Web Analytics Management

Metrics for Smart Content Management - Metric #2 - Mission Critical Content Effectiveness (MCCE)

Let’s return to the topic of content as being a measure of success. In my last post on Task Completion, I said that only sites that sell advertising can consider content viewing to be a goal. I admit that I overstated this a bit…if you’re a non-profit or government site, this could actually be pretty important. 
For non-profits, content that leads to donor contributions, program funding, volunteerism, and advocacy is highly important. Government agencies, branches and divisions have clearly stated missions against which they are funded.  I think of this as Mission Critical Content.

What is Mission Critical content? Content that directly or indirectly supports funding and revenue. For example, showing donors the readership of articles that they’ve funded.

Defining mission critical content can be a tricky exercise because you have to draw a line…or else all content can be viewed as critical. Here’s a few ways to go:

• Conduct an analysis to determine the pages viewed before visitors go to top tasks.  These pages are influential enough to bring a visitor to the task completion.
• Review the site to determine the pages that were designed to communicate mission. On a government site this could include: About Us, Our Mission, News, or posts from the head of the agency.
• Review the results of the top 100 pages and downloads on the site, cull out the non-content pages (home page, search, portals, index, and so forth). Review the resulting list to determine which pages are central to mission.

Once you figure out the content that is mission-critical, calculating the metric is pretty straightforward.

Mission-Critical Content Effectiveness (MCCE): Measures the number of times mission-critical content, including video, is viewed or files are downloaded.

Calculation: Expressed as a percentage based on total views or downloads of the top content pages of the site that most relate to organization mission, divided by the total number of all site content pages (do not include portal, search, or navigation-based pages). A higher percentage indicates a better MCCE rate.

Example: During the month, there were 25,000 total page views and downloads of mission-critical content and 150,000 total page views of site-content pages, including downloads. This equals a mission-critical-content effectiveness rate of 17%.
 

Based on the data, it would make sense that you could run this report for specific segments, such as visitors from targeted geolocation, organization type, content interest and branded keyword acquisition.  It would also be highly valuable to run an analysis showing the impact of mission critical content views on tasks such as donation, article sharing, membership and other top tasks.

Metrics for Smart Content Management - Metric #1 - Task Completion Effectiveness (TCE)

Management of content proliferation is important of course, but in evaluating content effectiveness it is also important to consider the goals of the site. All too often we hear that “reading content” is a site goal. While that may be true if you’re selling advertising, it is generally not true for content rich sites. (For more on this, you’ll want to read next week’s post on Mission Critical Content)The purpose of content is to drive an action or a task, such as a purchase, event registration, donation, newsletter sign up, lead generation form completion, using a selection wizard and so on.

Measuring Task Completion gives you an initial sense on whether the web site is effective in getting visitors to complete the tasks on your site that are associated with business goals. Once you establish Task Completion Effectiveness, you can use this as a benchmark to determine whether you content management actions are working. The goal: raise the site’s Task Completion Effectiveness percentage.

Task Completion Effectiveness (TCE): Measures completion of site tasks associated with your goals and mission

Calculation: Expressed as a percentage based on the total number of task-completion page views divided by total number of site page views. A higher percentage indicates more successful task completion.

Calculation Notes: The completion page for each task will need to be identified, such as a “thank you” page or a submission confirmation.

Example: During the month, there were 500,000 total page views. Of this total number, there were 10,000 task-completion page views. This equals a task-completion effectiveness of 2%.

In the chart below, you’ll notice that we’re using “visits” and not “page views” as a baseline metric. Why? This report was done in Google Analytics. GA bases its metrics on visits and can not correlate events to page views. While we could have created filters to obtain the page view data, we opted to go with what GA does best. Using visits as an alternative still provides a reliable measure of task completion effectiveness. If we had done this in SiteCatalyst, we would have been able to correlate the events to page views.

 

 

In this example, the TCE has gone down slightly over a 3 month trend. Next steps should include reviewing the page view totals of the task confirmation pages to see which ones are experiencing declines, and then determining what factors are influencing the drop. Is it because there has been more content added to the site, thereby “diluting” the completion page views? Less marketing and acquisition driving towards task completion? Or, perhaps tasks are seasonally driven? Like any good high level “health” report, the TCE will drive additional questions that require you to do some analysis and investigation.

As I mentioned in my first post, this metric becomes even more effective through segmentation of audiences by geolocation, subdomain, visit frequency, and acquisition source.

Metrics for Smarter Content Management

In your organization, what stakeholder group is most under-served by web analytics?

Certainly not marketers and product managers…they are an analysts’ best set of friends because the reporting can show real ROI.

The user experience designer or information architect? No, they get data that can really help with site optimization that brings visitors to the marketing and product focused site sections. 

I’m thinking it’s the content manager…the operations guy/gal whose job it is to manage the production, updating, archiving and retiring of content. Is there someone in this role where you work? Maybe they are a subject matter expert who has control over a particular site section. Maybe they manage a team of writers whose job it is to crank out the content. Maybe they are your intranet managers…a part of the site that generally flies beneath the radar when it comes to analytics. Maybe it’s the overall site manager. And maybe it’s you.

In much of my work with US Federal government agencies, financial services, pharmaceutical companies and non-profit organizations, the content managers and intranet managers tell me that they just don’t get metrics that help them determine when it’s time to clean up, spruce up or get rid of content that is old and in the way.  As one weary content manager told me, “The goal is to publish, publish, publish…not analyze whether anyone looks at the content or what they do with it.”

While I hear some content managers say with pride that they simply whack all the pages that don’t get page views, I don’t think this is the whole solution to the pruning problem.  I think it makes more sense to first get an understanding around relative site performance based on goals as a first step, and then take a more surgical approach that’s based on prioritization. This may indicate that certain areas of the site need more than just an elimination of pages and in fact may need a new content strategy. This seems like a more constructive approach.

Over the last few years, I’ve been working with clients who want to go this route.  I’ve developed six metrics that you can start using to evaluate site performance and direct your content management efforts.  I’ll be sharing them over the next six weeks in a series of posts that I’ll be publishing here. 

Let me say up front, that creating these metrics requires some prep work, like categorizing content pages vs. navigation pages. It's actually a good exercise...like doing an inventory. The goal: Do the analysis, create the metric and develop benchmarks that provide you with a good idea of overall site effectiveness that can be tracked and explained over time.

…But First a Word About Segmentation

While the metrics stand on their own, it makes sense to create a series of visitor/visit segments based on Semphonic’s two-tiered segmentation methodology. After an extensive review of site objectives, goals, top tasks and target audiences, you can create key segments. The metrics that you develop can be applied to these segments to understand whether each of these segments may use content that others don’t. This helps you understand immediately whether specific content types that do not get a high number of views, may in fact be content that is important to a highly valued segment. In the table below, we have some examples of segments developed for a site that reaches health care professionals, researchers and the general public.

As you can see from these categories, combining the known visitor data with site behavior gives you an opportunity to amplify meaning from the basic elements of data you’d be collecting.

OK…so categorizing pages and segmentation... two keys to making these metrics work. If you can do that over the next week, you’ll be on your way to applying the first metric I’ll be talking about next Tuesday…Task Completion Effectiveness.