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.

Comments

[Scott MacMillan]

Phil, I am enjoying your series of posts on metrics for content management. A couple questions on MCCE. How would you apply to for-profit sites? Would it be the "About Us" and Why Choose XXXX" type of content as viewed by prospects? Or is it broader to include critical pages viewed just prior to visitors performing key business activities/transactions like signups, downloads, sales, etc.?

[Phil Kemelor]

Thanks, Scott. Sure, certainly the methods I described are completely applicable to "for profit" sites. As to whether you would use the "About Us," or "Why Choose" content, I'd say yes, but I'd suggest doing the analysis on them first to see if they actually do impact conversions or top tasks.

I have worked with some clients that do discuss what they consider to be "mission critical" content. I did not include this in the post because I think this could be a process unto itself that can be successful only if mission critical is very tightly defined and agreed upon by all parties. This can be made to be a more strictly governed process if there are particular mission critical attributes that can be assessed. The group exercise tends to work better with small groups for obvious reasons.