The Single Best KPI to Measure Health Care Content

If you talk to enough health care marketers, you find that most of them believe content marketing is here to stay. Surveys confirm it, showing that most of them have been putting more time and budget behind content marketing for a few years. From my perspective, the remainder of 2018 will be no different.

But I’ve also found that most health care marketers have trouble measuring the value of the content they’re spending so much time, effort and budget on. It’s no fault of theirs. The trouble is that the tool most of us use to measure content (i.e., Google Analytics) doesn’t have a clear content metric. Sure, it gives you lots of different ways to look at a piece of content, but it doesn’t give you a single key performance indicator (KPI).

We took a crack at solving this problem about a year ago, and it gave us some great insights. I’m going to share our solution below, and show you how to implement it yourself.

First, some context.

The Need for a Content KPI

In mid-2016 my team at Smith & Jones was spending a lot of time, energy and budget developing content for both our own marketing and that of our clients. The content took many forms, including short-form content (like blog posts) and bigger publications like our popular yearly trends report. We also did videos, webinars and even advanced decision-making tools geared toward helping marketers solve practical problems.

But engagement with each of these different content types was being measured in different ways. We measured engagement with blogs by average time on page. Engagement with white papers and tools was measured by the number of downloads they generated, and video engagement was measured by the number of people who watched them. This approach was great at telling us which piece of creative in each content category worked best, but it didn’t do anything to tell us which types of content we should be spending our time on in the first place. In other words, it didn’t help us answer questions like, “Should we do more videos or more blogs?” or “Should we keep publishing white papers, or switch to an e-book format?”

What we needed was a standard measurement for engagement. A yardstick of sorts that could measure all of our content, side by side, regardless of format.

The Formula That Led Us to Enlightenment

Through a series of experiments, we settled on a formula that could be easily implemented in Google Analytics. Here it is:

( {{Pageviews}} / {{Unique Pageviews}} ) * ( {{Pageviews}} — ( ( {{Exits}} — {{Bounces}} ) + ( {{Bounces}} * 1.5 ) ) )

With about 15 minutes of setup, this formula gave us very insightful reports, like the one below. Notice how each piece of content has a very granular score (all the way down to two decimal places). This level of detail allows us to measure every piece of content against every other one, as well as against the average for the site as a whole.

For example, if we look at the column all the way to the right of this chart, we can see, at a glance, that there are three pieces of content that vastly outperform the other content on our site. And it doesn’t matter what kind of content it is. This metric judges everything the same from blogs to white papers.

It’s Quick and Easy to Use This Yourself

If you’d like to use this formula, be our guest. To get it installed, the best bet is to share this article with your web analytics team and ask them to create what’s called a calculated metric in Google Analytics. They’ll need to make sure they set the formatting type to float. Then, just copy-paste the formula into the appropriate window. Easy.

By the way, if you’re a health care provider and don’t have web analytics people, you can e-mail me or chat with me and I’ll help you get it in place.

Once you have it installed, you should be able to generate reports that look backward quite a ways. To put your shiny new data to use, start by asking questions like “What do our top-performing pieces of content have in common?” and “How might we generate content that works as well (or better) than our top performers?”

Happy analyzing!

About the Author | Braden Russom

Braden Russom is an account planner for Smith & Jones. He ensures the advertising Smith & Jones creates for clients gets a great first start by delivering strategies that consider the client’s broader business goals, the feelings and biases of consumers and what’s working best in marketing (i.e. media or delivery formats).

Smith & Jones is where health care brands come to get better. We help our clients create meaningful and desirable health care brands, align their internal teams, engage new and existing patients and drive downstream revenue.