Content Performance: 16 Metrics to Track Your Results

What Is Content Performance?

Content performance measures how well your articles, videos, and other content reach and engage your target audience. 

Marketers track specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs)—like AI visibility, views, engagement rates, and conversions—to assess effectiveness.

By analyzing content metrics, marketers can evaluate whether the content meets goals like growing brand awareness, driving website traffic, and generating leads.

Why Should You Track Content Performance?

Tracking content performance is important because it shows marketers which activities are working and which need improvement. This insight helps marketing teams optimize tactics, justify resource allocation, and gain support for future ideas.

Here’s an example:

Marketing agency Fluentica discovered that the “how-to” guides, training articles, and time management resources published by its client, practice management software ABA Matrix, consistently ranked, earned backlinks, and converted better than the client’s compliance-heavy articles.

So, the agency worked with ABA Matrix to expand its content clusters around these high-engagement topics and support them with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

The result? According to Fluentica Co-Founder Amy Perez:

“ABA Matrix scaled to 34,000+ monthly organic visits, improved its competitive positioning against national players, and began generating leads beyond Florida, fueling its visibility and expansion goals.” 

Key Content Marketing Performance Metrics to Track

The right content marketing performance metrics to track depend on your business goals and can include views, organic traffic, AI visibility, and return on investment (ROI).

Here are 16 key performance metrics to consider tracking:

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics like views and bounce rate, measure how users interact with your content and provide insights into its appeal.

Views

Views are the number of times users have viewed a page on your site. Tracking views in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) helps identify popular topics your audience finds engaging. 

Find views in GA4 by clicking “Reports” > “Life cycle” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens” to go to the “Pages and screens” report.

Then, look at the “Views” column.

New Users

New users are first-time visitors to your site. This metric helps you understand if your content efforts bring in new audiences—especially because users can rely on AI tools for answers rather than visit sites.

Find new users in GA4 by going to “Reports” > “Life cycle” > “Acquisition” > “Overview,” then click “New users.” 

Average Engagement Time

Average engagement time measures how long users engage with your site’s content. Longer engagement times usually indicate more compelling, relevant content.

Find average engagement time in GA4 by clicking “Reports” > “Life cycle” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens.”

Then, look at the “Average engagement time per active user” column.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without taking further action (like visiting another page) or staying for a specified amount of time.

Identifying pages with high bounce rates can guide improvements to better satisfy users. This is especially true since users often bounce when content doesn’t meet their expectations or search intent (the purpose of their query).

GA4 counts a user as having bounced if a session falls into any of these categories:

• Lasted fewer than 10 seconds
• Didn’t contain any key events (e.g., a form submission)
• Involved only one page view

To review your site’s bounce rate, go to “Reports” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens” in GA4. Next, click the pencil icon to customize the report.

Click “Metrics” in the right sidebar. Then, click “Add metric” to add bounce rate as a metric.

Likes, Comments, and Shares

Likes, comments, and shares show how well your content resonates with social media users.

Monitor these metrics directly with social media platforms’ built-in analytics or with a tool like Social Analytics (included in the Semrush Social Toolkit), where you can view high-level analytics or drill down by platform and post.

SEO and AI Visibility Metrics

SEO and AI metrics, like organic (unpaid) traffic, keyword rankings, and AI search visibility, measure your content’s prominence and performance in search engine results pages (SERPs) and AI tools like ChatGPT.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic measures the number of visitors who find your site through unpaid search engine results. This metric can indicate how well your content ranks and attracts users.

Learn your site’s organic traffic in GA4 by going to “Reports” > “Life cycle” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic acquisition.” Look for the table row labeled “Organic Search.”

Next, break down your organic traffic by page. So you know the specific content that’s resonating with your audience.

Click the “+” next to the “Session primary…Channel group)” table heading, and select “Page / screen” > “Landing page + query string.”

You’ll see the URL slugs of the pages bringing in the most organic traffic.

Just be aware that most brands are seeing significant impacts on their organic traffic with the rise of AI search. In fact, Wikipedia has seen an 8% traffic decrease from this time in 2024 that they think is largely due to AI search. 

The rise in AI search means it’s important to consider your organic traffic in tandem with other metrics to get a complete picture of your performance. 

Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings measure your content’s position in SERPs for specific keywords, revealing your SEO strategy’s effectiveness in targeting desired terms.

Use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool to monitor keyword positions and track changes over time. So you can gauge optimization progress. And compare your rankings against competitors’.

AI Visibility

AI visibility measures how prominent your brand is in AI-generated responses, such as Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini.

Semrush’s Position Tracking tool monitors whether your pages appear in AI Overviews for tracked keywords, helping you measure visibility within AI-enhanced SERPs.

Meanwhile, the AI Visibility Toolkit’s “Visibility Overview” report tells you how often AI tools mention your site in their responses.

The AI Visibility Toolkit also shows the prompts that lead to mentions of your site, and the specific pages cited.

Last but not least, Enterprise AIO helps larger sites track their brand mentions by AI tools, analyze these mentions’ sentiment, and compare their AI visibility against competitors’, among other features.

Branded Searches

Branded searches are searches containing your brand’s name or a close variation.

Changes to branded search volume could indicate your content’s effectiveness in maintaining or growing brand awareness (via SERPs, AI tools, or other sources), because users can’t search your brand if they aren’t aware of it.

Branded searches can also indicate the topics involving your brand that users are interested in, which can inspire your content creation efforts.

To track branded searches, use Organic Rankings. Which can monitor your rankings for and traffic from branded searches.

Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are references to your brand or your published content on external sites. Monitoring these mentions can sometimes reveal user interest in existing content, which helps you identify and replicate campaigns with high engagement.

Semrush’s Brand Monitoring app makes monitoring brand mentions easy. It lets you filter mentions by platform (e.g., LinkedIn) or content type (e.g., blog references), which can be used to see where your articles get shared or cited. Frequent mentions of a specific blog post signal audience interest.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed in search results like those Google provides, indicating your content’s visibility.

Find your Google Search impressions in Google Search Console (GSC) by clicking “Search results” and scrolling down to the report. View impressions by query (keyword), page, country, device, search appearance, and date.

Clicks

Clicks to your pages from SERPs can signal the effectiveness of your content’s title tag, meta description, and schema markup in producing organic listings that attract clicks.

View your clicks report from GSC’s “Search results” tab. You’ll see your clicks by query (keyword), page, country, device, search appearance, and date.

Backlinks

Backlinks in SEO refer to links pointing to your site from external sites, signaling credibility that can improve your search rankings. Tracking yours alongside competitors' can help you spot link-building opportunities.

For example, comparing your backlink profile to a competitor’s might reveal a reputable site that links to the competition but not to you. You could then create a link building campaign to earn a similar backlink, strengthening your site’s authority.

Track backlinks (yours and your rivals’) with Semrush Backlinks tool. Look for potential issues like lost links, which you can try to reclaim. 

Conversion and Revenue Metrics

Tracking these metrics shows your content’s effectiveness in getting users to take desired actions.

Leads

A lead is a contact with high potential to become a customer. Monitoring lead generation reveals how well your content attracts prospective buyers to support business growth.

For example, software company Contentsquare uses a “demo request” button on blog posts to gather leads. Like this:

Use a tool like HubSpot to track and monitor leads from your content.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action, like registering for your webinar or placing an order. Tracking conversion rates shows how effectively your content drives user action.

Track conversion rates (also known as key events) using GA4.

First, set up conversion tracking in GA4. Then, click “Reports” > “Engagement” > “Conversions” to view your conversion reports:

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on Investment (ROI) measures the profitability of your content efforts. Regularly reviewing these efforts can help with budget allocation, letting you invest more in content strategies that drive revenue.

Calculate ROI using the formula: 

ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100%.

Let’s say you spend $500 on content creation and earn $2,000 in revenue from these efforts. Your net profit is $1,500 ($2,000 - $500).

That’s an ROI of 300%. This indicates that your content investment is paying off.

Measure Content Performance with Semrush

Measure content performance with Semrush tools like Position Tracking, the AI Visibility Toolkit, and Brand Monitoring, which track metrics relating to SEO and AI visibility, social media engagement, and more.

If you have yet to expand your AI search footprint, get started with the AI Visibility Toolkit.