Measure Content Effectiveness

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Gather and analyze content metrics.
Maintain your content.
Evolve your content strategy.

Gather Insights and Adjust Course

Once your organization is cranking out consistent, high-quality content, there are more questions to answer: Is the content actually helping customers solve problems and achieve their goals? Is it helping your organization achieve meaningful business objectives?

In this unit, you learn how to use analytics to improve your content and refine your content strategy.

Boost Your Content IQ

To measure the effectiveness of your content strategy, you need data. That’s where content intelligence comes in. Content intelligence refers to the tools and methods an organization uses to turn content data and business data into actionable insights.

A series of charts and graphs that represent business data

The right analytics tools help you track key metrics that reveal whether your content is achieving results for both you and your customers. Let’s go over the two main types of metrics that can help your organization measure success.

Business Metrics

When defining the business objectives for your content strategy, you established KPIs to help measure the results of your content initiatives. For example, maybe your goal was to reduce support costs by 15% or to improve the net promoter score by 10%.

After implementing a content initiative, you can evaluate the data and review the results.

What were your baseline measurements and target metrics?
How did you stack up against your goals?
If you fell short of your numbers, are there ways to improve the results?

Engagement Metrics

In addition to analyzing KPIs and business data, your organization can also monitor content engagement. Here are just a few of the engagement metrics your organization might track.

Page views
Average time on page
Pages per session
Page depth
Bounce rate
Unique visitors
New and returning users

When it comes to engagement numbers, be wary of vanity metrics that don’t provide meaningful insights into the true performance of a content asset. See the Resources section for an illuminating case study about how a company measured the effectiveness of its Help Center content.

The Impact of Tracking Metrics

Using analytics to monitor the performance of your content initiatives is vital. The data provides insights that:

Build support for future projects by proving a return on investment (ROI).
Inform and guide the efforts of your content teams.
Allow you to evolve your overall content strategy and identify gaps in your content operations.

For more information about content metrics, see the Resources section.

Customer Feedback

Metrics are great, but there’s another important way to evaluate the performance of your content: by listening directly to your customers. Don’t forget to reach out to users to find out more about their struggles and successes with your content. You can learn details that simply don’t surface when evaluating the numbers alone.

There are a lot of methods for collecting feedback, but some of the most common are:

Interviews
Usability testing
Surveys
Feedback forms

Apply What You Learn

All the insights you glean from content analytics and customer feedback are useless unless you act on them. Here are the two main ways to apply what you learn.

Create a Maintenance Plan

Your content maintenance plan determines what happens to content after it’s published. This phase of the content lifecycle is often overlooked, but it can greatly improve the overall health of your content ecosystem—sort of like weeding a garden. If you fail to maintain your content, the result is a confusing mess that causes more problems for customers than it solves.

A piece of content surrounded by construction tools

Your content maintenance plan should address these questions.

How often will your team review content?
What’s the process for updating content and how does it fit in with the regular content production schedule?
What sources (metrics, user feedback, audits) can provide relevant insights?
What criteria will you use to identify issues and prioritize updates?

Learn more about creating a content maintenance framework.

Refine Your Content Strategy

A truly successful content strategy is one that evolves and grows. After your organization gathers content analytics and customer feedback, it’s time to reflect and make course corrections. What lessons did you learn? What will you do differently next time? And speaking of next time, be sure to revisit your content backlog to add new ideas and adjust priorities.

Remember, your customers’ needs are constantly changing, and so are your organization’s business objectives. It’s a good idea to review and refine your overall content strategy every 6 to 12 months.

Start Measuring Your Content Performance

Hopefully you’re ready to use content analytics and a strong content strategy to streamline your content operations and deliver high-quality, on-strategy content. No matter what tools or metrics you use, content analytics can help you deliver the right content to your audiences.

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