One of the most difficult challenges marketers face is the ability to understand how content is performing across all touch points throughout the entire consumer journey. In our latest webinar “Content Attribution: Identifying content that converts”, hosted by Marketing Land, experts from Cardinal Path and Intel discuss the value of content and why understanding how your content performs against your business goals can be one of the most critical elements in your marketing toolkit. Our guest speaker shares how Intel used a Content Attribution analysis to manage and optimize their content across all of the many Intel site properties. In this webinar, Cardinal Path and Intel discuss how to:
- Set baseline content KPIs and aligning to audience.
- Identify the value of your content to better inform your team.
- Understand what a successful content path looks like.
- Discover the value of always-on content vs. campaign content.
In case you missed it, you can watch the on-demand webinar here.
Below, you will find some of the great questions asked by our audience during the webinar, as well as those questions that we didn’t have time to answer in the live session.
Q: (With regards to the section on Content Velocity), Let’s say page G is a ‘sign up for free trial’ page, can you say more about how, for example, you might modify a whitepaper to drive conversion?
A:Charlotte: The question is about understanding how to interpret a content velocity of zero for a page that isn’t meant to keep a user on a site for very long. Page G has content velocity of zero which means people are exiting the site directly from this page. if this was a sign up page, I would expect this page to have a short customer journey, but at the very least there should still have a thank you page, so if they do, and the content velocity is still 0, then this is a bounce rate- however if you were to use engagement scoring to look at this customer journey, you can actually weight it differently to see if this was valuable- for example, sign up for a free trial– if it was doing what is was expected to do, it would actually be a really high performer.
Q: If a person goes to same landing page 5 times, generally speaking, are they less interested in that page the sixth time?
A: Danika: It would be more informative to look at what lift it is showing in conversion rate instead. This is because, when we add the 6th landing page, most likely we’re going to be seeing a negligible lift, so adding more landing pages to the path isn’t really actually helping.
Q: Will Intel be adding or removing content from the site because of the analysis that Cardinal Path executed?
A: Erica: Yes. we’re always adding and removing content based on what we find in our analysis. The Content Attribution work that was done really highlights some targets for end-of-lifeing or modifying, even more so than removing from the site completely. I love when we discover opportunities for improvement, i.e taking under-performers and turning them around. As I mentioned before, it does help embolden end-of-lifeing, and does highlight some content that we should let go of, and with our insights from the analysis, we can be 100% OK with that. It absolutely highlights opportunities for new and different types of content as well. For example, how to improve page types and content types so that they are something that visitors would want to engage with. For example, instead of using a PDF asset, a better fit might be an easy to use consumer landing page that connects to other pages or experiences- there is both user experience and search benefits to that for us.
Q: What is difference between running a Content Attribution analysis for a B2B organization versus a B2C organization?
A: Danika: There isn’t a real difference. It effectively comes down to the pages that are doing to the analysis. One thing to consider is that B2B might have a longer path to purchase, so you might have to use a longer date range to analyse in order to capture the whole customer lifecycle.
Q: How do you select the pages you use for this analysis?
A: Danika: There are two components to selecting pages for the analysis. The first is selecting which pages to put into the analysis. This should mainly be pages under your control – otherwise we’ll be making recommendations on pages that you can’t action. Then, there is selecting which grouping to use for the pages to roll up into.The page groupings should comprise of truly comparable pages – otherwise one very successful page can make an overall unsuccessful page type look better than it is. Once the pages and the content groupings are determined, we can run the content attribution algorithm.
Q: What if you don’t have access to Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, can you still run a Content Attribution Analysis?
A: Charlotte: It might help to understand what the underlying data needs to look like. You’ll need to know who the individual user is- which will be based on some sort of unique identifier. You’ll also need to know which pages they consumed and in what order. You wouldn’t need to rely on web analytics tools necessary- log files or even a customized ad server could work.
Q: How is Intel using this analysis for personalization?
A: Erica: It helps us to understand the journey, and a lot of personalization opportunities come out of this. Undergoing a Content Attribution analysis has taught us that one journey does not fit all. It has given us some starting points with regards to how we might test these scenarios, and how we might retarget and engage people. For instance, what happens when someone sees an initial intro to a campaign moment, do we repeat it? Or, do we take them deeper into another experience. And, which assets do we leverage for that? Then, when looking at contextualization, we can better understand how we’re placing opt-in. Should it always be at the same place for a new visitor versus a third time repeat visitor, versus somebody who’s found us through organic search who’s entering deep dive content? It’s all about highlighting these questions and helping us to find opportunities to sequence through an experience as well as organize our information architecture depending on what we know about the visitor.
Q:If we have a blog and we expect all of the pages to have the same page velocity and bounce rate, we would expect it to be relatively low across the blog. So if we have a high bounce rate on a particular blog article should we assume that to be a non performing article? What are the metrics and KPIs to do the analysis in this scenario?
A: Charlotte: You should first ask yourself what are you expecting your blog content to actually do. A high bounce rate on a blog article is not necessarily bad. It could simply mean that users are reading the content and then leaving the site – and that might be exactly what they are supposed to do. You could use other metrics like volume metrics to understand the amount of interest around a post. Or, there could be some softer conversion points you could measure around blog performance, like social share rates. This might be a better indicator than bounce rate of performance.
Q: If customer spent 3-6 minutes on the site, but if the bounce rate is 96% , how do we understand this. I think that if a user spent 4-6 min on a page we should not have 96% bounce rate?
A: Charlotte: It depends on the customer journey. You may have a high bounce rate but if a page is not designed to keep someone on your site, then this metric makes sense. It suggests that your content is very engaging, but is not keeping users on the site. But is the page meant to keep users on the site? (The above question about blog pages addresses the same issue).
Q: How would you deal with marketing a national brand’s sub website, when there has been little focus on the content? And by little I mean it’s like: “here is my product and here is the price”. Would you redo the entire website at once focusing on content, or would you take it step by step.
A: Charlotte: That’s a really big question. The first question would be to determine what resources you have available to you – this might give a straightforward indication of whether you can move on a full scale revamp vs. a methodical approach. When we work with website redesign projects, we do tend to see the large scale content revamps. Don’t underestimate the level of effort around this – these are multi-year projects. There is a school of thought that suggests this approach is too high risk, and that a ‘test and iterate’ approach is far safer. If you need to see immediate returns, try to focus on a priority audience or site section, perform a site audit aligned against your audience understanding. What content needs to stay, change, or be added? Then, use a test and iterate approach to try and improve content performance. (This can also work if you need an internal case study to demonstrate the value of content marketing in general to win more budget).
Q: Can you say more about how, for example, you might modify a whitepaper to drive conversion?
A: Charlotte: There could be many issues at play if you are having problems with conversions. It delves into the field of conversion rate optimization. The question is why the content is not meeting your user’s needs. Is the messaging off? Is the usability of the page in place? Standard approaches for diagnosing these issues would be 1. An analytics review 2. A conversion rate and/or usability heuristic analysis or 3. Usability testing.
Q: What is the benefit of using content velocity instead of bounce rate
A: Charlotte: They are certainly related in that they both measure how ‘sticky’ content is. But overall, bounce rate tells you what a user did on a single page and content velocity tells you what they did across an entire session (or even multiple sessions).
If you’d like to learn more about Cardinal Path’s Content Attribution Analysis solution, download our solution sheet. We also have other informative blog posts on this topic which you can find located in the Related Resources section of this blog post (located at the top right of this page). If you’d like to speak to an expert at Cardinal Path about how Content Attribution can benefit your organization, please contact us.
