Content measurement Archives

How to measure content performance using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Rockee

by Matt | Oct 7, 2022 | Guides

Rest in peace Universal Analytics

Keep an important date in your diary. As of July 1^st, 2023, the Google Analytics you’ve grown accustomed to over the last ten years will be no more. I know – on its tenth anniversary as well! That’s the official date that Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data. This data signals the start of a new era under Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

You’ll still be able to see old Analytics reports for at least six months afterwards, but only new data will flow into GA4 properties from that date on.

What do you need to know about GA4?

The biggest changes to take note of are the layouts of dashboards and changes in metrics and terminology. This is ultimately driven by a change in analytics methodology, which is a shift from session-based hit types like page hits, events hits etc to ‘event-based’.

Simply put, all hits like ‘page-view’ are now events. If you want to get into the technical details, Google’s official documentation is here.

Where have all my metrics gone! What does this mean for content marketers?

One of the big things for content marketers, who love analysing content performance to get used to is the metrics. Nearly all the metrics we’ve been using for the last 10 years are going or have been replaced.

Try not to scream. It’s going to be just fine.

It’s a good thing. Really.

Here’s why – most of the metrics we used were flawed in one way or another. That’s because Google Analytics was never built to measure content. Look at it like this:

Time on page – this was always subject to users who multi-tab, leaving tabs open for a full maximum session duration. A good guide on engagement but not accurate.
Bounce rate – This was always misleading. For example, high can be good! Someone who visits once, reads a whole article and solves a problem might leave once they’re done. And they’ve only visited one page. This contributes to a high bounce rate as that person didn’t trigger a secondary action on your website. In short, a bad metric for content.
Unique page views – A massive skew on what matters, which is engagement. This is not, and never has been, a good indicator on how many people start to read your content. People browse, click, and go all over the place.

Historically, this has been a big problem for content marketers. This data, while an interesting proxy to content performance, isn’t fit to help you measure or improve content.

There are no clear answers from the data. I mean, who’s making better content based on a dwell time or a bounce rate? You’d just be guessing. And that doesn’t feel like a solid foundation for creating great content.

GA was never built to measure content. It’s time to embrace change. So long, old friend.

Out with the old – in with the new. How to measure content using GA4.

The metrics that matter

Users – This is a key metric to establish ‘unique readers’ of your content. Universal Analytics used to focus on ‘total users’, whereas GA4 is focused on ‘active users’ – users who are currently engaged.

You will see a margin of error when comparing reports, mainly as GA4 at this point does not support filters. You can find more in this Google guide.

Average engagement time – Out with dwell time, in with user engagement. This, in essence, measures how long you’re ‘active’. That means all the time you are scrolling, moving your mouse etc.

Even if these are lower than your existing ‘session duration’ times, don’t fret. Most people are multi-tabbing. Switching in and out of your content among other things. Bear that in mind.

Engagement rate – This is the one that’s closest to replacing ‘bounce rate’. Engagement rate is the number of engaged sessions divided by the total number of sessions.

An engaged session could be it one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had two pageviews. The lower the engagement rate, the less your audience is enjoying that content.

Unique user scrolls – If ever I was to have a favourite metric (I know – I’m great at parties), this would be it. For years, content marketers set up custom-scrolling scripts in Universal Analytics. You don’t need to do that anymore!

In GA4, scroll depth is automatically calculated at 90% depth (you will need to turn on enhanced measurement in GA4: Admin> Data Streams> Select website/stream> Turn on enhanced measurement)

In essence, this means someone has scrolled to the bottom of your content. They are most likely to have read the full article. This is a key metric when you compare it with users to determine how many people started and finished your content.

Conversions – Formerly known as ‘goals’, conversions work much the same. This is where you can start attributing content to business outcomes. In GA4, you’ll need to set these up yourself, as the pre-defined metrics are very app centric.

We’d recommend you set up goals that relate to events that really matter. We’re talking form-fills, chatbot engagement or key CTAs to your platform sign-up page (if you’re SaaS of course). Linking content to impact has never been easier.

Combining GA4 and Rockee Insight data

Here’s the fun bit (ok, we’re biased). Now it’s time to understand the ‘why’ behind the analytics, when measuring content performance. Once you’ve set Rockee up on your website (read our how-to guides here), you’ll see people leaving ratings and feedback in your Rockee dashboard.

The unique logic-based questions Rockee uses will quickly allow you to understand user sentiment towards your content. Have you helped solve a problem, was something missing, what could you do better? In short, it’ll help you make sense of the numbers with feedback from the people who matter most – your audience.

Improved content optimisation

With GA4 and Rockee, you’ve now got all the tools and insights you need to improve your content.

Where to start?

High-volume content

Which assets get the biggest audience? Your big SEO winners are your priorities. Getting under the skin of how that content performs can unlock bigger lead driving opportunities. Combine the high volume unique user page visits from GA4 and Rockee feedback scores to understand how you can improve the content on these pages. Pro tip: Use the Rockee audience identifier questions to measure whether high performing keywords are bringing in relevant target audience traffic.

Low-performing content

Which content gets the lowest rating and what does the feedback say? This is where users aren’t getting what they need from your content. Too much detail? Not enough detail? Hard to understand? Too simplistic? These are the kind of things your audience can tell you. All you need to do is listen, learn and iterate to improve your content quickly. As we say, the only bad feedback is no feedback.

High performing content

On the flipside, where are people getting what they need from your content – enjoying it even? You’ve got high engagement rates, lots of unique user scrolls and great Rockee ratings – there’s something going down with this content! Look at the feedback and use it to repeat what you’re doing well in other pieces.

Rockee BETA Launch

by Matt | Jul 27, 2022 | News

What is Rockee?

Rockee is a B2B content measurement and feedback platform. It’s been built around a common problem we have in B2B marketing, in that we make a lot of content – but struggle to prove the value of it.

Analytics leads us to guesswork. SEO takes a long time for traction and lead-gen metrics only tell a very small part of story.

Rockee collects data from the people who matter most – your audience. Our BETA is an on-site widget you can use on any content, be it blogs, videos, e-books, infographics or even gated content. For more info, check out the video below:

The BETA program

- Rockee BETA is completely free
- BETA users – will get a 50% lifetime discount on any future package.
- BETA testing is limited to 15 spaces overall – with 4 spaces already taken
- Ongoing consultancy from the Rockee team – working with you to measure your content performance. Combining Rockee qualitative insights with existing measures used (i.e. analytics, marketing automation, CRM data). We will help you build a content marketing ROI framework for future use. All for free.
- Managed account setup – the Rockee team will help set up your account. We’ll get collection widgets in place and customise your dashboard reporting to suit your business requirements.

If you’re a B2B business, who are heavily invested in content creation and distribution – we’d love to hear from you.

Contact matt@rockee.io to find out more about the BETA programme and how it could work for your business.

Confessions of a Content Marketer

by Matt | Jun 10, 2022 | Confessions

This anonymous confession from one content marketer was delivered to Rockee HQ in a manilla envelope. Alongside the confession was a note that said:

I wish I was brave enough to put my name to this, but I still make a living creating absurdly bad content for some of the world’s biggest brands. I hope one day we’ll live in a world where we can talk freely about how shit most content is without fear of reprisals. And, maybe then, we can start making it better.

Until then, I remain Anonymous Content Creator.

Confessions of a content marketer

Confession no 1

First confession – I hate the word content. It might be useful for some people as a catch all, but it strips whatever the ‘content’ is of any value. You might as well swap it for the word stuff. Or, preferably, call the stuff what it is – a blog, a film, an article, eBook anyone? Don’t get me started on eBooks. Anyway if Vikki Ross, Bob Hoffman, and Dave Trott all agree on this one, there’s probably something in it. Having said all of that, I’ll be using the word ‘content’ (under duress) for the rest of this.

Confession no 2

Second confession – I’m no more convinced about the term content marketing. Most of the time, we’re just talking about marketing. The word content is pretty much redundant. When we do marketing, we need some ‘stuff’ to do it with. But, this isn’t just about trashing content and content marketing. Although there probably is a bit more to come. It is, however, about looking at a rather inconvenient truth for content marketers and creators.

Confession no 3 – the long one

How many of you recognise this scenario? You create content. You research and write things like videos, articles, blogs, eBooks etc for commercial purposes. You might be quite good at it. You take a brief. You do some research. You write something that you think will be helpful to your audience. You get a colleague, boss, client, village elder to review/approve it. You send it out into the world. And then you move on.

You might, if you’re lucky, hear about the number of leads it’s generated a little further down the line. Someone might talk to you about increased dwell time or some other spurious metric…But, for the most part, your content goes off into the ether and you don’t hear any more about it. And, in short, you don’t know if your content’s any good. And, by good, I mean it does what you intended it to do for the audience you intended it for.

From confessions to questions

So, is it just me? How common is this? I’m really interested to know who’s making really good content and how they know it’s good. What kind of metrics do you use? How do you collect, and respond, to feedback? How do you learn what’s gone well? How do you learn from what hasn’t?

I suspect most content marketers don’t have those answers. And that might be part of the reason there’s such a lot of shit content out there. I’ve created loads of it (what number confession are we on now?) But shit content is not a new phenomenon. Remember when Doug Kessler called out the deluge of crap in content marketing. The “me-too blog posts”.

The “Three-sentence ideas pumped up into 36-page eBooks”. And the “Microsites full of the obvious disguised as the profound”. Things haven’t changed. The research shows what Doug predicted: content is becoming less effective. People don’t trust it, in fact 57% of content buyers receive from vendors is described as ‘useless’ in a Forrester report.

Torturing analogies

At the moment, content marketing is like sitting an exam and never getting the result. We don’t know if we’re any good at it. Let’s torture another analogy. If you had bad breath, you’d want someone to tell you, right? Might be a little awkward, but at least you wouldn’t be wandering round offending friends, family, and innocent bystanders with your noxious oral health problem.

Similarly, if you’re pumping shit content out into the world, wouldn’t it help if someone told you it stank before too many people had seen (smelt?) it?

Good people make shit content

So, we’ve trashed content. And content marketing. Used the word crap and shit quite a lot. And covered stinky breath. Can we get to a positive and less excretory point? Most of the people I know who create content want to do a good job. They’re always looking for ways to improve their content. They look for, follow and share advice. They do their research. Adopt new tools. Take feedback on board.

They just don’t usually get feedback from the right people – their audience. If they had that feedback, they’d do something with it. They learn from it. They’d respond to it. They then make better content.

So, content marketers, does any of this ring true? And is this blog just adding to the tide of crap? What do you think? Give me some feedback.

How to measure content ROI – what does content performance look like?

by Matt | Feb 15, 2022 | Guides

The B2B content performance conundrum

Measuring and understanding content performance is a challenge most B2B marketers are asking themselves this year. Let us set the scene, the content marketing machine shows no sign of slowing – growing to a $60 billion+ industry, according to Research Dive. The global pandemic sent that growth into over-drive as marketing budgets moved away from traditional tactics like offline and events – into digital and content.

Content marketers as a result of this are facing new challenges. Research shows we’re being asked to prioritise two things:

1. Get more leads

2. Improve content quality.

No pressure, yeah?

Another consideration in this mix is our audience. Now more than ever they are being totally saturated with content and some of it is great! However, some of it is… well, less than ideal as a lot content resorts to click-bait gimmicks to drive web traffic (we’ll revisit this ‘metric’)

While we all went into a content creation frenzy for our audiences – we forgot to notice that vendor created content isn’t what it used to be. In fact, according to Trust Radius audiences rank vendor created content as one of the least trusted sources they go to for information.

This is a major problem. For all the SEO optimised copy, forms-filled or comments on social media – we’re failing to ask the people that matter, our audience what do they think about our content?

What is good content performance?

The age-old question isn’t it? Depending on where you go and who you speak to – you will find a wide range of thoughts. These tend to be influenced by the background of that creator. Whether it’s an SEO leaning, an analytics preference or how many leads we can attribute to an asset.

Arguably – the last one is a funny one, in that we measure forms-filled on a gated landing page but – we’re really just assessing how good the copy was to advertise the asset, as opposed to the asset itself. We are missing the point there, in that we can’t make better content based on numbers alone.

How do we measure content performance now?

The industry authority on content is arguably the Content Marketing Institute have produced this helpful graphic to show all the ways we can measure content: Common content marketing goals and metrics

Equally, there are several excellent articles to be read from the liked of Smart Insights and OptInMonster. These all follow a similar formula, but the core values tend to be:

Awareness – Web traffic, bounce rates, visit dwell time & user flows etc.
Engagement – Blog and social media comments, likes etc.
Lead generation – Forms completed, and emails sign ups.
Sales – Arguably Tenuous links to how many ‘sales’ can be attributed to content on the journey from attribution data.

You will spot a common theme here and that it’s nearly all quantitative data. Which leaves huge amounts of room for speculation on what ‘valuable content’ looks like. It’s incredibly unstructured and unhelpful for content creators to work with.

Metric chasing

Was it the low bounce rate? The number of subscribers acquired? Or the keyword ranking of the asset – that makes it good content? These are all valuable metrics for sure – but something crucial is missing. We are missing context.

None of these metrics tell us whether the content helped our audience, assisted in solving a problem or inspired a user to request a demo or better yet actually ring an inbound team (does this happen still?).

You know, real actual, living, breathing context behind the content. Marketing has missed a trick that software engineers have nailed for years, in that they combine quantitative metrics with the context from qualitative data to shape, mould and hone their craft.

Measuring the real value of your content

There is a solution, and it’s staring us right in the face. Ask the people that matter – your audience. Using Rockee you can collect content marketing ratings and reviews platform on all your assets. The concept is simple, once a user has read your content, they are given the option to leave a rating (1-5) and to leave a review of how they found the asset.

Whether it’s a gated hero asset or something as simple as a blog. In just seconds you can get real user feedback. This gives you clear insight if you’re hitting the mark with your target audience.

All this data sits in a dashboard which allows users to segment and measure content performance by content name, asset type, stage of the journey and campaign. Giving you real-time results as they come in.

What about the problem of waning trust in vendor content?

Here’s where fortune will favour the brave. E-commerce had this problem over a decade ago with a boom in selling online – but then it started suffering from those with less than honourable intentions, or a bad service.

So, what did the best ones do? They collected user reviews and published trust badges across their website. Bezos become a billionaire off the back of it (or is it trillionaire these days, if that’s a thing?)

B2C has done it so well, customer proof is now ingrained in every purchase decision we make. Whether we’re buying a holiday, booking a table at a restaurant or shopping for Air Jordan’s (I tried to sound cool here).

The process goes like this – we read a review. We validate the experience. We want to learn and draw comfort from the wisdom of the crowd.

Opportunity knocks

For us as B2B marketers, there is a huge opportunity for the best content creators, who put real craft and pride in their work to stand out. Rockee is not for those churning out endless white-papers or regurgitated research reports, with a click-bait hook to encourage a download. We care about true content performance and ROI.

It’s a way for the best creators to keep making the great content, iterate when it could be improved. With the added bonus of using ratings and reviews trust badges to show the world you’re the best at what you do.

This is a chance to celebrate the content makers and creators who make content that truly rocks.

It’s time for the very best in B2B to stand out.