Important Growth Metrics for Creators: Creating and Promoting Content

Tracking metrics seems like you’re creating more work for yourself. But by tracking the right metrics, you can actually save yourself a ton of time and work.

Here’s the key: find the ideal combination of what you need to track that is actually relevant to your creator work.

If you don’t measure anything, you will feel like you’re throwing spaghetti at a wall and waiting to see what sticks. But if you track metrics you never look at or analyze, that’s also a waste of your time.

What metrics are most important for creators to track to understand and grow their content creation business? Below, we’ll break down the important metrics for creating and promoting content that we think every creator should have on their radar.

Get ready to feel really smart—like, right now.

Why is tracking metrics important?

In case the spaghetti imagery a few paragraphs ago didn’t stick with you, these are the four main ways that tracking metrics will help you understand and optimize your content creation:

1. Pay attention to the process and identify what works: Do you see a pattern that posting on a certain day gets you more engagement? Using certain hashtags results in more views? These insights are only visible when you’re measuring your metrics.
2. Know if you’re reaching your goals: While your goal might simply be “gain more followers,” you might also set more specific goals like “gain 10,000 more followers in the next 3 months.” Tracking your metrics helps you understand your progress towards those goals.
3. Create a strategy for growth: Maybe you find that a certain type of email drives more click rates than the rest. You can then create emails like this to drive fans to your content, products, or whatever else you want to promote and drive growth where it matters to you.
4. Stop wasting time on things that aren’t working: If a certain project or type of post isn’t helping you get the growth you want, it may be time to cut your losses and move on. It’s just as important to learn what isn’t working so you can save your time and energy. Being efficient is a smart business practice!

Overall, tracking metrics as a creator helps you take a more strategic approach to your content creation and business growth. Let’s dive in to the metrics that are important for creators across different niches and platforms. Some of these may be familiar to you, while others might be new metrics to keep on your radar.

Social media engagement metrics

The best place to start is with the direct fan engagement you receive on your posts—no matter what channel you post on. Here are key metrics to consider:

• Followers: A measurement of your audience size. You can have a thriving content business at any follower size (especially by creating UGC or finding brands who work with microinfluencers), but growing your following is a good indication that your content is resonating with a wider audience.
• Likes: A like can mean something different to every fan, but likes on any platform indicate that your content is resonating with your audience.
• Comments: Comments show that you’ve engaged your fans in some way—whether they’re agreeing with you, disagreeing with you, or interacting with other commenters, receiving more comments means you’ve said something that fans think is worth responding to.
• Saves: Saves might indicate that fans think your content is useful or helpful and want to come back to it later.
• Views/impressions: Views and impressions are measured differently on every platform, but more views and impressions show that you are getting more reach (through the algorithm, SEO, hashtags, or topical content)
• Watch time: This also varies by platform (for example, the watch times on a TikTok video might vary greatly from the watch times on a YouTube video) but longer watch times are indicative that fans find your content more engaging and valuable.
• Click through rate: For posts with a call to action, click through rate helps you measure the effectiveness of your CTA (you can calculate this as number of clicks divided by number of views)
• Traffic breakdown: The relative breakdown of traffic to your website or link in bio from different sources shows you where your engaged fans are coming from. This can be helpful to either double down on that channel, or invest more effort in other channels that you want to grow more. A link in bio tools like Beacons will show you this traffic breakdown across all of your connected channels.

Many of these metrics are not only helpful in understanding your own content creation—they’re also important metrics to showcase to potential brand partners to highlight the strength of your channels.

If you set up a Media Kit with automatically updating engagement stats, like on Beacons, these metrics will be automatically synced and always up to date across all of your channels.

Many of these metrics are not only helpful in understanding your own content creation—they’re also important metrics to showcase to potential brand partners to highlight the strength of your channels.

Email engagement metrics

Email is a super strong channel for communicating with your most engaged fans. Whether you’re new to email marketing or a seasoned pro, these are the most important metrics to measure your email performance:

• Open rate: The total number of unique opens divided by the number of emails delivered. Open rate is usually an indication of how interested fans are in your brand and subject line. A very low open rate can also indicate that your emails are being filtered into a spam or promotional inbox.
• Click through rate: The total number of unique clicks on links in your email divided by the number of emails delivered. A strong click through rate shows that fans want to learn more about the content in your emails.
• Unsubscribe rate: The number of unsubscribed users divided by the email delivered. When users unsubscribe, it is not always a bad thing. However, it’s important to make sure your unsubscribe rate isn’t too high or creeping up over time, because that shows that your content may not be resonating with fans.

Don’t worry—you don’t have to calculate these engagement rates yourself for every email you send. If you use an email marketing tool, like Beacons Email Marketing (which is designed specifically for creators), these rates will be automatically calculated for you and you’ll be able to see them for every email you send.

Outsource your brain: choose the right tools

Make a plan for yourself: which of these metrics are relevant for the content creation you're doing (or planning) now? How (and where) will you track them?

By using a suite of interconnected tools for creators, like Beacons, you'll have all of the data you need across all of your social media and promotional channels connected in one place. And that's not all—it will be presented to you in an easy-to-ready, accessible format along with custom insights on how you can grow based on your metrics. You can sign up for Beacons today to get access to this full suite of tools for free.

Looking to learn about even more metrics related to monetizing and running your creator business, check out our guide on Important Growth Metrics for Creators: Running Your Business.