Four simple steps to measuring multiscreen content engagement

Netbiscuits Duncan Clark offers digital marketers some practical tips

As a certain gentleman by the name of Sir Winston Churchill, once said. ‘However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.’ So, if you’ve been pouring both time and money into creating beautiful content marketing, then you’ll probably want to know how effective your assets actually are, right? After all, video creation can be costly, as can the production of other digital assets. If web visitors aren’t spending time looking at them or engaging, then what’s the point? Worse still, what if they want to view your content but it isn’t optimized for the device they are using? That’s a lot of questions, Netbiscuits. How about a few answers?

Fear not, we’ve compiled some practical examples for improving web traffic and customer engagement with content marketing campaigns across any screen.

Number 1. Track highest performing referrer content

Whether you advertise on Google, draw traffic in from Twitter or Facebook, or just drive people through to your website via organic search, understanding where visitors come from and how they behave accordingly is becoming ever more important. Measuring whether your content audience is originating from advertising, from SEO, or from your social channels is a fundamental. Is there a link between how they reached your website and how likely they are to convert, based on the device they are using? Look at the visitor’s context, and the impact of bandwidth and connection speed on conversion or bounce. These elements can be used to segment and target marketing campaigns.

Number 2. Measure conversion goals on web content

Once upon a time, page views were seen as a good benchmark for how well marketers were doing at capturing visitors and driving them to their websites. How times change. Such is the rich nature of digital media, alongside the continued evolution of web analytics capabilities, we now need to look a little deeper into how visitors engage with content to understand success and failure.

In today’s world, digital marketers should look to measure engagement; this would include things like the time a customer actually spends watching video. If it’s an article, you can find out if they were really interested in the content by checking how far they read, via the scroll depth on page. Did they reach your call to action at the bottom of the screen, or just read the headline? Those are two very different engagements. If it’s an asset for download then the number of downloads is an important metric, but critically, it is important to consider how other factors impact that engagement across different devices and screens, so again, think about location, time of day and bandwidth speeds.

3. Measuring conversion improves future content marketing planning

Once you are measuring conversion goals, it makes it much easier to plan the most effective content for an engaged audience. This can be achieved by developing personal content based on mobile user personas and segmentation by screen, bandwidth speeds, location and more. Segment your audiences and concentrate on the content items that give you the best return on investment.

Don’t just measure where you’re successful but remember to take into account where you’re not successful. This is also part of the continual content optimization process.

Number 4. Identify reasons for bounce

Bounce is a bit of a dirty word in marketing, but it’s not always bad news. Taking a deeper look into the reasons behind why a user leaves a page is extremely important, but you should make sure that it takes into account the user context. Content that is bad on one device, may be exceptionally engaging on the same device, due to the bandwidth or connection speed at a certain time. The emergence of mobile and smarter web analytics means we know much more about user intent now than in the days of desktop web browsing. This contextual information will provide much better answers to why a customer might bounce.

That’s a very rough introduction to what you can do, and we’d recommend further reading into exactly what web analytics tools can do for you as you create your future content marketing strategies. In fact, you can learn more about measuring content engagement across all devices and screens, by visiting www.netbiscuits.com. You can also follow us @Netbiscuits for more hints and tips?

Netbiscuits Analytics — your secret weapon for digital content optimisation.