July 8, 2008 – 11:05 am
First off apologies to anyone that checks the blog regularly, I know I’ve been behind on my posts but it’s been tough to keep up recently with work and life on the go!
Recently I’ve had to do a few sessions at work for our editorial teams around measures for content effectiveness and I thought I’d share the basic idea from those sessions.
Why care so much about content?
Well if you’re in the media business you’re already well aware that content is king!
I like to think about it by comparing media or content driven sites to an e-commerce site. On an e-commerce site, your products or services are the most fundamental pieces of content on your site, 9 times out of 10 (warning: completely fictitious statistic) that’s the reason why people even showed up in the first place.
Similarly, on media or content-driven sites, the articles, videos or audio streams provided are the most fundamental and most important pieces of information on a website. Without interesting, engaging content what incentive do you provide your visitors to even come to your site in the first place?
Why then do many of us in the media or content-driven industry measure content effectiveness strictly by considering only page views?
The need for better metrics
Don’t get me wrong page views for any given media site are crucial, as a matter of fact due to the revenue models (see my posts on net present value as well as important metrics for media sites overall) that come with traditional media sites, page views is one of the most important metrics.
But when you really dissect exactly what a page view is as a metric, it really isn’t sexy at all. A page view simply tells us that a page did in fact load, that’s it. I have no idea if you liked what you saw, read it, told a dozen friends about it, came to it by accident, visited 15 more pages afterwards, found it fascinating enough to discuss it…you can see where I’m going with this.
I like to think of page views at a wonderful proxy metric, if everything goes right then yes we absolutely would expect to see eventual increases in overall page views. What page views fail to provide us with however is what I’ll refer to as measures of content potential. Page views give us a bit of a measure for what is working, but fail to let us know what will work or even why something worked.
Measures of Content Engagement & Potential
So what are the deeper measures we require to really understand content potential? To start, how about we look at a current leader in online media, USA Today.
As an example let’s take a look at one specific article.
Why did I pick USA Today? Because of the pretty enhanced number of story tools that they have. Let’s break it down.
Commenting
USA Today encourages its users to comment on their articles. Why is commenting important to measuring content effectiveness? Ever heard the phrase, “there’s no such thing as bad press?” That pretty well sums up my feelings on commenting.
Discussions surrounding content, whether they’re positive or negative indicates a keen interest of a group of people visiting your website. Understanding both the number of comments on any specific piece of content (or groups of those pieces) receives as well as the average number of comments per piece of content is critical to understanding overall site performance.
An experiment I’d love to be able to run is one where you toy with a content comment velocity threshold. When a given piece of content receives a number of comments (x) over a certain amount of time (y) a content management system (working in tandem with a web analytics tool) automatically identifies this as “hot” content. What action is taken? Perhaps the system automatically starts to place the piece of content in an “up and coming” content widget that’s placed on pages. Perhaps the story is automatically featured on a homepage and content vertical page. Perhaps the system integrates some user segmentation to align this story with other users that have commented on similar stories. The possibilities are endless (well almost)!
Finally, at a more fundamental level, commenting leverages the interactive power of the Internet. Most other media distribution channels are one-way. I send you my message and you take it whether you like it or not. Obviously in the online world we can actually have a conversation with our audience.
Taking the time to actually analyze the content of comments on popular or “hot” articles themselves provides invaluable insights. Many times editorial staff is able to analyze the content of these comments to gain ideas for future editorial segments on the site. While this shouldn’t be taken to an extreme and brands should always retain some editorial control (just because people want more Britney Spears doesn’t mean the New York Times should be doing homepage featurettes everyday), there’s nothing wrong with having a tool that essentially becomes an idea generator for future stories.
As a quick example, what if on a news article relating to the upcoming US presidential election, a few comments stated they were curious about an aspect of Barrack Obama’s childhood and remembered reading something on the subject but had since forgotten. This is a perfect opportunity for the editorial staff to respond in real time to the visitor’s request by generating content or linking to existing content that answers the query as well as posting a response on that article for others to see.
Rating 
E-commerce sites were (I believe) the first sites to pick up on the cue that allowing their audience tell you what they like and don’t like was a good thing. I feel that many online businesses underestimate the power of rating and its importance, particularly for media sites (though many are picking up the trend now).
Having a rating widget on every page of your website is essentially an informal user survey on every piece of content you offer. It’s a friendly way of asking, “Hi there! What did you think about what you just read? Could we do better?” Rating widgets on media sites similarly to e-commerce websites will become what arguably is the most important metric as a general rating of editorial quality.
Keeping in line with the idea of this post, for a media site, our product is information don’t we want to have some idea of how good or bad our product is?
One more thought on the rating front, rating doesn’t always have to be as boring as a little rating box that allows users to rate a piece of content out of 5. What about tailoring the rating engines on web sites to match the actual content there?
If I’m writing a politically charged blog / website why don’t I have separate ratings for the Most Liberal/Democratic and Most Conservative/Republican articles? If I have a comedy site why not the Most Slapstick, Most Ironic or Most Anecdotal? There are a lot of possibilities here but you’ll need to think through two things first:
- How do your users want their content organized?
- How does your business want to rate their editorial content?
Sharing
Sharing a piece of content whether it be via a social bookmarking site (like Digg, del.icio.us or Newsvine) or via an e-mail send to a friend feature is also an important measure for a media site.
These features are indications both of engagement with content as well as potential audience growth. If an article I just read had me so interested/disgusted/outraged/happy that I decided to send it to a few friends of mine, those are a few more people that could potentially become loyal readers afterward.
Helpful hint: When adding an e-mail / send to a friend feature on your website make sure to tag the links in those e-mails that go back to your site so you can evaluate this source of traffic.
Saving
A new feature on some websites being able to save your content to a sort of favourites list is on it’s surface a great idea. Users save their favourite articles and can even share these articles with friends encouraging greater engagement and loyalty from your audience.
Hang on a second though this sounds a lot like social bookmarking!
(As a quick side not here I absolutely love the guys at Common Craft, very simple idea for a web site that has always helped me when I’ve needed to explain tricky things to executives who may not be so web savvy).
My point with pointing out the analogy is along the lines of “stick to what you’re good at”. If entire sites are being created that are devoted to this concept, chances are they are 1) probably better at it than you are and 2) have way more resources to devote to improving upon them. Unless you have a pretty serious business reason to invest in this functionality, I’d say don’t worry about it.
Printing
If you’re anything like me then for any article you’ve read online that you found genuinely fascinating you can’t be bothered to sit in front of your computer and scroll page-by-page. Instead, you need to print it off, read it a bit to get used to it. Perhaps you post it on your cubicle/home office cork board and refer to it from time to time.
Granted, most of that engagement with that content is now taking place offline and we’ll never know that it occurred, but what we do know is you found that content interesting enough to print it so you could take it with you and that’s important.
Warning: No web analytics tool will actually be able to tell you if someone successfully printed an article, the best you can get is that a tool can tell you how many times people opened up their print dialog box (Ctrl+P or Control+P for Mac users).
The “New” Top Content Report
So what does all of the above mean? The old “Top Content” report that we have is dead! We need something better! My personal suggestion?
Check here
I’m a big fan of the views that Google Analytics supports the number of times they’ve helped me in doing some quick analysis are countless. In an ideal world, I’d take all four of these views (not just the two shown in my report) and simply add the additional metrics I’ve discussed above.
I’d love to know what people think about this so please feel free to provide some feedback. 
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