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As someone who’s written a lot of content and created content strategies, I know how big of an investment it can be. If you don’t understand your content performance, it can be hard to know how effective your efforts are and whether the investment was worth it.

That’s why I think it’s important to take some time to understand important metrics for tracking the performance of your content, along with generally how to use them to gain meaningful insights into your content strategy. In this post, I’ll show you how.

Based on my experience working with multiple of my sites, including one that cracked 10 million views in a year, here’s your complete guide on how to conduct a content performance analysis.

Table of Contents

• What is content performance?
• Content Performance Metrics to Track
• Why You Should Track Content Performance
• How to Level Up Your Content Performance
• Start analyzing content performance today.

To assess content performance, you can use a variety of different metrics, including engagement, visibility, and revenue metrics. The basic idea is that these different metrics help you understand the performance of both individual pieces of content and your content strategy in general.

You can discover what content is getting the most attention, where audiences are finding your content, and how your content is working to achieve your business goals.

Beyond discovering where you are now, you can also find opportunities and weak points to improve your strategy going forward.

On that note, I want to transition to talking about some of the main reasons why you should track content performance.

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Why You Should Track Content Performance

In my experience, analyzing content performance is one of the most important parts of implementing a content marketing strategy. Otherwise, you’re essentially flying blind when it comes to assessing the actual impact of your content.

Despite that, only agreed that their organization measured content performance effectively, according to the 2025 Annual Content Marketing Survey from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

If your organization falls in that 52% who aren’t tracking content performance effectively, here are my thoughts on the three main reasons to track content performance. Hopefully they’re able to change your mind (and/or your stakeholders’ minds).

1. Optimize how you use resources.

To start, tracking content performance will help ensure that you’re most efficiently using your financial and human resources.

For example, if you discover that a certain type of content is driving a ton of conversions and offering a positive return on investment (ROI), you might want to double down and invest even more time and money into that type of content.

According to a , around half of all decision makers planned to raise their content marketing budgets in 2024. In total, 85% of respondents said that they would either increase or maintain their content spending. This matches the 2025 Annual Content Marketing Survey, which found that 80% of respondents planned to maintain or raise their content marketing budgets.

If you don’t know the ROI of your content, you might be underspending or overspending on your content marketing efforts and it will be difficult to effectively manage your resources.

2. Create a more effective content strategy.

In the , only 28% of respondents rated their content strategy as “very effective” or “extremely effective.”

Perhaps this is because 45% of respondents also said that their content strategies were not data-driven.

Conducting a content performance analysis can help you make your own strategy more data-driven and move it toward that “extremely effective” group.

By looking at the data, you’ll be able to answer the following important questions:

• What topics work best on my site?
• What content formats work best on my site?
• Where are visitors finding my content?
• How are visitors engaging with my content?

You can use all of these answers (and more) to help you make your content strategy more effective.

3. Boost conversion rates from your content.

Finally, tracking content performance can also help you boost your conversion rates and more effectively use your content to achieve your business goals.

In my experience, it can be easy for content marketers to overly focus on metrics like page views. While page views are certainly important, I think the most important metric is usually conversions.

That is, how effectively is your content helping you achieve your actual business goals, whether those are growing your email lists, generating leads, selling products/memberships, etc.?

By tracking conversion rates and trying to accurately attribute them to your content, you’ll be able to answer the following questions:

• What content format converts the best?
• What topics convert the best?
• What types of calls-to-action (CTA) convert the best?

At this point, I hope that you’re convinced about the necessity of tracking the performance of your content.

Now, I want to shift from the “why” into the “how.”

To generate an accurate content performance analysis, you’ll want to focus on a variety of different performance metrics across a few different categories:

• Engagement metrics.
• Visibility metrics (SEO, social media, etc.).
• Revenue metrics.

Below, I’ll take you through what I think are some of the most important metrics from my own experience analyzing content performance, along with how you can start tracking them for yourself.

Users and Views

Tracking the views and users lets you see how popular each piece of content is, along with how many people your entire content strategy is helping you connect with.

I recommend focusing on these three metrics:

• Users (active users). This metric counts the total number of unique users who have visited the page for your selected time period.
• Views. This metric counts the total number of page views for the selected time period. This number will always be greater than or equal to the number of users because each user must count as at least one page view, but one user could view the page multiple times within the selected time period (and therefore count as multiple views).
• New users. This metric counts the number of users who visited the page and have never visited your site before. For example, a regular reader of your site wouldn’t count as a new user, but someone who found your site for the first time in Google would.

In Google Analytics, you can track Active users and New users by going to Reports → Engagement → Landing page:

To view Active users and Views, you can go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens.

All of these metrics track the same basic idea: how popular a piece of content is. However, each metric comes at the question in a slightly different way, which can give you valuable insights into content performance.

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For example, if a piece of content has a lot of users and views, but a low proportion of new users, that could signal that the content resonates with your current audience, but isn’t effectively helping you connect with a new audience.

On the other hand, if a piece of content has a lower number of views but a very high proportion of new visitors, that could signal that the content is effectively drawing in a new audience, which could help you reach new customers and leads.

Even if the overall view numbers aren’t as impressive, the fact that it’s helping you reach new visitors could still make that type of content worth the investment.

Bounce Rate and Engaged Sessions

A piece of content’s bounce rate helps you track whether or not users find your content engaging and helpful.

The exact definition of bounce rate will depend on the analytics tool that you’re using.

In many tools, including 51吃瓜 Analytics and the now-deprecated Universal Analytics version of Google Analytics, bounce rate is defined as the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e., the percentage of visitors who navigated away from a page without viewing a second page on your site).

However, in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), bounce rate is defined as the percentage of non-engaged sessions on your site. Google defines an as a session that meets any of the following criteria:

• Lasts longer than 10 seconds.
• Has a .
• Has two or more screen or page views.

Regardless of which bounce rate definition you’re using, the basic idea is that a high bounce rate can often (but not always) indicate that users don’t find that piece of content engaging.

When you conduct a content performance analysis, you’ll generally want to prioritize important pages with a high bounce rate when choosing what content to improve.

To view bounce rate in GA4, you’ll need to follow these steps to add it to your reports. Once you add it, you’ll be able to see the bounce rate as a column like the example below.

Bonus tip: I think it’s important to note that whether or not a high bounce rate is “bad” really depends on the purpose of your page.

For example, if the purpose of the page is to send visitors to an affiliate offer on a third-party website, you would actually want every single visitor to leave your site and go to the affiliate offer, so a high number of single-page sessions might just indicate your page is working well. On the other hand, if visitors are just clicking the “back” button, that wouldn’t be a good thing.

To understand which situation applies to your page, you would also need to look at some of the other metrics that I’ll cover, such as conversions.

Time on Page and Average Engagement Time

Time on page, called average engagement time in GA4, measures how long users are engaging and interacting with a page on your site.

While the older version of Google Analytics calculated time on page as the time in between page views, GA4 calculates it as the average time that your page was in the foreground of users’ browsers. That is, the time that users are actively looking at your website, rather than just having it opened as a background tab.

In GA4, you can see this metric by going to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens or Landing page and looking at the Average engagement time per active user or session column.

As a general rule, a higher average engagement time means that visitors find your content interesting and are taking the time to engage with it.

I don’t think there’s a single “good” time to aim for — it really just depends on the purpose and length of each piece of content. However, it can be really useful as a comparative metric between similar pieces of content.

For example, if you find that one long-form blog post has an average engagement time that’s 3x another, that might be a sign that you need to find ways to improve the content with the lower time.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is defined as how long the user spends on a page after clicking through from a search engine results page (SERP) and before returning to the search results page.

It’s similar to the concepts of bounce rate and engaged sessions in the previous section, but I think it’s helpful to segment it into its own metric because it’s more focused on helping you assess whether or not the content matches search intent and satisfies searchers:

• A higher dwell time usually means that searchers think your content matches their queries.
• A lower dwell time might indicate some type of mismatch between your content and what people are looking for in Google.

Google Analytics doesn’t have a dedicated dwell time metric, but you can use the “Average engagement time per session” metric as a rough proxy — you just need to specifically look at the “organic search” traffic source.

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Here’s how I recommend doing it:

1. Go to Reports → Engagement → Landing page in your Google Analytics dashboard.
2. Click the plus (+) icon next to Landing page in the first column.
3. In the menu that appears, choose Traffic source → Cross-channel → Session default channel group.

Now, if you type “organic search” into the search box above the data table, you’ll be able to filter out the average engagement time per session metric for traffic from search engines.

Traffic Sources

A page’s traffic source report highlights all the different ways in which users came to that page. For example, whether they came from search engines, social media, email marketing, or paid ads.

One traffic source that I recommend putting a special emphasis on is organic search traffic, as this will let you track the number of visits you’re earning from search engines like Google.

To see traffic sources in Google Analytics, you can go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition or User acquisition.

These reports will give you the numbers for your site as a whole.

If you want to see the traffic sources for an individual page, you can add a filter to the page. Click the Add filter button at the top to create a filter.

Then, select Landing page + Query string as the dimension and choose contains or exactly matches the URL slug of the page, depending on how specific you want to be. This will update the report to show data for only that page.

Keyword Rankings in Search Engines

Tracking keyword rankings is another essential part of performing a content performance analysis. Essentially, you want to be able to track your site’s ranking positions in Google and other search engines for important keywords.

There are tons of great third-party keyword rank tracking tools that you can consider, and I do use these as part of my own content analysis stack.

However, you can also get accurate data straight from Google — for free! All you need to do is set up your site with Google Search Console, which will let you track the average rankings for individual pages and keywords on your site.

While Google Search Console is really handy by itself, I personally prefer enhancing it by using an additional tool like or .

Essentially, these tools let you sync all of your Google Search Console data and then also add some extra helpful options. For example, SEO Crawl lets me add annotations when I change a page (such as refreshing/updating content). This lets me easily see how rankings have moved before/after I made the change.

Personally, I find myself using a mix of third-party rank tracking tools, Google Search Console (directly), and SEO Crawl. They all have their own advantages, so I like just using a bit of everything.

Other Keyword Performance Metrics (Impressions, Clicks, and CTR)

While I put a lot of emphasis on tracking the keyword rankings of your content, I think that the other keyword performance metrics in Google Search Console can also be useful for analyzing content performance.

Beyond the average keyword ranking position, Google Search Console also gives you three other metrics:

• Impressions. This is the number of people who saw your website in search results.
• Clicks. This is the number of people who clicked on your website in search results.
• CTR (click-through rate). This is the percentage of people who clicked on your site after seeing it in the search results. In mathematical terms, it’s clicks / impressions * 100.

Source

You can view these metrics by going to Performance → Search results in Google Search Console:

In my experience, having all of this data can be really helpful for assessing search performance, especially in an age where Google is often changing the design of its search engine results pages (SERPs).

For example, consider a situation where your page’s average position has stayed the same, but the impressions have dropped. This could indicate that people are losing interest in that topic, either because of normal seasonality or just because the topic is no longer as relevant to the world.

In the latter situation, it could be a sign that you need to focus on different types of content to match search trends.

Or, consider a situation where a page’s average position and impressions have stayed the same but its clicks and CTR have dropped. This could be a sign that your page’s SEO is still performing well, but Google might have changed the layout of its SERP in a way that negatively affects your page.

Unfortunately, this is something you might not be able to control, so it might be a sign that you need to target different keywords that aren’t affected by the layout change.

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Leads, Subscribers, and/or Sales (“Conversions”)

If you’re like most publishers, you’re publishing content with a specific goal in mind (though you also might be interested in general brand awareness). That goal could be generating leads for your business, getting people to subscribe to your newsletter, selling them one of your own products, or selling them a third-party product to earn an affiliate commission.

To make it simple, I’m just going to group all of these different actions together and call them “conversions.” A “conversion” is when a visitor performs the action that you want them to perform.

If you want to be able to judge whether or not your content is achieving its business goals, you need to track these actions.

In my experience, accurately tracking these types of conversions is one of the hardest things about tracking the performance of your content.

One big difficulty is that attributing a conversion to a specific piece of content can be difficult. For example, a reader might find your site via one piece of content but not convert until later on.

Another difficulty is that most web analytics tools won’t track conversions out of the box. Unless you’re using , which has to track form submissions and lead generation, you might need to set up additional tracking to accurately attribute conversions to individual pieces of content on your site, such as setting up events or defining goals in Google Analytics.

If you’re using Google Analytics, I recommend reading these help articles and blog posts to learn more about setting up conversion tracking for your content:

Bonus tip: While I have seen some sites also add UTM parameters to internal links to track conversion attribution, I don’t think this is a good idea because it also causes its own problems, even in GA4 (using UTM parameters to track attribution for external sources is totally fine, though). Instead, I recommend using event tracking as I linked above. Or, you can even to use if needed.

Double bonus tip: If you’re performing a content analysis for a site that you monetize primarily with display ads, you can use each page’s ad RPM as a substitute for conversions.

Conversion Rate

A page’s conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who perform whatever action it is you want them to, whether that’s converting to a lead, making a purchase, clicking an affiliate link, etc.

For example, if the goal of your page is to get people to subscribe to your email list, the mathematical representation of the page’s conversion rate would be subscribers / views * 100.

Source

If you’ve set up goal/event tracking per the previous step, you should be able to view key events in Google Analytics by looking at the various engagement reports and the Key events column. Or, you can create your own custom engagement report.

Or, an even simpler option is to use , which comes with built-in tools to track in-content conversion rates.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Content ROI refers to the revenue that you’ve gained from your content marketing efforts versus the amount you’ve spent.

In my experience, calculating an exact ROI can be difficult because of the nature of content marketing.

First off, it can just generally be difficult to set up conversion attribution for content marketing, as I discussed in the previous sections.

Additionally, if you’re publishing content that targets users earlier in the awareness funnel, there might be a long lag time between a user first engaging with your content and that person becoming a paying customer.

It’s also hard to put a specific dollar amount on “brand awareness,” which can be another big benefit of a strong content marketing strategy.

On the other hand, some types of content make it much easier to calculate the ROI. For example, if you’re publishing a review of a product for affiliate marketing, my experience has shown me that it’s pretty easy to track an exact affiliate marketing ROI:

• Use targeted tracking links so that you can see the exact amount of affiliate revenue generated by the post.
• Compare that affiliate revenue to whatever it cost you to produce the review.

As much as possible, you should try to set up your tracking in such a way that you can accurately attribute value to your content marketing.

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How to Level Up Your Content Performance

Now that I’ve covered some of the most important metrics to track content performance, I want to finish by sharing a few additional tips for getting the most from tracking the performance of your content.

1. Use helpful analytics software.

It’s impossible to perform a content performance analysis without data, so using web analytics tools is an absolute must. However, not all web analytics tools are created equal when it comes to giving you the tools to track the performance of your content.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tools and, with a little bit of customization, it can give you all of the data that you need for content performance. You just might need to set up event tracking in a way that lets you track results from your content.

If you want a more out-of-the-box solution for tracking content performance, you could also use a tool like for your content marketing efforts.

Not only does 51吃瓜 Content Hub include a content management system and AI tools to help you publish content more efficiently, but it also includes built-in web analytics to help you track important content performance metrics.

2. Set up tracking from day one (if possible).

As someone who’s had to add content performance tracking to an existing website, I can say with certainty that it’s not a very fun process.

It’s better than not being able to conduct a performance analysis, but I really found myself wishing that I had just set things up from day one.

Not only does it make it simpler to work on everything (because you don’t have hundreds or thousands of pieces of content yet), but it also means that you’ll have more historical data to draw from.

Of course, if you’re reading this post while working on an existing website, I know that this point won’t be very helpful to you. But if you’re reading this while debating if investing in setting up content performance tracking on your new site is something you should do now or something that can wait until later, I really recommend putting in the time to set it up from day one.

3. Consider the purpose of each piece of content when comparing metrics.

As I’ve tried to highlight when talking about the metrics above, there’s no single “benchmark” to aim for when looking at the data for individual pieces of content.

Instead, you need to consider the purpose of your content when you’re looking at the metrics above.

For example, if your analytics tool uses the original “single page session” definition, having a high bounce rate could be “good” for one piece of content and “bad” for another piece of content. Again, here’s how that could work out:

• If you publish a review that you want to use to drive affiliate traffic to a third-party website, having a lot of single-page sessions is not a bad thing if you’re still generating a lot of affiliate clicks.
• If you publish a piece of content that you want to drive more engagement with your site or convert them on your own website, having a lot of single-page sessions is probably a sign that you need to improve that piece of content to help it achieve its goals.

4. Create your own content performance dashboard for easier analysis.

A lot of the content performance metrics above can be spread over multiple tools and/or multiple screens within the same tool.

Once you start figuring out which content performance metrics matter the most for your website, I recommend trying to create custom reporting dashboards to make it easier to access these key metrics.

If you’re using Google Analytics, one option is to create custom reports within Google Analytics or customize the existing reports to your needs, such as adding a bounce rate column to the Pages and screens report.

Or, if you want to go even further, you could consider using something like to create custom reports. Looker Studio will allow you to mix data from multiple sources, such as including web analytics data from Google Analytics, search analytics from Google Search Console, and more if you want to.

5. Track performance over time.

Running a content performance analysis is not a one-time thing. It’s something that you should keep track of over time so that you can see whether or not your content efforts are improving and continuing to offer a positive ROI.

What’s more, showing historical performance can also help you achieve buy-in from stakeholders who might otherwise be on the fence.

Start analyzing content performance today.

If you want to understand the effectiveness of your content, I think it’s essential to learn about content performance analysis. While there can be difficulties with accurately tracking some metrics (such as conversions and revenue attribution), you can still get a lot of value from looking at the data surrounding your content marketing efforts.

If you take the time to properly analyze your performance, you’ll be able to optimize your resources more effectively, create a better content strategy, and earn more conversions from your content marketing.

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