If content is king then how do you know if what you’re publishing on your website is really as good as you think it is? After all, a vast number of bloggers, website owners and content marketers believe they’re producing high quality web content when in reality quite often they couldn’t be more wrong. What tools and metrics can we use to track the effects of our content to see whether it really is driving engagement, referrals and building trust and authority with our target audience?
Many content creators seem under the impression that the number of visitors a piece of web content receives is an important indicator of just how well written it is. While there is a degree of truth in the matter there are a number of reasons why this rather basic metric may not be as useful as it may first appear.
Firstly appreciate that a percentage of visitors to that piece of content have arrived by clicking on a hyperlink containing the article title. It was the title of your content – not the content itself – that actually attracted the visitors. And high quality content consists of far more than just a clever title.
Secondly anyone who has ever had a piece of content mentioned by a website or individual with a huge amount of reach will no doubt have experienced a deluge of traffic in a very short space of time. In this case your web content piqued the interest of a single, well-connected individual who then chose to tweet it, share it on their Facebook page or in some other way highlight it to their audience. Certainly we hope that a percentage of these referred visitors will enjoy and appreciate your content but once again just because lots of people arrive really only suggests that you caught the attention of a single (albeit powerful) individual.
Truly great content will be mentioned, shared, tweeted and discussed by far more than a single person. Truly great content will naturally attract links from other websites and will gently rise up the search engine rankings as a result, drawing in visitors from a range of different keyword searches.
No, if we’re going to assess what truly great content is then we need to take a slightly more sophisticated view of our analytics.
Time Spent On Page
One useful metric for assessing the quality of the web content we’re producing is how long a visitor actually spends on a page. It is logical to assume that the worse a piece of content is, the sooner someone will click away to read another page whether that’s at the original site or another. Of course the reverse is also true and so overall the longer a visitor stays on a page the more they are likely to be enjoying your content.
Of course one important proviso needs to be mentioned here and that is the subject of content length. Imagine if we created two articles of a similar level of quality, the only difference being that one was 500 words in length and the other was 1000 words. With everything else being equal it’s likely that a visitor would spend more time on the longer article purely because of how long it would take to read.
Therefore I would suggest that an even more accurate metric for measuring how successful your content is would be the time spent on each page divided by the actual length of the content (be that video, text etc.).
Percentage Of Your Web Content Actually Consumed
Much as I hate to be the one to say it a proportion of your website visitors won’t read your content from beginning to end but may instead dip in and out of particularly interesting-looking pieces. They may also get side-tracked, clicking off to a new piece of content before they finish the original piece they were consuming.
Truly great content that really engages visitors should lead to focus – visitors should want to focus on that content rather than clicking around your site looking at other pieces of content and so the percentage of people who actually consume an entire article or video rather than just arriving at it and then quickly clicking off to another page can be a very useful metric to examine.
Percentage Of Visitors Actually Leaving Comments
Once again it’s tempting to look at raw comments and assume the content that gets the most feedback is the best quality content but once again there are reasons that this metric may not offer a fair view.
Firstly, as already mentioned you will likely find from time to time that an individual with a lot of reach sends you a massive amount of traffic in a very short space of time – some of whom will leave a comment.
Secondly if you are “rewarding” your commenters in any way such as using Commentluv to offer a do-follow link to approved commenters then a percentage of the comments you receive will come from individuals using specific search queries in Google to find sites like yours that offer do-follow links.
Social Shares
When people find a piece of content they truly love it’s entirely natural for them to refer their friends and family to it so they too can enjoy it. I can’t tell you how many people I forwarded the big circus video to when I found it! Therefore another great measure of the effectiveness of your content is just how much it gets shared with others. Is your content sitting there only drawing visitors as a result of your own marketing efforts or are your existing audience helping to spread the word in their own way?
There are a number of useful tools for finding which pieces of your web content are getting shared on the social networks like Facebook and Twitter including Tweetmeme and the very useful .
Number Of Pages Viewed On Your Site
This metric is arguably less clear-cut than it’s bretheren mentioned in this article but it stands to reason that if someone finds your web content engaging and enjoyable they are likely to spend some time on your site exploring other pieces of content that you have published.
While there is a small risk that this data may be misleading as a result of visitors who don’t value your content just clicking away to another article as a n exit-route from a specific piece of content overall, and when used in conjunction with the other metrics mentioned in this article I still believe it can be a useful figure to keep track of.
Number Of Returning Visitors
Think back to when you first stumbled across the various blogs you read. Maybe you instantly subscribed to them so that you can stay abreast of their latest articles. Maybe you needed repeated exposures to them before you realized that they consistently published the kind of content you enjoy consuming. Either way you eventually added them to your feed reader or submitted your email address so that you could receive their latest content on autopilot.
Assuming your website is regularly updated blog-style rather than being a static website then it’s natural that visitors who appreciate the quality of your content will be open to receiving more. They may well bookmark your site to revisit at a later date or may be “pulled” back after subscribing. Either way it’s fair to say that the higher your returning visitor numbers become the more engaging your web content is likely to be.
Percentage Of New Visitors Making A Positive Conversion
We create great quality web content because we want people to read it, enjoy it and maybe even pass it on. But if we’re actively involved in content marketing there’s one thing we want more than anything else – and that’s conversions.
Now by conversions I don’t necessarily mean that your website visitors have to actually pull out their credit cards and buy something (not yet, anyway). Getting them to subscribe to your blog, take a free trial of your service or add their email address to your mailing list are all still valid conversions – ways that allow you to stay in contact with your visitors that give you multiple opportunities to turn them from browsers into buyers.
Again, quality content does stand out. Quality content is addictive. Do your job properly and you should find that your visitors are willing to make a positive conversion – no matter how small. So rather than just tracking your mailing list signups or blog subscribers overall consider crunching the numbers a little further to see which pieces of web content on your site are really driving the most conversions.
Agree? Disagree? Which metrics do you use yourself to measure engagement in your content and are there any important metrics you think we’ve missed? I’d love to hear your opinions below…