User Behavior Metrics

Behavioral analytics lets you better understand how many people are interacting with your site. Besides that, you can learn which pages bring them to the site in the first place, and which pages they engage with the most — these also play a part in how Google ranks your page in the SERPs in terms of relevancy.

Pageviews

Definition: Pageviews shows the total number of times a particular page on your website was visited. Please don’t confuse Pageviews with Unique Pageviews, which represents an aggregate of pageviews generated by the same user during the same session.

Impact: Pageviews can give you a basic understanding of how well your content performs in comparison with other publications of the same period. This metric also shows what topics attract your audience most.

Users

New and Returning Visitors

Impact: New visitors indicates the number of potential leads, while the number of returning visitors shows whether the visitors enjoy your content. It is better to have a healthy mix of both: create content that can attract new users and retain the old ones at the same time.

Average Time on Page

Impact: Time on page shows which website pages are more engaging. When analyzing your company blog, identifying the best-performing and worst-performing articles in this respect can give you insights on the ideal format, length, and structure.

Bounce Rate

Definition: According to Google, a bounce is a single-page session on your site. It happens when a user visits your page and leaves it without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server. Bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on your website where users visited only one page or triggered only a single request to the server.

Impact: Though a high bounce rate may suggest that something isn’t quite right with a page, its impact strongly depends on the page type and where the traffic comes from. For example, an ecommerce site with a high bounce rate on product pages can be a worrying signal; it might mean that most customers leave your website without making a purchase.

The bounce rate can tell a lot about the efficiency of a pay-per-click product landing page, although it’s not entirely suitable for assessing blog posts and other Top Of The Funnel pages tailored to drive organic traffic.

For example, a high bounce rate on a blog may be normal if you have a number of returning visitors who read new articles, find relevant information, and then leave your website. If your goal is to raise awareness, boost engagement and pass rank from the blog to the product pages, metrics like the Dwell Time become more relevant.

Pages Per Session

Impact: This metric shows if your content is engaging and sufficiently well-organized to motivate a visitor to move on to another web page. It can also help assess whether your blog or website has proper interlinking (links to related posts with more detailed information on the subject).

Traffic Sources

Impact: This content marketing metric can help you discover the most and least effective marketing channels for specific content. Does the majority of your audience come from search engines, or is your social media strategy stronger than your SEO? Or maybe your brand is already well-known, and you mostly get direct traffic? This metric is essential to answer those questions.

Engagement Metrics

The engagement metrics reflect how much you are connecting with your audience. These metrics are considered the most important when looking at the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns and overall strategy.

Likes and Shares

Comments

Impact: The number of comments under a post demonstrates the level of content engagement even better than social likes and shares do. It takes more time to write a meaningful comment than to like or share a post.

Mentions

Re-publications

In addition, you might want to consult with the website’s owner and ask them to add a canonical link tag pointing to the original article. This would ensure that Google won’t see those two publications as duplicate pages.

Incoming Requests

Impact: A high number of incoming requests is a strong indicator of your content quality, whether it is an invitation to write new material, to give an interview, to share your knowledge base, or to cooperate in any other way.

Make your headlines irresistible AND helpful

Does your headline accurately describe the content piece and let readers know what they’re in for if they keep reading? Or does your headline use sneaky hyperbole and clickbait tactics to mislead readers?

Here’s the interesting thing. Clickbait headlines don’t perform well. (Maybe this means people are catching on to the sneaky ways.) In a 2015 study, ReturnPath analyzed over 9 million headlines and subject lines and found that ones with common clickbait words performed below average as opposed to headlines focused on wording that emphasized benefits or urgency.

Bottom line: Use powerful wording to create irresistible headlines. Use formulas and tools to help you craft them, but don’t oversell your content or mislead people about the value it provides. Aim to be helpful and enticing for best results.

Skipping rendering work with content-visibility #

It may be hard to figure out which containment values to use, since browser optimizations may only kick in when an appropriate set is specified. You can play around with the values to see what works best, or you can use another CSS property called content-visibility to apply the needed containment automatically. content-visibility ensures that you get the largest performance gains the browser can provide with minimal effort from you as a developer.

The content-visibility property accepts several values, but auto is the one that provides immediate performance improvements. An element that has content-visibility: auto gains layout , style and paint containment. If the element is off-screen (and not otherwise relevant to the user—relevant elements would be the ones that have focus or selection in their subtree), it also gains size containment (and it stops painting and hit-testing its contents).

What does this mean? In short, if the element is off-screen its descendants are not rendered. The browser determines the size of the element without considering any of its contents, and it stops there. Most of the rendering, such as styling and layout of the element’s subtree are skipped.

As the element approaches the viewport, the browser no longer adds the size containment and starts painting and hit-testing the element’s content. This enables the rendering work to be done just in time to be seen by the user.

The browser is only able to skip rendering work if you are also careful not to call any DOM API that forces some of rendering to occur on one of the skipped subtrees. If you’re using content-visibility to improve performance, audit your code to make sure these APIs are not getting called. To help find them, Chromium will print console messages if you call one of these APIs for a subtree of an element with content-visibility:hidden . To see the messages, turn on verbose logging.

Step 5: Adjust Your Content Marketing Strategy

When performing a website content audit, it is important to keep your long-term marketing strategy in mind. If you track your successes and failures, you can steer your content strategy in different directions to appeal to your target audiences in other ways, adjust assets for better organic reach, and improve conversion rates.

Reviewing your content marketing strategy is something that is needed at least once a year to ensure your tactics and activities still fit your company’s goals. If your industry changes frequently, you’d need to set more frequent review periods, e.g. once a month, or every quarter. You have to keep up with these changes and find innovative ways to keep reaching and engaging with your audiences.

What works today may not work tomorrow, so consistent adjustments should always be on the agenda. Performing content audits at least a couple of times a year is a great way to see if your adjustments and general focus are working for your business.

Resources:

https://www.semrush.com/blog/measure-your-digital-content-performance/
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2020/07/improve-content-performance/
https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/content-performance-matrix/
https://web.dev/content-visibility/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-audit-for-content-marketing-strategy/