First, put your advertiser hat on. Where would you purchase display advertising space on your site? Second, what data would you use to add business intelligence into your decision process? Based on these two questions and answers, it quickly becomes apparent that not all pages are created equal.
This type of decision encourages us to combine the analysis of a variety of metrics like traffic volume, traffic trends, and engagement rates to better understand the value of content consumption and customer attention. In addition to understanding the awareness and perception of your company, products or brand.
An analysis of attention and consumption invites us to consider the intersection between varied items like content and engagement types, overall site purpose and goals, brand awareness and perception.
Plan of Action
1. Think like advertisers.
2. The data is available—put some business intelligence into this process.
3. Use this approach to evaluate the attention that customers give your site and brand.
“There is no formal process employed for creating the linkage between performance measurement and strategy…tell me what an organization is measuring, and I should be able to deduce its strategy.”
– Arthur M. Schneiderman
What is “the” Purpose of the Site?
There are corporate objectives with diverse needs of why a site may exist and then of course, there are the customers’ with a variety of agendas and needs as to why they arrived to your site.
With these diverse and in some instances divergent needs, a Digital Measurement Scorecard helps get at the questions everyone are asking:
• How is my site doing?
• Is anyone paying attention?
• Is our site healthy?
• Should we change anything?
• What should we change?
Building a Digital Measurement Scorecard
A Digital Measurement Scorecard becomes an index of traditional performance measures of site performance (quantitative) with stakeholder opinions to create a comprehensive but intuitive view of performance. Measurement given to each segment represents its overall health or success within specific categories.
| Content | Engagement | Awareness | Perception |
|---|---|---|---|
| Measures the value of the content as perceived by stakeholder and the value as demonstrated by customer behavior | Measures actions in response to engagement opportunities offered on the site (e.g. registrations, downloads, trials, etc.) | Measures the external awareness of the company, specific products, brands or initiatives | Measures the familiarity and perception of customers to the site, products, brands or initiatives |
| Types of Data: Visits | Types of Data: Engagement Actions | Types of Data: Social Media, Search, Surveys | Types of Data: Social Media, Surveys |
| Measurement: Content Value Index, Grading System | Measurement: Grading System | Measurement: Grading System | Measurement: Grading System |
Content Index
If all pages are not created equal, how do we distinguish between one type of page and another? Think about it a different way. Do you value of your site’s home page the same way as a product page on the site? The obvious answer is “No”, each page has a specific purpose.
Distinct Content Types Identified
- Conversion pages, transition pages, and inform pages are used to help define page types. See our blog related to defining page objectives as this will help identify the content page types. Conversion content page is an end-node page that generates leads, buys, registrations, trial software, etc., with the primary call-to-action taken on the page.
- Transition page essentially routes traffic to conversion or inform pages.
- Inform page is constructed to have the customer read the content, watch a video or demo, etc., it’s a learning action.
Construction of the Content Index
Once you’ve defined the content pages, identify distinct site segments. For example, Investor pages may be categorized as ‘Inform’. Product pages that have a trial download may be categorized as ‘Conversion’, while Product FAQ pages could be categorized as ‘Inform’.
Define the content values based on perceived internal and emergent values rated on a grading scale of 1 to 5.
• Internal Value refers to content important to your business stakeholders
• Emergent Value refers to content deemed valuable to customers to the site (use customer comments, site metrics (popularity), surveys, etc.)
Your table of defined content pages may look something like this.
Constructing the Grading System
Weights are applied to the points earned to adjust the value of each of the measurements. This is where you want to engage with your stakeholders again to define the weights that are important. Within each of the four category types (content, engagement, awareness, perception), you may have additional data that comprise a specific metrics. Use weights to prioritize to sum to 100%. Scores for each individual measurements are summed to produce the final rating.
Your table for the grading system may look something like this.
Engaging the Feedback Loop
The Content Index and Engagement Ratings provide insight into where customers spend their attention and how they spend it. Awareness and Perception provide external insight as to what customers are liking, searches, talking about as well as think of the company.
“Analysis should generate conversation.”
– Peridot LLC
With the Content Index it creates additional value through conversation. You will want to engage your business stakeholders to define explicitly what they value, how much they value it, and how they determine success.
These definitions are incorporated back into the analysis to refine the performance measures and content index.
The refinement process leads to more opportunities for site optimization based on clear definitions of performance, stakeholder input, and a rigorous analysis of the data.
