How Much is Your content Worth? by Martino Liu

? H O W M U C H I S YO U R C O N T E N T W O RT H ? N AT I V E A N A LY T I C S P R OV I D E A M O R E I N - D E P T H WAY OF MEASURING CONTENT ROI

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

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Introduction Discovering Valuable Insights Within the Analytics Noise Friends Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Let Friends Measure Page Views How Do You Measure True Engagement? Measuring the Reach of Visual Content Adapting the 5Ws (and the H) of Information Gathering: Who is viewing my content What types of content is my audience engaging with? When and for how long are they viewing it? Where is my audience viewing it from? Why are they viewing it? How much is my content really worth?

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Conclusion Contributors

T H E PAG E V I E W I S D E A D. LO N G L I V E T H E

Long live the what? How do we measure the ROI on all the content we’re producing? These are the questions marketers and publishers are asking today. If pageviews will no longer suffice, what should we be tracking and how? Granted, the “death” of the pageview is overstated. There’s nothing wrong with using pageviews as a primary gauge of interest in your content. If story A gets 10x the pageviews of story B, clearly your audience found story A more appealing. And if your revenue model relies on display advertising to any extent, pageviews still matter. But by all means, they are not the only metric to consider. Social and on-demand media have forever changed how we consume content. In the past, publishers and advertisers wanted to know how many people saw it because that’s all we could do: read the story, watch the news, put up with the commercial breaks or banner ads. (Okay, they also cared about clickthrough rates, which ended up the main reason for the demise of the slideshow format. Remember those?) Today, consumers share content that they find worth sharing. They curate and they create. Pageviews barely scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the ROI of your content. If your story got 500,000 views, does that mean that half a million people read all of it -- or that they clicked on the page, read the headline and left? How many people liked your video? How many shared your Instagram photo? Once your infographic started making the rounds on other blogs, websites and publications, how many people saw it there? In the pages that follow, we will address those questions and showcase a solution we developed at Visually that we hope you will find useful in measuring the value of your visual content. Let us know what you think!

Aleksandra Todorova Editorial Director, Visually

1 D I S C OV E R I N G VA L UA B L E INSIGHTS WITHIN THE A N A LY T I C S N O I S E When used correctly, analytics can reveal insights about content and websites that are otherwise invisible. But analytics can often create a cacophony of noise with no obvious message, turning a tool that is intended to clarify user experience into a confusing mess of numbers. Marketers report their problems with analytics often surround basic questions: who, what, when (and for how long), where and why are people viewing their content? Each one of these problems raises another set of questions: Which is the best metric to use to answer this question? Does a metric exist to measure this? What do I do with this information once Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve acquired it?

2 “FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS M E A S U R E PAG E V I E W S ”

The simplest metric to measure is a page view count, but just because it is easy to log does not mean it is valuable. Too many publishers put too much emphasis on the importance of clicks, mistaking a user’s action for a positive impression. Valuing clicks, which are only truly useful for ad-driven sites, can give a mistaken impression about a user’s experience and often results in publishers delivering content that user don’t really want.

Are a lot of page views per visit a good thing (“the visitor loved our site so much!”), a bad thing (“our site is so bad it takes 23 pages to find what you’re looking for!”), or a horrible thing (“After a 23-page hunt, the visitor gave up!”)? Measuring only page views, how would you ever know? – Avinash Kaushik on Think with Google Perhaps the only way to rationalize the continued obsession with page views is that this information is easily obtainable, easily quantifiable and easily understandable to those who don’t work regularly with analytics.

3 H O W D O YO U M E A S U R E T RU E E N G AG E M E N T ?

If Your Content Is This Engaging, You’re Doing Something Right. But How Do You Measure Engagement?

Viral content site Upworthy, which does not use banner ads, wrote it was changing its primary metrics for gauging content from page views to “total attention on site” and “total attention per piece,” which it defines as more precise than the more common “time on page” metric. “We built attention minutes to look at a wide range of signals — everything from video player signals about whether a video is currently playing, to a user’s mouse movements, to which browser tab is currently open — to determine whether the user is still engaged,” Upworthy posted on their blog. “The result is a fine-grained and unforgiving metric that tells us whether people are really engaged with our content or whether they’ve moved on to the next thing.”

4 M E A S U R I N G T H E R E AC H O F V I S UA L C O N T E N T

The picture becomes even more blurred when visual content and social sharing come into the picture. While sites can easily track who is sharing their posts on social media -a sure sign the audience is engaging with it in some manner -- images can easily be dislodged from their original context, reposted and shared beyond the reach of traditional analytics programs. It’s therefore difficult to truly understand the full reach of any visual content on the Internet. Despite these challenges, marketers and analytics experts continue to come up with new metrics and new ways to contextualize data in order to glean new insights. A new generation of tools focused on solving these problems have recently emerged, including Contently Insights, Chartbeat’s recent announcement

support

for

native ads, Sharethrough’s Content Quality Score and Visually’s newest Native Analytics for measuring visual content performance. This new generation of tools needs to answer the hard questions being posed by marketers investing in content marketing. Should content marketing be judged and measured as a brand building exercise? An exercise in thought leadership? Cold hard direct response dollars and cents? All of the above?

5 A DA P T I N G T H E 5 W ’ s ( A N D T H E H ) O F I N F O R M AT I O N G AT H E R

What we need is a new analytics framework native to the world of content and built towards answering the ROI question in as direct a way as possible. Adapting the 5 W’s of information gathering, we can use the following as a guide for answering the following questions:

WHO IS VIEWING MY CONTENT? Marketers are accustomed to being able to target and

marketplacevisual.ly/projects

measure their advertisements based on interests, demographics, psychographic and in-market intent data, using all forms of digital media platforms going back to the pre-internet age with TV and radio.

#1 1018

TV lovers

#2 987

18-24 years old

Movie Lovers

Female

#3 935

Music Lovers

Consumer Electronic Phone

TIME SPENT VIEWING THIS CONTENT

2 MINUTES/USER

2 DAYS IN TOTAL

Why should they have to settle for less when it comes to seeing who is viewing their content online?Using a Native Analytics approach, you should be able to have access to detailed information about your content’s audience in order to confirm that you are reaching your intended audience.

( W ) H AT T Y P E S O F C O N T E N T I S M Y AU D I E N C E E N G AG I N G I N ? Is content about my productsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; features and functionality or general content about my industry resonating better with my audience? This means figuring out which topics are most popular and which different forms of content (video/image) are the most appropriate fit for campaign goals.

( W ) H E N A N D F O R H O W LO N G A R E T H E Y V I E W I N G I T ? Is content about my productsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; features and functionality or

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general

300 250 200

content

about

industry resonating better with

15th of February 149 views

my audience? This means figuring

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out which topics are most popular

100

and which different forms of

content (video/image) are the most appropriate fit for campaign goals.

( W ) H E R E I S M Y AU D I E N C E V I E W I N G I T F RO M ? Where in the world is my audience engaging with my content the most? Does this match my ideal market for my goods and services where my advertising

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Danny Mclellan NY, USA

party websites or on my own site?

Connie Reid NY, USA

Sr. Marketing Strategy Consultant, Frost &

Sullivan sales cloud marketing digital

social b2b custserv custexper cctr

962 Tweet | 337 Following | 142 Followers

dollars are being spent? Are they viewing my content on third

Brandon Chambers NY, USA

Total Embed Views

2.2K

Total Embed Views

1.7K

Total of unique websites

307 views Wired

In fact, up to 10x the amount of views can take place off of your own website (if you are lucky), so measuring this off-site attention on your content can be critical to painting a full picture of its success.

(W)HY ARE THEY VIEWING IT? The most meaningful metrics are those that tell you something you marketplacevisual.ly/projects

wouldn’t have otherwise known SOCIAL SHARES

IN SITE SHARES FACEBOOK

Facebook

56 SHARES

and communicate an insight that was previously hidden to the

Twitter Pinterest TOTAL SHARES

Google +

192

StumbleUpon Email

naked eye. Intent is one of the most difficult metrics to quantify directly, but can be estimated based on other signals. Those include, but are not limited to

things like “traffic source – did they read it by clicking through on a friends facebook link” and “organic search – was the content arrived at from an informational query through google like ‘how to tie a tie?’”. Understanding the intent behind a view is an important piece of measuring the content’s performance.

( H ) O W M U C H I S M Y C O N T E N T R E A L LY W O RT H (IN DOLLARS AND CENTS)? The million dollar question in content marketing. Attempting to answer it directly is going to be highly dependent on a multitude of factors, like your industry, benchmarks and lifetime value of a customer to your business. At the end of the day, however, arriving at a value for your content in dollars and cents is the missing piece of the puzzle. Once comprehensively answered, we can try and settle the debate over content marketing and its value to brands.

C O N T R I B U TO R S : Adam Breckler is a co-founder and VP of Product at Visually. Allison McCartney is an editor at the PBS NewsHour focused on education and informational graphics, and a freelance designer in the Visually Marketplace. What challenges have you faced when trying to track and measure the performance of your content? You can start learning more what native analytics can do for your visual content, using Visuallyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new Native Analytics Tool. Let us know what you think!

For more content like this, be sure to visit the Visualist, our online magazine, updated daily. If you need high-impact visual content for your brand, Visually can help. Our world-class pool of talent can provide everything from ideation to design and execution. Let us know how we can help by dropping us a line at sales@visual.ly.