Persuading your web users to convert is always job one for a digital marketer, and there are plenty of weapons that digital marketers have at their disposal. Better targeting, A/B testing, content changes–there is a long list.
But I believe that the most overlooked weapon is content analytics. Yeah sure, we all look at bounce rates and exit rates, but those traditional metrics are blunt instruments.
Are all bounces bad? No. Blog posts have very high bounce rates, mostly because people search, find a post, read it, and leave. That is likely a successful visit.
Content analytics allow you to distinguish which content is working and which is not, through several approaches:
- Interaction. If someone looks at your page for five seconds and exits, that’s probably bad. If someone looks at your page for a minute, scrolls through the whole thing, and exits, maybe that isn’t bad.
- Effective Clicks. If someone clicks a link on your page, that’s good right? Probably, but if they click on your top nav or your footer, maybe they got lost and didn’t find what they were looking for. Where they click is as important as whether they clicked.
- Task Patterns. If you can see that task completions hinge on users seeing certain pages, maybe those are the ones to tease.
And that’s just a few tricks that you’ll learn if you attend my workshop on content analytics at the Marketing Summit in Las Vegas in June. Because it isn’t just about dashboards to tell you what to do–it’s about automation that improves your site as more people use it. I’ll see you there so you can pick up some secrets, too. And if you want, those secrets can stay in Vegas.
