Our Processes
Published on
November 5, 2025
Developer Content Marketing Metrics & Interactive Charts
Milica Maksimović
Co-founder, COO
I’ve been working with tech founders for over 10 years. Over time, I’ve come up with my own system of working on content for developers. Measuring the success of your content is hard, like, honestly, one of the most difficult things you can do. At the same time, it’s extremely important to get it properly set up.
Calculating the success of your developer content efforts is difficult when you’re doing it for the first time. However, when you have a system in place and you know what you want to measure and how to connect the tools you need, then it’s a breeze.
In this post, I’ll show you the practical side of the Dirty Pirate Metrics and what your dashboards should look like for the first stages of this funnel when you’re targeting developers.
In case you haven’t yet, check out the first part of our series, where we break down the framework itself. Here, we will go through all the stages and show you which numbers are relevant to track for every step in the Dirty Pirate Metrics funnel.
The foundation is the first step in our framework. It determines the size and the type of the developers you cater to. Do they have specific needs? Are they tied to certain tools/frameworks?
Another question worth asking is whether your product is truly language-agnostic. And, if it covers multiple frameworks, are all features equally available to all of them?
Let’s take a CI company as an example. The size of your audience is largely defined by the number of the languages you support.
Next, you need to consider workflows: are you as good for a monolithic app, or can you also meet the needs of a distributed system? How about multi-step deployments? Different env support? Rollbacks? Even in a hypothetical scenario where your platform performs flawlessly across all these areas, you’ll soon realize that achieving equal success among all developers is nearly impossible.
Your limitation lies in the language/app maturity level, as well as the number of developers who are using the said language. In situations like these, the smartest thing to do is decide which developers you want to focus on first.
Outline who actually needs your tool: when does the problem arises and which types of companies experience these issues? Talk to users, connect the dots, and create a map.
Let’s say you’re the first to support something for Rust or Elixir devs. The size of your potential user base doesn’t matter if none of your competitors support the said languages. You get to win over the new market and potentially gain even more users than if you were competing with everyone else in the JS/Python space.
Even though many tech founders dream of seeing their tool adopted by large companies, they need to ask themselves whether their tool and their team are ready to face this challenge.
Stability is often associated to being trusted by large companies, like Docker, for instance. Our client, kapa.ai, is used by numerous enterprise-level companies including the well-known whale mentioned above. But, their product can scale with any team size and adapts to all product requirements. They have all the necessary certifications and the patience to endure long sales cycles. For example, they are prepared to wait for months before the first payment arrives (which is a standard when you work with large companies).
The question is, can your product do the same? Or does it realistically break under a heavier load? Once you’ve addressed these matters honestly, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to chase enterprise-level companies just because you think adding them to your client lists sounds impressive.
The best way to start is by creating a Venn diagram.
The foundation is the first step in building an effective GTM and content marketing strategy. It all starts with your product in its current form. As it evolves, your strategy should evolve as well.
From that initial Venn diagram, we move on to the next one, which defines the audience and the general direction for your content.
When you brainstorm new topics for your blog, they should ideally be tailored for the groups identified above. If there are no matches and the topic doesn’t resonate with any of the groups, then it’s likely not a good fit for your strategy.
And when you’re just starting out, it’s critical that you write content for the people you can realistically convert down the line.
Don’t get caught up in impressions or the potential reach of social media. It’s all just noise.
Instead, focus on the people who found you through different channels and landed on your website. Identify which channels bring the most traffic, then think about optimizing those.
When it comes to measuring success, think of it this way: the people who have come to you are the ones you want to entertain, retain, and eventually convert to paying customers. It is important to look at visitors from three angles:
This is your top of the funnel. Ideally, a visitor comes upon a really good post we’ve created for you, becomes interested in the services you offer, and explores your landing page and the documentation. (As a side note, if you believe landing pages drive conversion, you should know that well-written docs often convert developers faster.)
Here’s an example dashboard that you should build yourselves; of course, you can also reach out to Literally to do it for you.
This is your top of the funnel. From here, you’ll be able to spot patterns and understand how your audience reacts when you publish a blog post. You’ll learn what drives your traffic; whether it’s visits to the blog or some activity that leads people to check out your homepage.
Next, I recommend creating a graph that will allow you to track the performance of individual blog posts.
We can see that some posts perform great over time, continuously attracting readers, with drops over the weekend. This signalizes that people are reading your posts at work, which is exactly what you want.
Don’t obsess too much over blog post performance if it doesn’t get picked up on social media instantly. Remember, SEO takes time. You generally start seeing results six months after sharing a post.
We can also see that this one post that went viral on HackerNews experienced a sharp drop afterward, which is completely normal.
Now, the important question is, what do you stand to gain from those viral posts?
“Next steps" is a metric that tracks how many people explore the rest of your website after reading your blog post. It shows you whether your content was engaging enough to make visitors explore the rest of your website, too.
This way, you can see if the visitors who discovered you through HackerNews, for example, are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. We all love seeing large numbers on pageviews on a post, but what matters more is whether those readers are your potential clients who will actually take the next steps.
The key is to always keep an eye on this chart and steer your content strategy toward topics that drive the most next steps. After all, marketing is a creative discipline, and you need to turn your hypotheses into concrete plans. Still, you also need to keep your thinking cap on most of the time and constantly evaluate the performance of your posts.
Once again, it’s unrealistic to expect direct conversions from a single viral blog post. You need to be able to separate correlation from causation. Content is a numbers game, and you need to have multiple touchpoints with someone before they convert to a paying user. That’s why you want to have content on your website that addresses the pain points of your users, as this will likely drive them to explore your tool.
In B2B sales, there is no straight, predictable line. Multiple people are involved in buying decisions. Performance marketers will optimize everything to match someone’s last click before they became a customer; still, this doesn’t tell you why they were there, where they first heard about you, or what actions built enough trust to make them care.
I have a funny story about a company that was obsessed with understanding how certain large accounts converted so fast, only to realize that the person they were obsessing over was a BizOps one, in charge of making accounts, setting up payments, and similar. They weren’t an actual user, nor were they involved in the buying decision.
The numbers you should look at are the ones that are not easy to measure, and the ones that make you think. Just because you can monitor something, like how many times someone has visited your website, doesn’t mean that you should, especially if it doesn’t help you make any concrete plans or learn something from it.
As a developer marketing agency, we work with early-stage startups and scale ups. The key to our clients’ success lies in the fact that we are led by numbers. We work with top experts in developer marketing who can interpret these numbers and strategize with founders and growth managers to identify the best content pieces and promotion strategies.
Our thinking caps are always on.
Let’s discuss how we can turn your technical expertise into clear and engaging content. Book a call and start leveling up today.
