Over the past decade, content marketing has become an essential tool for B2B SaaS companies. It’s a realm where thought leadership matters a lot. The combination of relatively long sales cycles paired with purchasing decisions that rely heavily on credibility make content uniquely important. When it’s time to pull out the credit card, B2B SaaS companies often win through brand positioning and expertise more than features and pricing.
That’s why SaaS content marketing drives scalable growth, even and especially in competitive markets. Whether you’re speaking to 50 potential customers or 5,000, the same whitepapers, webinars, blog posts, and social media content can be persuasive. Content marketing for B2B SaaS improves your SEO, helps you rank in search, generates leads, and establishes your brand authority.
But that’s only true if you have a smart SaaS content marketing strategy on your side. You can’t just randomly start your content marketing efforts and hope for the best. Instead, you need to create content across your entire sales funnel based on the topics your target audience cares most about. Content types differ depending on the stage of decision-making your audience is in. And, of course, you need to track your success to understand whether your efforts and investment are actually working and adjust accordingly.
The Power of Tracking the Right SaaS Content Marketing Metrics
It’s impossible to talk content strategy without talking about metrics. They’re the goal posts you’re working towards and the measuring stick to help you understand whether what you’re doing is working. Just as importantly, they’re also what let’s you know where tweaks and changes could improve your ROI.
The right metrics can become your roadmap for optimizing your content marketing strategy. Along the way, they’ll also help you overcome challenges like the SEO plateau, which happens when your ranking efforts are stagnating and content no longer breaks through. Even in the most competitive industries, tracking the right metrics can help your SaaS business maximize limited resources.
This guide is all about the right metrics: what they are, how you can track them, and what they’ll help you improve. Each of them can help you improve your content marketing efforts. Together, they’re the foundation of what makes your B2B SaaS content marketing thrive.
1. Organic Traffic Growth
In many ways, organic traffic growth is the most fundamental content marketing metric. It describes the portion of your target audience that finds their way to your website naturally. Unlike traffic from paid ads, your organic traffic is a result of audiences finding you because your content brought them there.
As a result, organic traffic growth is a core metric for SEO success. Ranking for more relevant keywords—and ranking higher—makes it more likely that people will find your site naturally, without the need for paid advertising.
For content marketing optimization, organic traffic growth is most closely related to brand awareness. The reason is simple: This metric measures how many people find you and how that number of people grows over time. It’s an early funnel content marketing metric that most closely tracks your content marketing success in the earliest stages of your target audience’s customer journey.
Tools and Techniques for Tracking Organic Traffic Growth
To discuss the most foundational content marketing metrics we must talk about the granddaddy of content marketing measurement: Google Analytics (or GA for short). As you might expect, the comprehensive website analytics tool is perfect for measuring organic traffic, thanks to a built-in organic traffic report you can track over time.
Combine Google Analytics with Google Search Console, and the results get even more specific. It enables you to build reports like Google’s pre-made organic search traffic report, breaking down exactly where your traffic comes from, how it changes over time, what devices are most common in generating traffic, and more.
From there, you can break it down even further. For example, consider segmenting your traffic data by content performance, which helps you understand exactly which pages (and associated keywords) are most responsible for driving traffic.
How to Prioritize Organic Traffic Growth in Your Content Marketing Efforts
Don’t just track the metric—shape your SaaS content strategy to improve it. Regular traffic audits, for example, can help you understand which of your content has resonated with your audience the most. That allows you to build more like it and prioritize it in your promotional efforts, maintaining organic traffic growth over time.
Another opportunity to leverage the metric for content success is taking a look at where traffic growth has stagnated. For example, you might find old blogs that are no longer performing and converting like they once were. By updating and refreshing them, you can give them a jump start that ultimately benefits your entire content strategy. Search engines that rhyme with Shmoogle tend to reward freshness, so content refreshes are your friend.
2. Search Engine Keyword Rankings
Search engine optimization and successful content marketing are inseparable. One can quite literally not exist without the other. SEO is a primary goal, and it is only possible with an intentional content strategy built on keyword research and optimized content. So it’s no surprise that search engine and keyword rankings are a core metric to track.
Especially in competitive industries, this is a critical KPI. You have to make sure that, when it comes to high-value keywords, your brand and website are part of the results page and online conversation. It’s difficult to succeed in SEO as a personal injury lawyer if you don’t rank at or near the top of keywords like “best personal injury lawyers near me.”
Even in less competitive industries than law, of course, the same truth remains. Research shows that the top three organic Google results get more than 50% of all clicks and that, on average, moving from the second to the first spot improves your click-through rate by nearly 75%.
The Factors Influencing Search Engine Rankings
Improving consistently in search engine rankings for relevant keywords is not easy, especially as the internet is more and more crowded with content. But it’s also not impossible once you know what factors play a role in how search engines rank pages and websites:
- Keyword optimization: How naturally are you integrating the keyword or phrase for which you are trying to rank into your content, headlines, and page title? If you’re the Best Seattle Plumber for Seattle Emergency Plumbing and Seattle Drain Repair and Pipes, well, that’s a lot of keywords but not a great user experience.
- Internal linking: Are you creating a web of content from the keyword-optimized landing page to other pages on your website that dive deeper into related pages?
- Backlink quality: Are other high-credibility websites linking to the keyword-optimized page? Bonus points if you can get .gov, .org, or .edu sites to link to you.
- Search intent: Is the content you’re providing a match for the reason your users may be using the keyword? Are you answering their spoken and unspoken questions?
Each of these factors requires careful strategy to get right for each of the pages and keywords for which you’re trying to rank. Fortunately, you can still get some quick wins in the process.
How to Get Quick SEO and Keyword Ranking Wins
Start with intentional keyword research. Look for keywords that hit the sweet spot between difficulty to rank and competitiveness on services like Moz Keyword Explorer. That might mean focusing on long-tail keywords, which are not only less competitive but also more likely to communicate the search intent you should optimize for.
From there, optimize not just your body content but also your headers, meta descriptions, and alt texts. The more naturally you can integrate your target keyword throughout your entire content, the better. Finally, make sure that you can incorporate at least 2-3 internal links to other relevant pages and blog posts on your site for every new page of content you publish. Building a beautiful, rich tree of interconnected content across your site will go a long way.
3. Conversion Rates on Content
Getting seen on search engines and getting users onto your page through organic traffic is only part of the battle. No one cares, and your SaaS business will not benefit, until your revenue improves—and that’s where conversion rates come in.
In SaaS content marketing, conversion rates tend to define key actions like sign-ups for free trials, requests for demos, and downloads of comprehensive resources like a cost comparison guide with competitors. Webinars that explore the platform in more detail might also count. Basically – whatever you’re asking the user to do on the page, are they doing it?
These conversions matter because they tend to relate closely to buying decisions. A user requesting a demo is no longer just browsing but almost ready to make a call on subscribing to your software. Tracking conversion rates helps you better understand which parts of your content strategy are working to drive subscribers and revenue.
How to Identify High-Converting Content
Google Analytics can once again help identify your high-converting content, thanks to its Goals feature. The feature, which does require some setup, allows you to track exactly where users are taking the actions most predictive of a subscription in the near future.
But you don’t have to stop there. Hotjar, for example, helps you understand conversion journeys on a deeper level, like how your users got to the conversion or what they read immediately before they decided to take action. Meanwhile, A/B testing tools like Optimize.ly allow you to evaluate the performance of the tools necessary for high conversion rates, like the design, placement, and language of your CTA buttons.
Always compare content using consistent metrics. Being specific helps you see which pieces are performing and which ones need improvement to drive conversions.
Optimizing Your Content for Higher Conversion Rates
With the tracking in place, look to take specific steps to boost your conversion rates. Examples might include creating stronger calls to action on your content pieces or testing which placement of CTA buttons performs best. Should you offer a demo request form at the beginning, middle, or end of a key content piece about your solution’s functionality?
You can also go deeper, like personalizing email follow-ups to more general content.A button within the content may not be as effective as a follow-up email sent after someone reads your competitor price comparison guide, especially when that email offers deeper insights and answers lingering questions. Sometimes, even the smallest tweaks toward personalization and personal relevance can pay off.
4. Bounce Rate and Time on Page
Think of bounce rate as the ugly stepchild of conversion rate that still needs some love. Unlike conversion rates, which indicate an interest and movement towards a purchase, bounce rate will tell you how many of your visitors are so disinterested that they not only fail to convert but jump ship entirely without bothering to visit any other page on your site.
Time on page, meanwhile, is self-explanatory in showing how long you can keep your audience’s attention with a given piece of content. Together, bounce rate and time on page act as indicators of the relevance of your content based on what users were hoping to see when they first came to visit.
Everyone loves to track success metrics. Bounce rate and time on page show that sometimes, it’s just as important to track what we’ll call failure metrics. Doing so will uncover some surprising (and potentially ugly) truths about some of your content. But it also helps you understand where you can make improvements if you know how to best frame your next steps.
Diagnosing Your High-Bounce-Rate-Content
Tools like Google Analytics (there it is again) help to track your bounce rate and time on page. The more important question behind the what is the why: diagnosing exactly what caused users on pages with higher than usual bounce rates to, well, bounce.
That means using additional tools to analyze user behaviors. Microsoft Clarity, for example, recently released a comprehensive dashboard with tools like:
- Heatmaps that show where users tend to click
- Scroll depth measures that show how far down the page users go before they bounce
- Reporting on metrics like dead clicks (on text that isn’t a hyperlink but probably should be), rage clicks (rapid, repeated clicks out of frustration that nothing is happening), and quick backs (to the previous page)
Other tools, like Hotjar, offer similar insights, visuals, and statistics.
How to Refine Your Content to Mimize Bounce Rates and Maximize Time on Page
Start with readability. The most effective content is easy to read and skim, using short paragraphs and plenty of lists instead of long blocks of text. If you’re into Flesch and Kinkaid, aim for a score no lower than 60.
Adding visuals can also help engage users, especially when those videos are interactive elements that cause them to stick around and try them out. But always keep your end goal in mind: your content, text, and visuals need to support and satisfy user intent to ensure a happy experience with no need to bounce quickly.
5. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
In the context of B2B SaaS content, customer acquisition cost describes the cost it takes to get a new subscriber. It’s typically calculated by using the total spend on advertising and sales in a given period (a month or a quarter), divided by the total number of new subscribers gained in that same period.
Customer acquisition cost reflects how efficient your content marketing and overall marketing strategy is. If you have higher costs, only an increase in new customers could justify that and keep your CAC low. Lowering marketing and/or sales costs, on the other hand, lowers the overall costs as long as the number of new subscribers doesn’t go down with it.
Other metrics can have an impact or even predict your CAC, as well. For example, creating content that’s high-converting is likely to lead to more new subscribers, which lowers CAC. No metric lives in isolation, so knowing where CAC stands for your industry and your business type will be essential.
Balancing CAC and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
While you need to know how much it costs to get a new customer, whether or not your current metric is good depends largely on the value you derive from them. A $50 cost to acquire a new annual subscriber is high if that annual subscription is only $20 but low when it’s at $200.
You can calculate your CAC and CLTV as follows:
- CAC = Total Cost of Marketing and Sales Expenses in Period [x]/ Total Number of Customers Gained in Period [x]
- CLTV = (Average Revenue Per User * Gross Margin) / Churn Rate
The two should not be even, and CAC should certainly never be higher than CLTV unless you want your SaaS business to run a deficit. Ideally, the ratio of CLTV to CAC should be 4:1, which means that your customer lifetime value should be 4x your cost to acquire a customer. That way, the revenue generated from customers can pay not just for your sales and marketing expenses but the cost to run the entire business.
Reducing Your SaaS CAC Through Content Marketing
Because CAC is an efficiency metric, reducing it through content marketing means finding efficiencies in your marketing efforts. For example, you can repurpose existing content into new formats rather than creating it from scratch. An existing whitepaper or trends report could become multiple emails, blog posts, and social media posts.
Consider creating targeted lead nurturing series, as well. Relevant emails can help to prompt users to take that conversion step without having to spend extra money on ads or new content. Similarly, investing in evergreen resources that can help your business for years instead of the month they were posted can also help minimize resource investments.
6. Lead Quality (MQL to SQL Ratio)
Getting leads into your funnel is crucial for follow-ups. But if those leads are low in quality, they won’t ever amount to customers or revenue. When it comes to SaaS leads, quality will always trump quantity.
Think about the impact that high-quality leads can have. They’ll require fewer follow-ups or convincing messages. If you get leads that are high-quality enough, you can even shorten your sales cycle as a result, driving a faster route to revenue that ultimately helps your SaaS company succeed.
Unfortunately, lead quality isn’t always easy to monitor. Because you can’t just count the numbers, you might think that you have to look into the future to know whether the new database contacts you’re generating will convert. Thanks to the MQL to SQL ratio, there’s a way.
How to Track MQL to SQL Conversions
Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are prospects who have shown at least some interest in your product. If you convert a lead because they want to learn more information about your SaaS platform rather than just buying a database of your target audience, those leads are already MQLs.
But they’re not SQLs (sales-qualified leads) yet. That term refers to leads who have engaged with you enough to show they’re ready for the final sales pitch. Those are the leads you’re driving towards in your entire lead nurturing process. So, to track lead quality, you’ll want to look at the MQL to SQL ratio.
To track that ratio, you’ll need a CRM tool like HubSpot that can help you define both types of leads, as well as the average of MQLs that turn into SQLs. In B2B SaaS, the benchmark to aim for is about 13%. Set up a CRM report so you can track trends and movements in your ratio and see if your middle-of-funnel content is working.
How to Create Content that Directly Appeals to High-Quality Leads
Here’s a simple truth: if you have high-quality leads in the funnel from the beginning, your MQL to SQL ratio will skyrocket. That means making sure you give high-quality leads a good reason to convert.
Case studies are a great place to start because you know potential customers are looking for them as evidence that your platform works. Comparison pages with other potential SaaS solutions serve a similar role. Finally, consider content that directly addresses potential buyer objections, which can both build credibility and proactively answer questions your leads may have later on.
7. Content ROI
In many ways, return on investment (ROI) is the holy grail of any marketing effort, and arguably any effort in business. Everyone wants to know whether the investment they make returns actual revenue. The problem is that in content marketing, ROI is notoriously difficult to measure.
Think about it. How many subscription dollars did that last blog post bring in? Do you know if one of your case studies results in more customers than another? How about your explainer video and its exact revenue-related role in reducing churn?
But marketing leaders need that tangible ROI. It’s the clearest way to justify your budget and the time, effort, and resources invested in content that turns awareness into conversions. Here’s how you do it.
Measuring Your ROI From Content Campaigns
There is no single best way to measure content ROI, but one option comes closest: associate each piece of content with leads generated, and then tag those leads and calculate the revenue they ultimately result in. If each of your content pieces is attached to an inquiry form, that tagging can happen automatically, at which point your CRM can take care of the tracking.
Of course, that approach requires quite a lot of setup and the right software. There are some more general options, as well.
For example, if you can’t track leads generated from individual pieces of content through to subscriber conversion, you can calculate the average value of a lead by dividing your average customer lifetime value by the percentage of leads that turn into customers. That way, if a blog post generates 5 leads and on average 40% of your leads turn into subscribers, you can estimate that the blog post might have generated the equivalent of 2 subscribers’ worth of revenue.
Maximizing Your ROI With Evergreen Content
Once you start looking at your content from a revenue and ROI standpoint, you begin to realize that pieces offering only short-term or time-specific value—relevant for just a few weeks or months—tend to have little lasting impact. A blog post that will be irrelevant in a week simply doesn’t have enough staying power to generate enough leads to justify its existence.
Instead, start looking for more evergreen content. Data-rich reports can be immensely helpful in this endeavor, especially if they’re gated behind a sign-up (inquiry) form. But even blog posts can help if you can continue to optimize them and add new pieces of data or information as it becomes available and relevant.
8. Engagement Metrics (Shares, Likes, and Comments)
On the other end of the spectrum from ROI is engagement, particularly on social media. Think of this metric as the vibes of your overall content strategy—but vibes that you can actually track and optimize over time.
Social media signals like shares, likes, and comments may not be predictive of immediate revenue, but they do have their own value. As more of your target audience interacts with your content on social media, the reach of that content (and your brand alongside it) will expand.
Meanwhile, posts and content pieces with high social media engagement also build brand authority over time. If you can get your audience’s peers, whose opinion they trust, to share your content or comment on it, they’ll transfer some of that credibility to your brand.
Where to Prioritize B2B Social Media Engagement
Social media strategy is very different for B2B SaaS marketing than it might be for consumer products. LinkedIn is the primary platform, tailor-made for reaching potential prospects who are in the mood to hear about potential business solutions. But it’s not the only option, either.
Facebook can still be effective if you’re able to build an audience there. While still being used primarily for personal purposes, business communities have sprung up that might be relevant for your content marketing. Twitter/X is similar, with a slightly heavier sampling on business audiences.
Don’t discount other communities, either. Slack and WhatsApp groups, for example, might offer relevant channels to reach business leaders as they discuss topics relevant to your niche. Spend some time searching through groups that might be relevant to your business
9. Lifetime Value of Content (LVC)
You’ve heard about customer lifetime value (CLV), but it’s also worth considering the lifetime value of the content you create. Understanding the true worth of a single piece of content can offer clear insight into its role in driving your growth.
Thinking about your Content Lifetime Value can be super helpful in improving and optimizing your content strategy over time. Tracking each piece (and especially your most high-performing pieces) can generate awareness, increase leads, and boost revenue over time, sometimes for years. If you can track it, this metric can help you understand exactly which pieces of content are worth refreshing and promoting to continue driving those results.
How to Track Content Performance Over Time
Similar to some of the other metrics on this list, the lifetime value of content can be difficult to track. Fortunately, several tools can help you automate the process without having to spend hours as a content marketer trying to become a math wizard.
SEMrush and Ahrefs are especially valuable pieces to calculate LVC for you. Ahrefs, for example, lets you track traffic value over time by estimating how much it would cost to generate the same traffic through paid ads targeting the keywords your content ranks for organically.
These reports often reveal one key insight: the value of your top-performing content doesn’t grow gradually but increases exponentially over time. These pieces need some time to catch on, but once they do, traffic leads to more backlinks, leading to more credibility, leading to more traffic, and so on.
How to Strategically Increase Your CLV
Once you track your content’s lifetime value, you can begin to understand where to focus your efforts. Since returns can accelerate over time, keeping existing pieces of content fresh and relevant can have a drastic impact.
Periodic content updates are an important part of the process. For example, take a look at well-performing content to see where you can expand your internal links, expand on relevant sections, or add media like video. Keep tracking your CLV, and see if those tweaks make a difference in driving additional traffic and value.
10. Customer Retention and Upsell Impact
Finally, don’t underestimate the potential value and impact of successful SaaS content marketing on your existing customers. It’s easy to think about content strategy as primarily designed to drive new subscriptions. But with the right strategy in place, you can also retain your existing subscribers at higher rates, reducing churn, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving their lifetime value.
For example, consider the potential benefits of content built around better understanding your platform. In both knowledgebase formats and onboarding scenarios, that content can play a major role in helping user adoption and buy-in when they first sign on. Especially if your software is complex or designed for larger teams, this content can play a major role in their retention.
In other words: think of some of your content as supporting the existing customer and subscriber experience. The more you can leverage it to improve their satisfaction, the more effective you can make it.
Content Marketing as an Upsell Opportunity
Beyond retention, the right content can also help to upsell your subscribers onto higher tiers. Consider, for example, a lower-tier subscriber looking to accomplish something that only a higher tier enables them to do. The natural result is frustration, but a well-placed tutorial can help them understand exactly how the higher tier might help accomplish their goals.
Case studies have similar success potential. They showcase the possibilities of your SaaS solution, which can prompt subscribers to want to seek out these same benefits and goals. The right content pieces can offer your sales team some great evidence to point to as they look to make that upsell pitch.
How to Measure Retention-Focused Content Performance
Some of the best ways to track the performance of your retention-focused content comes from intelligence your sales team will generate. They’ll be able to tell you which tutorials and case studies resonate most. But that’s just the qualitative side; you can also examine the quantitative metrics.
Page views and time on page matter just as much here as they do for awareness and conversion-focused content. But here, it’s also useful to go deeper. For example, the number of repeat visits can tell you whether a customer found your content valuable enough to return to it multiple times. The number of social shares can have a similar takeaway.
Finding the Right Metrics to Propel Your B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
The metrics in this guide cover every stage of an effective content marketing strategy. They help you measure how well your content drives awareness, generates leads, converts customers, and supports retention. They’ll also tell you when something isn’t working.
Together, these metrics form a solid foundation for building and refining a high-performing content marketing strategy. Let these metrics guide your content creation and optimization, and the results will follow over time.
As you might expect with such a varied set of metrics, tracking them can become complex. And of course, even the best tracking only matters if you can turn the takeaways into action and improve your content as a result. That’s not easy to pull off, but it’s also where finding the right help might just be what you need.
Verblio has become a leader in content marketing not just because our pool of writers can produce the right content for the right situation, but because we can help with more than content. With services like Verblio Plus and Verblio Enterprise, we can manage your entire content marketing strategy—from tailored insights to the planning, production, and evaluation of every piece of content. We’re hands-on so you can be hands-off.
Done right, content marketing can be a powerful force that propels your B2B SaaS business to long-term, sustainable growth and success. Producing content, tracking its success, knowing when to optimize, and finding constant improvement opportunities is a never ending cycle. It’s not glamorous, but it’s absolutely essential to fueling B2B SaaS growth.
The metrics listed in this guide give you the recipe for success. Now, it’s time to implement them, either through your own strategy or with a partner like Verblio. Go forth and conquer, or chat with us and we can help.
