Three
Ways
To
Measure
Your
Content
Performance
In content marketing, it’s obvious to expect your content to perform to it’s fullest potentials. However, unlike the obvious expectation many times despite being an awesome piece, your content fails to get the traction, and you are left clueless about why it happened. It’s not necessary that visitors would love your content as much as you do. It’s sad but a truth which has been accepted by every wise blogger. There could be 101 assumptions for why they don’t like your content. Perhaps it was too long? Or was the title relevant at all? Lots of assumptions create the equally intensified confusions, and you are again back to where you started from. What if I told you, you don’t need to make any assumption, as you can easily identify the faults in the content? Moreover, you can also fix them after identifying them.
When a content performs An effective content performance is something that achieves the goals associated with it- Perhaps a sign-up, purchase, trial offer, subscription, or a free PDF download. "An effective content is not written at once. It goes through several iterations of optimization based on how visitors are reacting to it, and finally becomes something your visitors love to read"
The web analytics tools like Google Analytics can be used to get the comprehensive data on your content's performance. By tracking different website metrics (Traffic, demographics, visitor behavior etc), you can easily find the answers to why they liked or didn't like your content. In this article, we give a quick look at various tools and techniques used by professional bloggers to track and improve their content performance. Once you get familiar with these tools, you are all set to develop some really effective content for your website.
1. Google Analytics Probably, Google Analytics is the best tool you have got on your side. Not just the content performance, but you can track a lot more with this tool. There would hardly be any website without a Google Analytics integration. Different website metrics tracked by Google Analytics can be used to track your content performance, and also you can think a little deeper to get the solutions as well. For example, You can track the “Bounce Rate” metric to find out how many users closed the page without reading the content. You can also imply from this metric that these users didn’t find your content relevant to what they were looking for. Similarly, you can track a lot more of the metrics to get other insights. I have explained 10 useful metrics that you can track in my post “10 website metrics to track your website performance”. Please spare some minutes to read this content before you proceed further in this post.
2. Scroll heatmaps Website heatmaps are the graphical representation of your visitors’ interaction with your website. A heatmap tool presents a visual report of how users have interacted with different elements on your website pages. It is well said that "A picture is worth a thousand words". It stands so right for the graphical representation of the heatmaps. Just imagine how easily it could be to understand your visitor's behavior if it is explained to you on a picture something like this:
Unlike Google Analytics you are not left with some data to interpret the implications by yourself. The above picture is a heatmap report of a web page. Here the color variations represent the level of attention the particular section of the page has received. The area marked with Red color says that it was most engaging, while the one on the blue color represents the least engaging area. Now you can interpret this report to make several clarifications about the content on this page:
The content-Length- The length of a content is always a controversial matter. Some say short contents perform better, while others settle with comprehensive and lengthy contents. Well, the scroll heatmap is just here for you to help you stop thinking about what others say. With Scroll heatmap, you can by yourself decide the ideal length of your content. For example, if you notice the blue color at the end of the page, it means most of the users didn't even reach to that part. Perhaps the content is too lengthy? Or it might also be possible that the upper section was too bad that users didn't bother to go down any further. How to know if the length is the responsible factor? Just look at the scroll map of the sections above the bottom part. If they are hot (close to Red or
Red itself), it means they are not bad and they engaged the users effectively. So, only the length could be a factor here. Perhaps you will need to cut-short the content.
When readers loose the interest- The easiest way to know when your readers start to loose the interest in the content is to check the fading process of the Red color. When the Red color starts fading out and yellow sets in, this is a sign that user is loosing the interest in that part of the page.
You can take measures to improve such areas by making them more interesting with some graphic, image, fact, stat or anything relevant that readers would love to read.
3. A/B testing Sometimes we have endless ideas for the content headlines, Call-to-Action, Images, and videos etc to put in the content. However, it's quite confusing while choosing on of the ideas for final implementation. We cannot choose which idea would be the best one to meet the goals with the content. Thanks to the A/B testing tools, that you don't have to live in confusion anymore.
Definitely, A/B testing technology has changed the way we have been looking at our contents a few years back. With affordable A/B testing tools available in the market, it is not possible for any smallest to largest scale business to use this great technology for usability optimization.
Things you can A/B Test to improve your content performance Headlines Headlines are probably the most confusing element of a content page. They crucially help in determining the content on the page in a single glance of few words in the headline. So, obviously, you would want your headline to be something that is catchy, engaging, interesting, and relevant to the main content. So how would you decide if your headline is catchy, engaging, interesting, and relevant?- indeed by A/B testing. You can test multiple headlines and check which one brings the most qualified conversion that was originally intended with the content.
Images For any content or webpage, images are the most crucial parts that determine the value, and engagement level of your content. However, certain times due to a wrong image or wrong placement, images can also counter the intended conversions. So, it’s so important to test the images before that you have used in your content. You can follow these A/B testing ideas for a start: 1.
Test two entirely different images
2.
Test a computer created graphic against a real photo
3.
Test Texts against image and vice-versa.
4.
Test small changes in similar images. For example, replace a man with women in the image and vice-versa.
If these ideas interests you, you can use the MockingFish’s Free One Year trial to A/B test all these ideas by yourself for free. Perhaps a small step towards A/B testing is all you need to take your contents to another level. So don’t just write a content, develop it into a valuable piece with these three tools by your side.