In this week's issue:
- Reconsidering content measurement (yet again, as we are wont to do)
- The tech reckoning comes for Adobe while link rot takes down Morrissey
- Did you read? About the best summer solstice record
Psst! I have a virtual event coming up on June 26 (US evening) / June 27 (Australian morning). Let's chat knowledge graphs!
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Join the ultimate audience research masterclassBlending sophistication into organic content measurement: Metrics and dimensions to consider for web content measurement
In digital content, measurement remains a massive boondoggle for most organizations. Attribution is wildly misunderstood; the maxims of the "attention economy" don't often correlate with improved business performance; and paid media sources are given far more credit for growth than they deserve when compared with organic content improvement.
With varying interpretations of how measurement should be applied to business actions, teams that should be aligned in creating quality content are pitted against each other—SEO is responsible for ranking and traffic metrics, while user experience teams try to minimize the friction that arises from too much unqualified traffic landing on the wrong page.
Content marketing teams attempt to fill every blank space perceived in the pre-purchase journey, while customer support and documentation teams are trying to minimize the amount of time they spend fielding easily answerable questions. And almost no one considers how the audience's holistic brand perception of how every piece of content works together.
Automated software "insights" taken at face value add absolutely no actionable information, and companies rarely train their reporting teams to dive in deeper than the surface level. Many junior digital marketers are trained in prescriptive 12-week certificate programs or online-only courses that remove the emphasis on methodology and original thinking more advanced degrees provide, and they're not familiar with advanced measurement methodologies. And it's sadly increasingly rare that good content professionals are even getting the access they need to read analytics that will help them do their jobs.
By including measurement as a phase of The Content Technologist approach, rather than merge it with strategy or outsourcing to another team, my goal is to emphasize that content performance needs to be measured differently than other counterparts in the business. Content measurement, when executed with a dose of sophistication, provides the quantifiable insights needed to prove exactly how quality digital content is making a business impact.
How can content teams measure their work more effectively?
You can't tell a story about measurement if there's no before-and-after, so before you make big changes to a website or launch a new content campaign: take some benchmarks in your measurement tool. The free version of Google Analytics 4 is all most companies need.
I've put together some benchmarks from the analytics data across my client and prospect accounts, and gathered a few engagement benchmarks to help organizations understand what "good" looks like, measurement-wise. My dataset included no ecommerce companies, nor any pure media companies. The dataset primarily comprises organizations that create content as a resource for their audience and driver for growth.
Deborah Carver
Common audience growth metrics and growth rate recommendations
If your primary goal is to grow an audience that is connected to your content, I recommend recording one or both of the following:
- Average monthly engaged sessions: One of GA4's most helpful new metrics, engaged sessions describes the number of users on your website who have passed one of the following three thresholds: they've spent more than 10 seconds (or, better yet, changed to 60 seconds) on your website; visited more than one page; scrolled through more than 90% of the webpage; or completed a form. Ideally, you're always going up and to the right for monthly engaged sessions, even as rank or traffic fluctuates.
- Average monthly active users: Depending on your goals, you'll want to track the absolute number of new and returning users every month. In GA4, this also means tracking Users (aka Active Users) and not Total Users (which includes Active and "inactive" Users).
In general, for average number of sessions and users, you're aiming for a healthy growth rate of around 3-5% month over month. Anything more is great! But because content changes and their effects tend to be a slow burn, a healthy snowball of incremental monthly growth is better than a viral avalanche of visitors who never return.
Deborah Carver
*It's worth noting that, before GA4 was even announced, I outlined a solid method for measuring high-quality sessions that is more or less the same as GA4's "Engaged Sessions" metric.
The best audience engagement metrics and benchmarks
If your primary goal is to connect more deeply with an audience and become part of their content consumption routine, I recommend tracking the following:
- Average engaged time per session: Based on the clients I work with, websites focused on content benchmark at an average engagement time of 30 seconds per session... or in some cases much higher. Benchmark where you're at today, and watch what happens after you implement changes designed to increase engagement
- Average engaged time (per user): The benchmark with my clients here is 50 seconds— with many high-quality resource-driven websites clocking in at well over 1:30 during a typical 30-day measurement window.
- Engagement rate is a great at-a-glance metric to benchmark and understand performance. Websites optimized for high-quality content have an engagement rate of 50% or above.
Understanding key events, fka conversions, for content publishers
Earlier this year, Google Analytics switched the language on what had always been called "conversions" to "key events." Like most surface-level language changes, the shift in terminology means the same thing it always did: just like a conversion, a key event is an important action on your website that we've marked to track in detail.
But now Google wants to associate the word "conversions" solely with Ads, which... whatever Google. We'll call them "key events" in GA4 now.
Anyway, those of us who regularly look at cross-channel content analytics know that "key events" from organic search occur at a higher rate than those from paid, whatever they are called. Lately I've been referring to key content events as Commitment metrics, since they represent an audience's desire to commit to receiving more from your company.
In any case, every GA4 account has to manually set their Key events. For most content-focused websites, I recommend toggling the setting up the following as to key events, if applicable on your website:
- Newsletter sign-up form completions
- Qualified leads (form completion usually)
- File downloads
- Video completions
- Purchases, if applicable
Every organization has its own scheme of conversion and attribution, but typically companies investing in content will see that, all conversions or key events being the same, non-paid channels attract higher quality audiences and return on investment than paid media.
And speaking of channel attribution...
Dimensions and attribution for content measurement
When taking benchmarks, it's crucial understand the dimensions applied to each metric. For most organic and content performance, I recommend focusing on the following dimensions:
- For most strategic content changes (templates, workflow, etc.), measuring effects monthly is much easier and more sustainable than daily or weekly impact.
- Always examine channel-specific growth from organic and direct compared with paid media (because otherwise paid channels will tank your high organic success rate).
- Aggregate performance of similar content is more valuable than page-level performance, so use content groups when possible.
- Individual session behavior and individual anecdata almost never correlates with audience preferences at scale—so session recordings or comments aren't good reasons for making changes without additional validation from your aggregate data (beware of upsetting your website's silent majority).
Two weeks from now, we'll explore in more detail how to shift your organization's thinking from "moar traffic" to audience growth, and review some arguments for evolving your digital content measurement strategy. Because you can be a words person and get measurable insight from reading charts, and I swear, it's not that hard if you know where to look and what to explain.
Content tech links of the week
- Independent creatives were up-in-arms this week about Adobe's changes in terms of service. Tedium explores why, even though Adobe's missteps may have been wrongly perceived, the creative software giant is no longer getting the benefit of the doubt.
- Archiving content is a challenge (or a cost sink) for many media organizations, but I'd argue it's as necessary as maintaining the print archive. In NiemanReports, Gabe Bullard outlines some technical challenges and business missteps that result in link rot, or the disappearance of high-quality content from the internet.
- Meanwhile, this week I discovered that the website that used to occupy morrissey dance dot com is now a garbage "SEO content" factory, and The Moz is only available on silent disco mode via the Wayback Machine.
- Scope of Work, the B2B manufacturing newsletter with soul, outlines the operational considerations of running libraries in the 2020s. Of course it's fascinating and contains details on current library tech guaranteed to scratch whichever bookish or workish nerdy itch you feel like addressing.
- I'm relatively skeptical of "prompt engineering" until available chatbot products gets better at understanding more complex verbal logic—I've yet to craft a prompt that didn't need 88 follow-up responses to get what I wanted. But this Notion-based glossary and guide to the world of prompts is a great guide for understanding how information retrieval and prompt development works.
- It's almost the summer solstice, so get outside and touch some grass (via perennial newsletter favorite Embedded)
- From Lauren Pope's excellent 10 Things newsletter, check out this in-depth documentation of the lifecycle of a piece of content.
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.
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Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI
Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.
The new La Luz record is an excellent soundtrack to the long days of the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere.