When you have lots of content in different places, it can be hard to keep tabs on whether it’s working. And what does that mean, anyway, that your content is ‘working?’ 

We like to think of it as meaning it’s supporting the goals of your users, business and marketing. 

With the lockdown comes an opportunity to reflect on your content, to see what issues are there and time to fix them. To help you do this, we’re publishing a series of posts to help you take stock of the content on your website.

But first… why?

“Yes”, you probably think, “yes I should take stock…” and then you start thinking about why but then a bird chirps and you notice a lovely fluffy cloud and by the time you look back at your screen, the motivation for such a monumental task has slipped away. 

Having a clear idea why you’re doing this will help. Taking the time to reassess your content can help you:

• improve things for your users

• cut down on support queries

• stop spending money in places that don’t convert browsers to buyers

• refine your messaging.

It can also help you see what your users see. Is the website or process confusing? Is there a lot of legacy content getting in the way?

If you’re in a public sector or non-profit organisation, is there a lot of avoidable contact getting in touch with the support team (that includes dedicated teams and other forms of contact including social media and email)? ‘Avoidable’ might mean the same queries come through regularly, or perhaps there’s an online way of doing something but people aren’t able to use it.

If you’re in a commercial organisation then improving your content will almost certainly mean saving money. Whether that’s because there’ll be less to create and maintain, or you’ll be able to make better decisions about where to advertise, or something else, it’ll be worth it. 

Do a content audit (sorry)

A content audit keeps track of your content and provides analysis for how the audience uses it. We’ve written about what a content audit is and how to do one here. 

The knowledge you gather will tell you a huge amount about your organisation and your audiences and will help you improve navigation, findability, content quality and performance. 

Yes, these can be a bit of a pain to do. If you want a hand because you’re short on time (or simply can’t be bothered to do it) then get in touch and we’ll do it for you. 

Ask the right questions

Before starting you need to know what you want to measure. What’s important to your users and your organisation? Just measuring things like visits to the website isn’t enough, it needs to be more meaningful by adding more context. Have visits increased since you did some PR activity? Did the extra visits increase the amount of products bought or people helped? 

Start by thinking about: 

1. What goal(s) do you want the content to achieve? 

For example: Help people complete a task such as buy something or know how to do something. 

2. What are the best indicators the content is achieving those goals? 

For example: People complete their task during the visit or manage to do the thing without further support from you. This might look like sales, completed transactions or a lack of support queries (particularly about the same topic). 

3. What’s a realistic way to measure those indicators?

For example: A combination of measuring number of visits, buying journey completion and amount of money spent per transaction. Or maybe it’s the number of comments generated per page and counted per topic.  

This exercise is going to be different depending on your organisation and where you are in that organisation. You can measure a lot of stuff, so take the time to think about this (give us a shout if you need help with this). 

Be realistic. You will need to be clear about what you want your content to achieve and make sure those goals are measurable. 

Measure traffic using analytics

Look at your website traffic using tools such as Google Analytics and compare results with previous periods - days, weeks, months or even years. The website analytics you gather can help you see how many visits your content had, how people got to the site, how long they spent on the page, how far down they scrolled, whether they downloaded that PDF, what page they were on when they left the site... and more. Much more. 

Layering up information like this can help you see what’s working for you in terms of bringing traffic to the site, how they navigate around and when they leave. This is especially useful if you have transactions and other journeys on your site - how many drop out before completing, for example? 

Even though you can measure just about anything, it doesn’t mean you should. Metrics can easily become all-consuming and confusing – make sure you extract the data that’s relevant to your goals.

Ask your users what isn’t working

Measuring traffic will tell you what happened, but it won’t tell you why. Add your analytics to some qualitative information, such as user feedback, to build a more complete picture of your content. 

Qualitative information can be taken from observations, interviews with stakeholders and user research. Gathering feedback from users can include direct messages, emails, reviews, blog comments, calls, support tickets etc. 

You can also get useful and actionable feedback from surveys. Open-text questions are especially helpful because it gives your users the chance to express their opinions using their own voice.

By taking the time to do this kind of research you’ll be able to see things that quantitative data can’t reveal. Evaluate the effectiveness of your content to be able to understand its value. 

Take the time to analyse what’s going on

It’s not enough to just collect this information, you need to take the time to analyse the data to understand what to improve and how. The analysis is where you get the insights that will help you understand where your content is working and where it isn’t. If you want to improve the quality of your content and optimise its effectiveness, we can give you a hand with this bit.

If you started out wanting to:

• improve things for your users

• cut down on support queries

• stop spending money in places that don’t convert browsers to buyers

• refine your messaging 

then you will now have all the information you need. 

Got any measuring tools that work for you? Need help with content recommendations or starting a content audit? Let’s talk.