Define your Content Strategy

You hear the term banded about a lot these days, from PR companies through to senior managers in businesses... they all want to have and own your organisation's Content Strategy.

But what's your definition of the term Content Strategy?

Here's mine:

"A Content Strategy should aim for the creation of engaging and appropriate content that delivers improvements in the agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)"


Those KPI's most often being:
- Increase online visitors & sessions
- Increase online engagement (most likely reported as a reduction in page bounce rates)
- Convert lookers to bookers (or into whatever your main commercial goal is)

What's yours?

Is A High Bounce Rate Always Bad?

If you have any form of contact with website reports, you will no doubt be familiar with the phrase ‘bounce rate’.  Google defines Bounce Rate as “the percentage of single-page sessions”, in other words the ratio of site visitors who came to your site and didn't go anywhere else. 

It is one of the most popular online web metrics quoted and is typically cited by website managers as good or bad depending upon the figure…. With “High” usually meaning “bad”.

But is that really the case?

Those with some understanding of bounce figures usually claim that a high rate is a sign of poor design or bad usability. That users have not found what they wanted and then gone elsewhere.

This may indeed be true, however the opposite may also be the case. You see a user may have arrived at exactly the right page they wanted (either via marketing activity or good deep-linking search engine optimisation) and got everything they wanted (such as the right information or a view of a video).

Note: If you only have a single page site, such as a microsite or a holding page for a larger forthcoming site, then you can obviously expect a very high bounce rate.

What is a good bounce rate?

This is an interesting question I thought I'd answer, primarily following a series of debates with friends and associates in the digital industry.

For those unsure what exactly is meant by the bounce rate, it is usually defined as those visitors to a site who only view one page of the same site in any one browsing session. The metric is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors by those who only view one page and then expressing this as a percentage. 

But is a high or low bounce rate a particularly good or bad thing? Let's take an example....

Imagine a company has a website that showcases their products and uses both SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques as well as Google Adwords for Pay-per-click digital marketing. When investigating bounce rates from their digital analytics we see that visitors from organic search engine sources have an approximately 40% bounce rate. This compares with a rate of around 55% for those coming from pay per click adverts over the same period.

Surely the bounce rate generated from the organic source is healthier? As less people come to the site and disappear straight away, this must surely mean that they are 'better' users is some way?

Or to flip it around, doesn't it therefore follow that the paid PPC campaigns are delivering less value than those from search engines?

Not necessarily.  

 A different bounce rate from different acquisition sources makes sense if you consider these factors:

1.      The landing pages for paid and organic traffic could be different.
Search engine optimisation is not an exact science and depending upon the search terms used, the page displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPs) might well be different from the one you really want them to go to. This may also be different from search engine to search engine. If this is the case, it is likely your paid efforts are pointing visitors to the page of your choosing and one that may well be optimised for this purpose.
Note: this may well mean that the users’ paths to complete their required goals are different and could affect the conversion rate.

2.      The paid advert copy might be different from your organic listing
Now far be it if for me to suggest that any upstanding company would deliberately mis-represent their site in PPC adverts to potential visitors.. but I have seen examples where the Ad Words copy significantly differs from the content of the target page. Now I’m all for experimentation to understand the optimum copy in each circumstance… but when the paid advert content sets an expectation with the person about to click on an ad, don’t be surprised if they bounce straight out if the page doesn’t meet those expectations.

3.      Different visitors use different searching techniques.

I know that I have differing browsing behaviour depending upon: the frame of mind I'm in, the device I'm using and the amount of time I have. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Online users also click on different paid placements depending on whether there are other PPC adverts displayed and the quality of the organic listings displayed alongside or below those precious Google Adwords ads.

Whatever your bounce rate, you should always take whatever steps you can, not just to minimise it, but to focus on optimising your collective set of site KPI’s and maximising the commercial opportunities your online presence gives you.

The philosophy of content marketing

In a previous post I posed the Content Marketing equivalent of a long-standing philosophical question "if words are written and nobody reads them, are they really content?"

But the creation of content doesn't exist in a vacuum. To succeed at content marketing you don't just need great content... You also need:

100% code:
Just developing HTML that just about qualifies as 'fit for purpose' at the time of testing not only means that you may have issues down the line (e.g. when a specific browser is slightly updated) but may also hamper some of your SEO efforts. For example, some blogging platforms (e.g. WordPress) can take quite a lot of effort to get them SEO-friendly.

Killer UX:
Creating a fantastic user experience helps visitors browse your site with ease and complete tasks you want them to using functionality and content to inform them at every relevant step of the user journey.
So does content marketing include the use of  A/B and multivariate testing (MVT) approaches to optimise the user experience? You betcha! Alternative versions of content can have significant influence on visitor bounce rates and understanding... which can lead to improved conversion.

Exemplary 'white hat' SEO techniques
Forget the grey and murky areas of questionable search engine optimisation actions, your content marketing efforts have to be based on sound and utterly legitimate techniques. Why? Well thanks to the recent Google algorithm updates there is now an the even greater chance that less than honourable techniques could negatively affect your website's organic rankings.

Insight from digital analytics
A good analytical understanding of what your visitors are doing when they get to your website gives you the knowledge to evolve your content (text, imagery , video , animations, etc.) by changing it rapidly to respond to trends.

Further metrics of content marketing success

In one of my recent posts (here) I provided three important metrics for understanding the value of your content marketing efforts: bounce rate, pages per visit and returning visitors. Furthermore I said I believed that although these three figures are each individually important, when combined they are potentially even more useful.

However, there was a couple of metrics I did not include:

1. Sharing:
   It is possible to measure the use of social sharing functionality in several ways, including: the metrics provided by applications such as addthis / sharethis / etc. that usually come with their own built-in analytics or by tagging actions that integrate with your website analytics.
2. Conversions from links
   Within your website analytics package you should be able to track users from links within your content pages all the way through to them completing their required goals. This gives you another indication of the value of the content you are producing and how it is directly affecting your bottom line (note: it is even possible to tag each link with it's own specific identifier).

Have I missed any others?

Note:
You may also want to read my previous post on Content: Found, read, shared and measured, a useful way to categorise your content marketing activity.

Measuring your Content Marketing efforts

In my recent post on Content Marketing confusion I described how I thought one of the most important KPI's for the optimisation of content is the number of returning visitors to your site. You should easily be able to measure this figure using your website analytics package (such as Google Analytics, which even has a specific report for this purpose: Audience >; Behaviour > New vs. Returning ).

But l thought it might be worthwhile to take a bit of time to dig into this subject further. So I've pulled together some other important metrics for Content Marketing that I think are beneficial and how to measure them.

Bounce rate:
This metric is the percentage of all visitors who come to your site and only view one page, in other words they bounce straight off. Usually it is a positive sign if you have a low bounce rate, indicating that a higher percentage of people go on to view subsequent pages... a sign of engagement with your content.
Note: I sometimes exclude paid marketing (e.g. PPC) from this statistic, as paid traffic usually drives people to pages deep into a site to carry out specific functionality.

Pages per visit:
Again an indication of site enagement this metric is quite useful and is sometimes quoted alongside bounce rate. However care should be taken to factor in the site's user experience... for example if content is purposely split across several pages (such as to optimise advertising opportunities) then this figure will be comparatively high.

Returning visitors:
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the returning visitors figure gives a site owner a good idea of how interested visitors have previously been (e.g. interested enough to come back). However combining this visitor information with the previous two measures (bounce and pages per visit) does provide a better idea of the 'stickiness' of site content and also potential issues. For example: calculating the number of pages seen by return visitors, identifying new visitors who don't bounce and finding those pages that have a high bounce rate even for visitors who come back can each start to paint a picture of where to focus your content marking effort in the future.

Retention Marketing : working out the value of your efforts

We are currently working on a project to improve the retention marketing efforts for a client. But before we are able to sit down to finalise the deliverables, the client has asked us for some Key Performance Indicators that they can expect to measure our work against.

 

This is a sort of 'chicken and egg' situation, as until we have worked out what we are specifically trying to achieve and how we are going to do this, we can't decide on our actual goals and what the success criteria are. However, given I've done this sort of thing before I felt I could 'short circuit' the process and pulled together a few examples of some of the metrics I would expect to measure as part of a digital customer retention plan. Based on the assumption that the digital marketing activity is mainly going to be via email, the ones I gave were:

1. Bounce rates (site visitors and emails)

2. Share of overall website traffic
3. Conversion rates
4. Share of total conversions

 

And finally... I suggested measuring ROI (return on investment) from this activity as calculating the cost per site visit and cost per conversion generated.

 

Can anyone else suggest anything else?