Measuring content performance

- [Instructor] Measuring the performance of your content is essential to determining the success of your SEO efforts and to helping guide your content strategy. By looking at how your content performs, you'll be able to understand what your visitors want and provide more of it to them in the future. When you evaluate your content's performance, it's important to ask these questions: What pieces of content are our visitors looking at? What's our most popular content? Are our visitors engaged with our content? Are they sharing our content with others? And is our content generating quality business results? If you haven't already, you can install a web analytics tool like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics to collect the data you'll need to help you get the answers to these questions.

If you're not familiar with these tools, be sure to check out those courses on LinkedIn Learning where you can learn more about the reports and features that we're about to discuss. For this course we're going to use Google Analytics as it offers a free version, accessible to anyone. But you'll find very similar reports and metrics in any of the enterprise analytics tools. First, figuring out what our customers are looking at can be measured by simple page views. In Google Analytics, you can head over to the site content reports, and you'll see a list of the most popular pages of your website for the date range you're looking at.

If you want to find out which were your most popular pages as landing pages, or the first page a visitor sees on your site, you can head over to the landing pages report. If you're an advanced user, you can even used advanced segments to look at only visits that came from organic search or even specific search engines. And while it's good to know which pieces of content got the most page views, that doesn't tell us anything about how well the content was received. Writing content is easy, but writing content that will provide value and leave an impression on your visitors is much more difficult.

And that's where we're interested in finding out about visitor engagement. Traditionally, there are three quick and easily obtained metrics that can help you gauge how well visitors are engaging with your content, pages per visit, average time on site, and bounce rate. Visitors are considered more engaged the longer each of their visits to your website is. And this can be measured by both average time on site and the number of pages they view during their visit. When looking at both of these metrics, the higher the number the better.

And you should look at how this trends over time. The bounce rate is a measure of how often a visitor lands on your website and then leaves without seeing any other page of the site. Generally speaking, the lower the bounce rate the more your visitors were enticed by your content to dive deeper into your site. Next, let's look at whether or not our content is being shared online. While you can use a slew of social media tools to measure how often your tweets and posts and pluses and shares are re-shared throughout your social networks, analytics tools can help track how many times people are clicking your social media sharing buttons, leaving comments on your blog, or seeing how often social channels are driving traffic to your site.

While most analytics tools can detect clicks from major social networks, campaign tagging can be used even more control and granularity of your reports to see how many of your visits are coming from which posts and activities across different social platforms. But perhaps the most important question of all, is whether or not all of this content production is driving your business goals. A properly configured web analytics tool is focused not just on counting pages but associating all of that data with business outcomes.

Did the visitors who came to our site as a result of a particular piece of content end up buying something? Calling us? Submitting a lead form? Downloading a white paper? Did they sign up for a product demonstration? Or did they follow us on a social network? Or share our content with others? Did they sign up for our newsletter? Each and every one of of these goals has a real business value. And by understanding what content drives these conversion actions, we can answer the biggest question of all. What did we get back for our investment in SEO? Whichever tools you use monitoring and measuring the performance of your content will help you understand the value you're creating and help you plan for and continually improve the content you'll be focusing on next.