Pageviews the Right Metric for Content Marketing Success?

Most of our expansion stage portfolio companies have adopted content management marketing… It seems that pageviews and reduced bounce rates are the metrics du-jour. But are those metrics the right ones? I agree with Douglas Karr’s perspective on the topic

I contend that creating Competitive Positioning through content management marketing really boils down to the classic metrics: Qualified leads generated and the conversion rate of qualified leads to qualified opportunities.

Where marketers typically fail is in linking content marketing with the associated qualified leads generated. 

The approach I preach to tackling this issue: go back and figure out the trends of leads generated on your website with a source tag typically labeled as “your company name” or “Other” or “Unknown.” These are leads that are often neglected by your marketing team, but typically constitute 20-40% of leads generated. These leads are also ones that you can attribute to word of mouth, which is another name for content marketing. Once you launch your content marketing program, track these lead categories, and attribute them to that program. And voila! You have your metric.