authorization (Godin, 2001); relationship marketing seeks to maintain a stable relationship over time, provided that both parties obtain added value by maintaining it. (Barroso-Castro and Marín-Armario, 1999). Influence marketing is a term that started to be used in the 60s by Daniel Edelman. He is the founder of the public relations multinational Edelman; the term designates the power that famous people exercise over consumers. This power has paved the way for other sectors in the digital environment.

In this regard, Sanagustin (2013) should be taken into consideration as she explains that content marketing drives digital conversion, while the more the public relates to the content the more significant the capacity to engage them is. Indeed, the value that participation among the public and contents has acquired has resulted in, as Marshall (2004) highlights, the user gaining an interactive dimension, which must be taken into account. At the same time, as Del Pino emphasizes (2009: 8): “communication develops into a context in which the emotional connection between the user and the brand become the advertisers’ objective.”

Therefore, this has given way to an environment in which new communicative practices prevail, and to carry them out them, new metric systems are required. In such a way that it has given rise to not only so-called sentiment metrics but also metrics based on the combination of algorithms. Martinez and Lara indicated (2014: 579) that they allow for the analysis of tendencies and facilitate “selective content strategies, evaluate economic models in the network, manage profiles that can configure extensive networks of users and improve the return on the investment in social media.” In this sense, Lamas (2010: 96) notes that the same technological digital complexity “is that which introduces new and more precise possibilities of tracking”.

This work is based on the hypothesis that the emergence of new metrics in the digital environment has facilitated a more considerable knowledge about the public’s behaviors regarding the contents and the feelings that they provoke, as well as a previous knowledge that allows the contents to be planned before their dissemination. They are factors that contribute to the development of inbound marketing strategies and in particular inbound and content marketing.

The analysis of the importance and transcendence that these new metrics imply for the development of communicative strategies has been set as the object of study of this article, especially in the design and distribution of contents of interests that capture users’ attention.

For that purpose three objectives have been set out:

Identify what new indicators are being used in audience metrics.

Identify the data that metrics provide for inbound marketing practices, especially in the case of content marketing.

Assess the extent to which these metrics allow us to test contents and plan them.

The study has been based on previous contributions to audience measurement that have addressed the theme from dif-ferent perspectives. The input from Maldonado (2015) who examined web analysis is significant, or Medinaveitia and Mer-chante (2015) who addressed the difficulties and challenges that the digital environment entails in this respect. Others such as Bermejo-Acosta (2003) focus on the new communicative practices that have resulted in new measurement dynamics. In this sense, we must also highlight Aguado-Guadalupe’s (2017: 145) reflection when she explains that “the digital environ-