moat and building it can bring long term success
- Brand awareness does have to precede purchase
Cons:
- There’s no single definition of brand awareness
- Reach doesn’t mean you’re reaching the right people
- Optimizing for reach means you may miss out on more resonant topics
- Brand awareness can justify failed marketing campaigns
8. Share of search
Share of search is a newer metric and one that I think is a much better indication of brand awareness, at least for content marketers and SEO specialists.
Share of search is the volume of search queries for a brand as a proportion of all of the search queries for all the brands defining a category.
This metric is hard to control with content marketing alone, but is generally a great indicator of the salience of your brand.
One related metric is SERP visibility.
Using the surround sound strategy, your goal is to appear favorably on all search engine results for your core keywords. The higher your SERP visibility, the more likely it is someone will trust and purchase from you. Semrush created a tool to audit this metric and we’ve gotten good success using this with our podcast.
Metric quality: Pretty good
Pros:
- Clearer metric for brand awareness in search
- Correlates with market share
Cons:
- Depends on much more than content marketing to succeed
- Hard to track over time
9. Domain rating
Domain rating is a composite metric created by Ahrefs to identify the relative strength of your website in search.
Moz used domain authority, which is similar.
Domain rating or domain authority basically tracks the number of backlinks and how “powerful” they are (if, for instance, the bulk of them come from spam websites or, conversely, powerful websites like the New York Times).
Domain rating is contentious as it’s a metric built by SEO tools, not necessarily based on what Google actually uses to rank content (though it tries to approximate this).
I’ll say, personally, that while it’s not perfect, it’s a pretty darn good indicator of how powerful your website is, and thus, which keywords you can feasibly rank for.
However, as a metric, it’s not great. In some industries, you can rank for tons of keywords with a low domain rating and it shouldn’t be a primary focus. Additionally, your domain rating will grow over time largely as a function of the other things you should already be doing: high quality content creation and backlink generation.
Metric quality: Moderate
Pros:
- High domain rating tends to mean you can rank for more competitive content
- Domain rating is mainly a function of backlinks, which are definitely important.
Cons:
- Composite and somewhat black box metric by SEO tools
- Doesn’t necessarily correlate with program success.
10. Pageviews / Sessions / Users
Alright, now we’re getting into one of the most common content marketing metrics: traffic.
In Google Analytics, Tableau, or pretty much any other alternative analytics tool, this is usually broken down into three different metrics:
- Pageviews – hit level metric to signify a single pageview
- Sessions – a metric grouping that can include one or multiple pageviews in a time period
- Users – the highest level metric. A user can include multiple sessions across time, which can include multiple pageviews
Unique pageviews, unique sessions, and unique visitors are variations of these metrics that only track pageviews from a singular user ID.
Traffic for traffic’s sake isn’t a good thing, but traffic should definitely be accounted for in your metrics.
If you’re not growing traffic, it’s a huge canary in the coal mine for your content marketing efforts.
The thing is, you need to make sure you’re bringing in the right traffic. I know many websites who go for traffic for its own sake, writing keywords like “best motivational quotes,” that have nothing to do with their product.
Metric quality: Good, with caveats
Pros:
- Objective and quantitative
- More results almost certainly have to start with more traffic
- Traffic decay and stagnation is a clear sign of ineffective content marketing
Cons:
- Traffic needs to have strategic direction, i.e. you need to bring in the right traffic
- Not all traffic is created equally
- Optimizing only for traffic may cause you to miss lower traffic but higher intent keywords
11. Organic pageviews / sessions
Honing in slightly more on the traffic metric, we have organic search traffic. This excludes all other forms of traffic, such as paid advertising, direct traffic, social traffic, and referral traffic.
When engaging clients in SEO work, this is a key metric we almost always use, with the same caveat above: we use our content marketing strategy to target only relevant keywords and traffic.
If you can do that, organic search traffic is one of the best and simplest leading indicators of program success.
Metric quality: Great
Pros:
- For SEO-driven content programs, it narrows the scope to only organic traffic
- More organic traffic is almost always a leading indicator of other KPIs like conversion from content, lead generation, backlinks, and revenue
- Easy to track in Google Analytics
Cons:
- Same as above
- Could over optimize for traffic at the expense of high intent keywords
- Doesn’t include other important channels, so narrows the focus to SEO
12. Return visitors
On a recent Kitchen Side podcast episode, we discussed which content marketing KPIs may be best.
Tommy Walker, our guest on the show, proposed “return visitors.”
The logic here is multifold:
- Return visitors to the blog imply you’re creating some brand cohesion and audience
- It’s easy to get traffic once with click bait; it’s harder to get the purpose back to your site
- Most don’t purchase in one visit, anyway. This is a more realistic way to drive the business KPIs like new leads that we care about.
I was convinced. Particularly if your approach expands beyond SEO, repeat visitors can be a great way to satisfy a number of other metrics.
For instance, by nature of the metrics, repeat visitors will also increase your overall traffic, some of that being organic.
Repeat visitors also tend to convert at higher conversion rates, so if your KPI is email list signups or revenue from content, repeat visitors is also a great metric.
I’ll even go so far as to say this metric is underrated, especially for those seeking to build brand awareness and build an audience.
Metric quality: Great
Pros:
- Hard to game
- Implies quality content creation
- Envelops more than one channel
- Repeat visitors tend to be higher value
Cons:
- Still difficult to directly correlate with business value
- Devalues new traffic and new visitors
13. New visitors
The flipside to this is to focus on new visitors.
One of the strengths of content marketing as a channel is it’s often a good place for a prospect to start the customer journey. Rarely will someone flood straight to a demo request page and sign up.
Often, you hook them with a piece of content and fill up the top of the funnel.
Content is great at casting a wide net in this case, and if your business is particularly great at performance marketing, then using new visitors might be a great metric for you. For instance, you can use new visitors to create remarketing and lookalike audiences to nurture more people down to the bottom of the funnel.
New visitors do devalue return traffic, though, and both types of visitors are important for a mature content marketing program.
Metric quality: Good
Pros:
- Casts a wide net at the top of the funnel
- Can support other forms of acquisition like paid ads and email marketing
- Easy to track in Google Analytics
Cons:
- Somewhat myopic in focus
- Can incentivize traffic for traffic’s sake or the number of pages you’re publishing
14. Email list signups
One of my favorite metrics for content marketers is email list sign ups.
First, let me claim my bias: I’m a growth person. I like KPIs at or near the bottom of the funnel where I can attribute a dollar value to them.
In most types of content, you’re unlikely to score new leads or demo conversions. But to get someone on an email list (through ebooks, content offers, webinars, or simply an email newsletter popup) is simple and effective.
Of course, the revenue and value you generate from these signups depends, also, on your email marketing program. But especially for B2B marketers, this is where you’re going to get the most value in your content program.
The email list is well-known in B2B marketing, but e-commerce tends to overlook this. Some brands, however, like Bulletproof, rely heavily on their email list sign ups.
You can tell because of the massive call-to-action (CTA) on their blog homepage:
Metric quality: Great
Pros:
- Very difficult to game
- Channel agnostic but incentivizes long term, compounding channels like SEO
- Email is an ‘owned’ audience and create flexibility
- Once you capture an email, you have additional leverage in remarketing, lookalike audiences, and email marketing
Cons:
- Relies on email marketing program to create revenue and value
15. Product purchases / conversions from content
Another one of my favorite metrics!
Most content marketers underrate the ability of content to act as a performance channel.
“Content shouldn’t sell, it should educate,” they say.
Okay, you take that approach, and I’ll write bottom funnel content that drives predictable revenue. We’ll reinvest that revenue to fill out the rest of the stages of the funnel and build a self-reinforcing flywheel.
It may be contrarian, but more content should be product-led content. If you’re building on the foundations of a smart content marketing strategy, you can easily weave your product into bottom of the funnel content, middle of the funnel content, and even sometimes in top of the funnel content.
For what it’s worth, I rarely think this should be the only metric you should track. Ideally, your conversion goals are a mixture of MQLs / email list signups and direct product signups, new leads, purchases, etc.
And you won’t ever reach fully accurate marketing attribution here, but if you can use first click attribution or last click attribution to show your content is actually driving sales, then you’ll have greater luck getting buy-in for riskier initiatives. This is a core tenet of our barbell content strategy.
Metric quality: Great
Pros:
- Gets to the point of what marketing and business executives care about
- Shows real business value of content marketing
- Number of conversions from content is easy to measure
- Conversions drive buy-in and further investment in the channel
Cons:
- Puts a lot of pressure on content to convert
- Incentivizes bottom funnel content at the expense of less measurable benefits
16. Revenue from content
In an ideal world, all of our marketing efforts should map towards revenue.
Of course, this isn’t always possible, and exclusively doing things you can track accurately and attribute to revenue leaves a lot of creative initiatives out of consideration.
But at the end of the day, I believe every content marketing program should track the revenue they generate.
This could be loosely attributable, such as the correlation between reading the blog or knowledge base and customer retention.
It could be directly attributable pipeline generated for B2B marketers that tracks down the funnel to a sale.
It could also be an estimated metric, like assigning a dollar value (based on average revenue value) of an email list signup or content offer signup.
Metric quality: Good
Pros:
- Generating revenue is the point of your marketing goals at the end of the day
- Clear ROI calculations made possible
Cons:
- Extremely difficult to do precise revenue attribution
- Crowds out riskier campaigns or creative campaigns
- Can be boring for marketing teams to only focus on content likely to generate revenue
- Depends on other factors like sales team efficiency or product user experience
17. Customer retention
Finally, the hardest metric to track: customer retention.
If you’re in e-commerce, you can also call this repeat purchases.
The reason this is hard is because, obviously, repeat purchases or customer retention depends on a million factors, most of which are way more important than content marketing.
However, content marketing can definitely assist in retention. Take, for example, Butcher Box. They use content mostly as a means to help customers get more value from their subscription box:
To do this the right way, you’ll likely need a good BI team or data scientists to build correlational analyses and dashboards. Still then, you need to combat the ‘correlation vs causation’ problem. Does a customer who reads a recipe stay a Butcher Box customer longer *because* they read the recipe? Or is a customer who is likely to stay longer anyway more likely to read a recipe because they’re already more serious and engaged?
You can run experiments to help you answer these, but it’s still pretty murky.
Metric quality: Moderate
Pros:
- Retention is super important, especially for a subscription business
- Breaks your incentives out of the typical acquisition funnel
Cons:
- Extremely difficult to track
- Aiding retention is probably not the highest value of content for most companies
5 Input Content Marketing Metrics
Briefly again, output metrics are what you show your boss. But input metrics help you achieve those output metrics.
They’re based on effort and operations, either towards increasing output or improving efficiency.
What you choose as input metrics should reflect a causal impact on your output metrics (i.e. if you care about organic traffic, the number of articles you’re publishing probably impacts that).
1. Number of X published per time period
Whether it’s the number of articles you’re producing per month, the number of webinars you’re conducting, or how many tweets and LinkedIn posts you’re creating from a single piece of content, quantity matters.
We talk a lot about “quality vs quantity,” but this is a non-argument. Quality, to an extent, is table stakes for success. And it’s subjective. What I think is good isn’t what others think is good.
Quantity of publishing should correlate to your output, but will often diminish after a certain point. 1 webinar per month might be good, 2 might be better. But if you do 12 webinars per month, you’re likely not getting many marginal leads, and you’re probably spending a ton of time and money on them.
Same with the quantity of content published. Four articles per week is a good pace, but 16 articles a week might not be better (or it might be – this depends on your industry and many other factors).
In any case, the sheer output of your team is one of the most controllable factors you have in moving any of the output metrics you choose.
Metric quality: Crucial
Pros:
- Obvious correlation with output metrics
- Increased pace can force new creativity and mastery
- Increased pace can also uncover process bottlenecks to be fixed with automation or better processes
Cons:
- Difficult to ascertain diminished marginal utility and opportunity costs
- Can lead to burnout or diminishing quality with a bad manager
- Can cause you to overlook promotion, optimization, and other numbers outside of velocity
2. Cost per article
The journey of a content marketing program starts in the early stage with very expensive, differentiated content.
As you build an audience, you generate leverage through your audience reach, domain rating, or simply your brand.
People will begin reaching out to *you* to write free guest posts for the exposure or link. The content you produce need not be 10X quality, but perhaps just marginally better than what currently ranks.
All of that is to say: cost per article should decrease over time. If it’s not, that’s a red flag for me.
In terms of content marketing ROI, the average cost of your article being lower, by definition, increases the ROI of your program.
It’s not as simple as just paying less per article, either. You can make your editing process more efficient. You can accept more guest posts. You can improve your editorial style guide to cut down on back and forths.
Metric quality: Great
Pros:
- Cost per article should decrease over time
- Lowering the cost per article, by definition, improves ROI
- Lowering per article costs frees up money for other initiatives
Cons:
- Could lead to quality issues if lowering too much or too soon
3. Backlink velocity
The number of backlinks you’re building as well as how fast you’re building them (backlink velocity) is an important factor in the success of an SEO-driven content marketing program.
This is particularly true of an early-stage company in a mature industry with many established competitors.
If you’re doing it right, you’ll end up building both manual links (those you actively reach out and place) and passive links (naturally occurring links from people finding your content and linking to it).
Backlink velocity can account for both of these, and it should be increasing with time.
This is both an input and output metric, as I mentioned above.
I put this as an input metrics because a) manual links are controllable and b) backlinks, by themselves, are not an indicator of content marketing success.
Rather, backlink velocity contribute to other goals like rankings, website traffic, and ultimately, content performance.
Metric quality: Good
Pros:
- Backlinks are a critical piece in SEO-driven content strategy
- You can control your manual links (and to some extent your passive links)
- Backlink velocity should be growing over time (and if it’s not, this is good to diagnose)
Cons:
- Diminishing marginal returns and opportunity costs (i.e. could you be better off putting extra dollars into content production versus link building)
- Doesn’t incorporate non-SEO goals
4. Cost per backlink
If you’re doing link building, especially of the manual sort, how much it costs you to place a link is important and should decrease over time.
This is because of both economies of scale and leverage.
For economies of scale, as you start link building, you’ll naturally build more and more relationships. These relationships make it easier to place links than when you’re starting out fresh.
Leverage comes from your brand as well as the existing rankings you have. If you already rank for top of funnel content, you’ll get naturally occurring links. And as you build your brand, outreach and guest posts should become easier and easier to attain.
Metric quality: Good
Pros:
- Link building is time consuming and expensive, but there are ways to lower costs
- Keeping a cost per link lets you better analyze the opportunity cost associated with manual efforts
Cons:
- Could incentivize lower quality links
5. Team size
Finally, how many people you have working on your marketing team or content team is something people track.
Sheer headcount can help you accomplish your goals, through increased content production, promotion, optimization, etc.
But I’ll say this: we had two content marketers at CXL (both of us doing other things, maybe 30% of time on content). And we were crushing organic competitors with teams of 10-20 people.
If you have a smart content strategy, you can avoid organizational bloat. Team size is, by and large, a vanity metric, albeit one that will naturally grow with your content marketing success.
A big team can give you leverage, but I wouldn’t look at it as an input metric worth tracking.
Metric quality: Poor
Pros:
- More headcount means more resources to succeed at content
Cons:
- Can lead to organizational bloat
- Small teams can and many times do beat larger teams
- Better to be efficient than large
- Team size raises costs, which lowers ROI
Conclusion: which metrics should you track?
Which metrics you track depends on your business and resources, but you should probably pick some output metrics for KPIs, and then track some input metrics to make sure you’ve set yourself up for success.
For what it’s worth, the three metrics I track for SEO-driven clients are the following:
- Rankings
- Organic traffic
- Conversions from the blog
And then we map the conversions to revenue.
For thought leadership programs, we typically look at:
- Overall traffic
- Return visitors
- Conversions from the blog
- Links from content
But the important thing is to map these things to your marketing strategy, which always flows from business strategy.
