• Home
  • Content Services
    • The Content Hive
    • Email Marketing
    • Content Writing
    • Editing and Proofreading
    • Content Strategy
  • Blog
Menu
  • Home
  • Content Services
    • The Content Hive
    • Email Marketing
    • Content Writing
    • Editing and Proofreading
    • Content Strategy
  • Blog
cropped-BigBee-Logo-square
  • Portfolio
  • About
    • Meet the Queen Bee
    • Our Values
  • Contact
Menu
  • Portfolio
  • About
    • Meet the Queen Bee
    • Our Values
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Content Services
    • The Content Hive
    • Email Marketing
    • Editing and Proofreading
    • Content Writing
    • Content Strategy
  • Blog
    • What is Google’s ‘helpful content’ update, and why should you care?
    • Content marketing strategy essentials
    • How to be playful with your website content
    • What makes content trustworthy?
    • How to tell if your content is successful
    • How to break through writer’s block
    • What to consider for new website content
  • Portfolio
  • About
    • Our Values
    • Meet the Queen Bee
  • Contact
Menu
  • Home
  • Content Services
    • The Content Hive
    • Email Marketing
    • Editing and Proofreading
    • Content Writing
    • Content Strategy
  • Blog
    • What is Google’s ‘helpful content’ update, and why should you care?
    • Content marketing strategy essentials
    • How to be playful with your website content
    • What makes content trustworthy?
    • How to tell if your content is successful
    • How to break through writer’s block
    • What to consider for new website content
  • Portfolio
  • About
    • Our Values
    • Meet the Queen Bee
  • Contact
cropped-BigBee-Logo-square-png
  • Home
  • Content Services
    • The Content Hive
    • Email Marketing
    • Editing and Proofreading
    • Content Writing
    • Content Strategy
  • Blog
    • What is Google’s ‘helpful content’ update, and why should you care?
    • Content marketing strategy essentials
    • How to be playful with your website content
    • What makes content trustworthy?
    • How to tell if your content is successful
    • How to break through writer’s block
    • What to consider for new website content
  • Portfolio
  • About
    • Our Values
    • Meet the Queen Bee
  • Contact
Menu
  • Home
  • Content Services
    • The Content Hive
    • Email Marketing
    • Editing and Proofreading
    • Content Writing
    • Content Strategy
  • Blog
    • What is Google’s ‘helpful content’ update, and why should you care?
    • Content marketing strategy essentials
    • How to be playful with your website content
    • What makes content trustworthy?
    • How to tell if your content is successful
    • How to break through writer’s block
    • What to consider for new website content
  • Portfolio
  • About
    • Our Values
    • Meet the Queen Bee
  • Contact

How to tell if your content is successful

  • Big Bee Content
  • August 23, 2020
bloggingGoogle AnalyticsMeasuring success

Pageviews is by no means the only measure of success for your content. Get familiar with the analytics that you’ll want to shout about.  

You’re wide-eyed, staring at the screen, finger hovering perilously above the ‘publish’ button. Click! It’s live. Now what? As you spend your next few days glued to your Analytics software, what should you be looking for?

Unique pageviews is the classic marker for success – the thinking being that views = interest. But pageviews can be as much a mark of how much you paid to market the article, or how good your headline is, as how well it supports your sales funnel or how interesting or useful it is to the reader. So, what other measures can you use to tell if your content has been successful?

Dig in to the source

It’s as important to consider the source of the pageviews as it is to consider the volume. First thing to check is what percentage acquisition was via your funded Facebook/Insta/Twitter campaign versus organic Google traffic? This matters because it all comes out of the bottom line. If you’re producing content that is organically successful, then you’re not having to invest as much in paid campaigns.

Of course, it’s not the noughties – nowadays organic success is hard to come by, but when you find it, it’s a cause for celebration.

Next, look into how much of your traffic has come from a referral? Referrals are a sure sign that your content is highly rated to the extent that other organisations and individuals endorse it by linking to it. Keep an eye on the organisations that are linking to your content and consider building on the connection. They may want to make it a regular referral, which will boost your visibility and your kudos.

Watch the clock

When they’re on your page, how long are they spending there? Google recognises dwell time as an important measure of success, because it shows that people are engrossed in your content, rather than quickly clicking out as it’s not useful to them. The longer the better, so check the ‘time on page’.

Stalk the journey

If your content is doing its job, it won’t be the end of the line when the reader lands on it.

Onward links in your content help the reader to continue their journey, either on to more editorial content or to service or product pages. There’s three metrics that can tell you if that’s happened: Bounce rate, exit rate and next page path.

Bounce rate tells you the percentage of readers that haven’t interacted at all with your page or moved onto a next page. The higher the bounce rate, the fewer the onward journeys. Not ideal. Exit rate shows you the percentage of people who landed on that page and ended their journey through your site there. Also not ideal.

The Next Page Path is a more positive measure – it shows not just that your readers have gone onto a next page, but where they’ve gone. If they’ve carried on to a sales page, you can safely conclude that your content has been an important part of convincing them that you’re worth spending their hard-earned cash on. Nice job!

You can still have a high bounce rate but a high conversion rate from your content. And you can have a long dwell time with a high exit rate. It’s important to remember that no measure should be taken on its own to mean success or failure. Analytics can be read in different ways, and so conclusions are best taken over time and with rigorous testing and comparison to benchmarks.

Once you have your benchmarks, you can begin to compete with yourself on metrics to improve your results. And when you see improvements you can start to look forward to hitting ‘publish’.

Liked this blog? Sign up to receive our weekly wisdom straight to your inbox (we don’t pass on your details or do anything naughty with them):

(Thanks for the retro computer on roller skates image Morning Brew on Unsplash)

You might also like...

Artificial intelligence

Will ChatGPT make copywriting obsolete?

Loxwood Joust - a jester watches on as a jouster in full force

Loxwood: A medieval marketing tale

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
User research - man on ladder climbs up towards a giant brain surrounded by data points

10 ways to gain audience insights

Read More »

4 common blogging blocks and how to get past them

Read More »
Cocky man making lots of money from his content

How to maximise the potential of your content

Read More »
Writing inspiration - typewriter

10 writing projects to start in Lockdown

Read More »
Coffee cup reads 'begin'

How to break through writer’s block

Read More »
Blogging set up - keyboard, headphones, notepad and pen

Why your business needs a blog (even if no-one reads it)

Read More »

Editing

Not convinced your content is delivering? Let us cast an expert eye.

Writing

Got a content plan, just no time to deliver? Our content creation service can help.

Strategy

Know you need content but don’t know where to start? Let us help you find direction.

Learn More

GIVE US A BUZZ

  • hello@bigbeecontent.com
  • 07734 261 359
  • hello@bigbeecontent.com
  • 01403 343 7003
  • Big Bee Content is a content agency based in Horsham, West Sussex
  • Privacy Policy