Content Scoring: What It Is, Why You Need It, and How to Start Today

What is content scoring?

Content scoring is a method to assess the effectiveness of your content. Some focus on SEO metrics, while others prioritise the deeper impact of content beyond just driving traffic. We belong to the latter group.

If you want scoring just for Search visibility and ranking – check out one of the many Content optimisation tools dedicated to SERP performance.

However, at Rockee, we believe content impact goes beyond search. We help marketers understand if their content is engaging, solving problems, resonating with the audience, and delivering real business results.

When you invest in any marketing tactic, at some point, the question comes up: ‘Is it working?’.

Whether the answer is yes or no, we want to know and use that insight to guide future actions. For us, content scoring is about understanding the tangible effects of content on your target audience – exactly where it should be focused.

Why should you content score?

Guessing what works based on analytics data alone is tough. Often, you’ll find conflicting metrics that make it hard to draw clear conclusions.

We’ve experienced that struggle, and it’s a frustrating way to operate. Convincing stakeholders becomes even more challenging when you can’t back up your claims with evidence.

Putting a ‘score’ against your content sharpens the focus. Higher scoring content is your top performer, you can instantly see which content is connecting and resonating best with your audience.

Low scoring content – well there’s an area to work on. Particularly pages with high traffic volumes, and big drop-offs in engagement. That’s where you can optimise and win.

Making that content deliver better on audience expectations means you can start to win the trust of your audience, you’ve helped solve a problem for them – better yet, they may even want to try your product or service.

Ultimately content scoring gives you the clarity for better decision making. With a robust system in place you can make better evidence-based decisions on where to focus your energy. Better yet, you’re now armed to prove which content is working or not – when the boss next asks “Is our content working?”.

How does Rockee content scoring work?

Our platform uses Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data to assess the health of each page on your website. Before developing our tool, we asked content marketers which metrics they value most, and we built our system around those key insights:

• Engagement time– This metric measures the average time a user is engaged on a page.

• Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions with a user logging an event or engaging with your content.

• Event count rolls upthe number of actions that users have taken on a web page or group of pages, such as a file downloads, scrolling down, clicking a button, starting a video, etc.

The problem with isolated analytics data

Analytics data alone can often lead to guesswork and the process can sometimes be slow.

Many managers admit to relying on their instincts with simple heuristics to speed up decision making – which can work, but is also hugely reliant on a bank of previous experience to be effective (Harvard Business Review).

This represents a challenge and creates room for error when analysing content.

How can we introduce clarity and conviction in data decision making?

Our Rockee MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was built around this problem. Our hypothesis was that for all the best data analysis in the world, there is context that could easily be missing on whether that content is ‘good’ or not.

Users can sit on a page for ages. Scrolling up and down, revisiting certain sections, watching a video, engaging with a chatbot or… maybe even marvelling at your fantastic UX. Who knows?

We don’t, and crucially – analytics data won’t tell us that either.

The power of user feedback.

In addition to analytics data from GA4, Rockee users have the option of collecting data from their readers through one of our content feedback widgets. This helps give context and definition on whether content is doing its job, through a simple rating, custom questions and a qualitative feedback survey.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, SurveyMonkey and Hotjar have made quite the living from serving up short surveys into a dashboard for content marketers. Albeit in an isolated fashion, away from the guiding numbers of analytics data.

What no-one has done well (that we can find) is combine user feedback data, alongside analytics data to give users a clearer idea on the quality of that page or content. The perfect blend of quantitative and qualitative data.

Which GA4 metrics are most valuable for content scoring?

SEO leaders like Kevin Indig talk in depth about the range of metrics you could use in the excellent Growth Memo Newsletter – which is particularly interesting, considering recent Google leaks on the secret sauce behind their search algorithm.

Individually those metrics all have a value, but when used in unison and weighted accordingly – we can signpost users to their best and worst performing content in an instant.

The metrics we’ve gravitated to are based on user interactions, specifically – time on page, user engagement and events (e.g. clicks, scrolls etc).

At the moment, this is a painful job for many – our own research showed marketers an spend up to one day a month analysing analytics data, with regular bloggers for example checking that data 3+ times a week.

This level of attention makes it crucial to have the right scoring system in place.

Creating a traffic-light content scoring system

After selecting key metrics, we developed a system to combine them into a cohesive score using industry benchmarks to help guide the way. This segmentation enables us to distinguish good from bad content performance. Here are the metrics and benchmark data we use:

• Engagement time – based on benchmarks from Databox
• Event count on page – based on existing user benchmarks from Rockee
• Engagement rate – based on benchmarks from Databox
• User ratings – through Rockee widgets

It was critical to get this last element right. For example, two bad ratings might not reflect the opinions of hundreds of readers who had a positive experience.

Therefore, we only include user ratings in the content score after receiving at least eight responses, ensuring statistical validity based on Creswell & Creswell’s (2018) study on sample sizes.

Weighting each metric

Once the core metrics are collected, we calculate the overall engagement score by applying weightings to each metric. This is how we structure our weighting system out of the box:

• Engagement time – 20%
• Engagement rate – 20%
• Event count – 20%
• Rockee Content ratings – 40%

Note: the Rockee ratings are not applied to your overall score until you reach 8 responses.

If you chose not to use Rockee widgets, simply assign values to other metrics accordingly or leave as is, the platform will still score regardless.

Adjust content scoring for your needs

Whilst our content grading is based on the latest benchmarks and from our own user data, there are always examples where your website might perform differently. As such, in your control centre, you can adjust the weighting accordingly.

Some factors that might influence scoring:

• UX and page layout – we’ve found this a much bigger influence on analytics data than expected. Websites with cleaner UX and layouts, with accompanying imagery all tend to enjoy better engagement and events metrics.

This is a clear sign you’re giving users a good experience! We are big fans of SeedLegals and Thomas for their content design and UX.

• Average length of article – If your content is under 800 words, then naturally your engagement time might be lower. The average user will read 250 words a minute – but not everyone of course consumes the full article of course.

As a rule of thumb, if your content on average is shorter – you might want to adjust the weighing on engagement time accordingly.

• Interactive elements (e.g. widgets, pop-ups) – a marketer’s best friend perhaps, but a nuisance for most users. Research shows that 70% of users are annoyed by pop up ads. So, whilst the newsletter sign-up form might slowly but surely bump up your e-mail list size, it has the potential of upsetting your users.

Too much of this as well can give you false positives in your analytics data, for example ‘events’ will jump up with users clicking to close those pop-up modals.

If you want to adjust your content scoring weighting, simply visit the Grading settings in your Rockee dashboard.

Setting minimum threshold on content scoring

You might wonder how Rockee determines when to apply a content score. For smaller websites, you might see ‘insufficient data’ in some cases. This is because, under a certain number of views or user interactions, it’s tough to make confident decisions about content performance.

By default, we’ve set the lower threshold to 250 users. You can adjust this in the Grading settings section of your dashboard, where the higher the threshold – the higher the confidence level the Rockee algorithm will have in its recommendation.

• 1000 views – 95% confidence
• 500 views – 85% confidence
• 250 views – 75% confidence
• 100 views – 60% confidence

One point to consider here is, depending on when you uploaded or optimised that page – you can also adjust the timeframe when viewing that content. Extend the timeline to 3 months or beyond, and you’ll notice the system may change the content grading over a bigger sample size.

When reviewing content performance, look at the biggest sample you can to get the best insight into what’s working and why. If you see clear trends, you now have the insight to act and prioritise what to work on.

How robust is this model?

The idea for our content scoring model emerged from an early user who wasn’t getting any ratings on their content, despite decent traffic. Their UX was so poor that users abandoned the content within seconds, never getting close to the feedback widget. This highlighted the need to factor in the different nuances of each site.

For the first version of our grading system, we used analytics from 22 SaaS and technology companies, with monthly traffic ranging from 1,000 visitors to over 120,000.

This wide range allowed us to fine-tune the metrics and create a model that applies across different industries and traffic levels.

How to start content scoring right now

There’s two ways to approach this, the hard way and the easy way.

• Hard way – Formulate your own system of preferred metrics, weighting and cumulative scoring. You’ll need to map it out first, and figure out how to write a script for this in Python. The other main challenge will be access to data and how to visualise this. The best route might be a Looker Studio dash, with some fancy formulas in the right places. Estimate: 1-2 days work, with a good technical developer.
• Easy way – Ok, this is shameless self promotion – but we did build it first. The quickest way to get content scoring across your whole website is to create a Rockee account, connect your Search Console and GA4 platforms and then… look at your dashboard! You will get instant grading on all your content.

How to analyse your content score?

Our content scoring and grading works at 5 key levels

• Insufficient data – modify date ranges or threshold in settings if required.
• Poor – content is performing well below all available benchmarks, and not keeping users engaged on page in any way.
• Needs Improvement – some metrics might be performing, but when weighted out – something still isn’t working. Clear opportunity to improve.
• Good – metrics are performing well, and mostly sit on or above industry benchmarks for engagement, but there’s still room to improve.
• Excellent – these are your winners; this content is performing above and beyond in nearly every metric possible.

How you use these grades is entirely your call. As a rule of thumb, prioritise low performers with high traffic. Those are clear weak spots in your content strategy – but represent an opportunity to make more of the experience for those visitors to your website.

High performing content is another opportunity, are their clear trends in topics that resonate, types of content – maybe even writing style? Does this also represent an opportunity to expand on those areas and make more content in a similar category. You now know it works after all.

Will you introduce further metrics in the future?

On our roadmap, we’re going to be adding CRM integrations so we can track content influence on pipeline and revenue. This feels like the biggest natural progression for Rockee, as the biggest challenge most marketers still face is ‘proving content works’.

There’s nothing saner than influence on the bottom line to do that.

Equally, we’re asked a lot about softer metrics – like readability, a lot of SEO platforms prioritise this at the moment in their own scoring models. Whilst it’s not clear the impact on readability has on SEO – there’s perhaps a stronger argument to be had on how it may affect user engagement.

Write at too high a level and lose your audience perhaps? We want to put that to the test, and it absolutely should be part of optimisation recommendations if you see huge parallels between writing style and user experience.

For now, though, we’re entirely focused on giving our users a content score based on the engagement on page and quality of user experience.

How to improve content score?

A content score should be used to guide your focus and energy, but also act as a line in the sand to improve upon. We’re currently working on an AI recommendations and content assistant to help you take those next steps.

Ask Rockee, analyses your search, analytics, user feedback data and reads your content. Armed with all this data, it will give you clear recommendations on what to do next to improve your work.

If you want to dig-deeper, Ask Rockee works the same as a Chat-GPT like interface, so you can ask further questions to get more insights on what to work on.

In conclusion

Content scoring up until now, has been a tool for SEO operatives. For the voices who have looked beyond just ranking and traffic, we’ve yet to see anyone create a system which is easy to implement or understand.

It’s a practice we should have been doing for years, given the massive investment most of have in content marking. In 2024, it’s needed now more than ever, with competition for share of voice never harder – when you get the traffic to your site, you need to make it count.

Does your content reach, resonate and influence your target audience?

It’s time to find out.

To get an instant content score on all your content, get started with a free trial today.