In this series on metrics for assessing your site’s overall content health and content strategy, I’ve so far focused on focusing on valuable content as defined by Task Completion and Mission Critical Content Engagement. These metrics help you determine whether visitors are using the most important content in your site.
Today, let’s take a look at the other side of the coin…understanding content that appears to have little value; content that you would consider removing prior to a site redesign or a content migration. Let’s say you want to create a metric that will give you the opportunity to do a before and after comparison. To accomplish this, I want to introduce you to the Content Engagement Score (CES). Think of this as your site’s Body Mass Index (BMI). Once you have the CES, you can do more detailed analysis on why certain content may lead to more engagement.
We’re currently working with a client that is planning a redesign and consolidation of dozens of sites into one. They selected 3 current sites that were representative of all of the sites. Using the cut-off of at least one page view over the course of 10 months, we focused on specific site sections. After doing this analysis, we found that some sections had a Content Engagement Score as high as 100% and as low as 33%.
Content-Engagement Score: Measures the overall site-content engagement based on viewing of all site-content pages.
Calculation: Percentage of all content pages on the site or site section receiving at least a pre-determined page view compared to percentage of all pages receiving less than the pre-determined number of page views.
Calculation Notes: You have to be able to identify content pages and then decide on a number of page views that you’ll use as a cut off for what is considered as a minimally acceptable engagement. Using only 1 page view as a cut off may work for low traffic sites, but I’d recommend generally at least 10 page views as an initial cut off. Filtering out the following pages will create more accurate results:
o home pages
o portal pages
o search engine results pages
o site maps
o pages provided for navigational purposes
Example: There are 25,000 content pages on a site; 20,000 have received at least 20 page views during the last quarter. This results in a CES of 80%.
Do an analysis of the 80% that are receiving higher than the minimum page views to understand what is driving visitors to that content and how this content influences Task Completion.
