Setting Goals for Content Sites

If you’ve been reading up on internet marketing, you’ve no doubt seen many articles talking about improving your site conversions. On a sales-oriented site, this is very intuitive…what portion of your visitors end up buying something? 

For a content site, though, it can be difficult to decide what a “conversion” might be, much less how to measure it and optimize for it. As this is something I have struggled with on some of my client sites, I thought it was worth a post and hopefully some discussion. 

This article is not intended to be a definitive, all-encompassing guide…rather, my hope is to get the wheels turning for how you might be able to more effectively use and measure your content-based site.

What is a content site for?

Before getting into specific conversion goals, let’s consider the reasons we might put up a content-focused website, from the most basic to the more enigmatic. Once we know why our site exists, it becomes easier to identify measurable interactions and conversions.

Product or service information

This is probably the first thing that comes to mind for when most people think of a website. Whereas in the past one might send out brochures, letters, or ads highlighting the company’s offerings, today this information can be more cheaply and more widely distributed online.

Branding

Similar to putting up product information, branding is another traditional messaging goal that gets ported to the internet. The website might include TV-style video ads, product-focused games, viral video, expertise-establishing blogs or podcast, or any number of other content items designed to establish the company or product’s brand image and make it stick.

Lead generation

The internet makes it very easy to acquire new leads, especially with contact forms, which can be emailed for immediate reply or inserted into a database for easy aggregation and management (or both). There’s no reason a site can’t have multiple points of contact…in addition to your general Contact Us form, you may be using an email newsletter or updates signup, FAQ submissions, or inquiries for a specific products or services. Used sagely and courteously (in other words, no spam), any one of these contact points adds to your pool of potential leads.

Conversation

This is one of the newer opportunities presented by the internet. Blogs and forums not only allow you to speak directly to your audience, but for your audience to talk back to you…and to each other. This is a rich opportunity over traditional one-way marketing channels.

Collaboration

Many companies are finding that they can engage their audience in not just learning about products, or talking about them, but helping to create them. This was a key point in the recent MyVenturePad.com webinar with Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Seth Godin (Author), and Steve Mann (SAP). (I think there should be a stream available at some point and will post the link when it’s available.) Forums, wikis, and other spaces let you and your audience bounce ideas off each other and help you to truly design products and services for your specific customers. Additionally, incorporating and acknowledging your customers’ insights into your offerings can create enormous goodwill and encourage customer evangelism.

Measuring your success

Hopefully by now you know what your site is for, or should be for. Knowing what the site is for provides some guidance for identifying specific goals that contribute to your objectives—an absolute necessity in obtaining meaningful measurements of your success. The listed objectives, however, are very qualitative and can be difficult to conceptualize as “conversions.” 

To start, let’s change our definition of conversion a bit. Pulling it out of the sales context, a conversion is simply the execution of a desired action by someone visiting your website. By setting the desired action as a measurable goal you now have a way to quantify the qualitative objectives of your site.

Examples of measurable goals

• Product and services information – Goals might include downloading a product brochure, viewing a key information page, and using the contact form to request more information or a service call.
• Branding – These goals could include time spent on the website, number of pages viewed, forwarding a viral element (like a video clip or article) to a friend, sharing on a social site (like Facebook or Digg) or downloading a free whitepaper or ebook.
• Lead generation – Lead generation success is fairly intuitive, with counts of how many visitors provide you with their contact information. Further analysis of your success here would involve tracking your sales process to see how many of these leads ultimately result in sales, registrations, subscriptions, or whatever the ultimate goal is for your business.
• Conversation – This gets trickier to measure, and takes more thought and legwork. Things to consider and track might be number of participants, number of active participants (people who contribute at or above some threshold of frequency), incoming links from user-generated sites and blogs, proportion of participants who develop a more involved relationship with your company and feature you on their own sites or blogs, share of negative comments that ultimately have a positive resolution…you get the picture. It’s not as easy to automate as some of the other measures listed, but a carefully consider plan for measuring uccessful conversations can give valuable insight into how your audience feels about you.
• Collaboration – As with conversation, this is something that takes careful consideration and      planning. You can start with raw numbers…how many are engaged in the process? Beyond that, you may want to track how many participants yield actionable ideas, how do referral rates from      collaborative participants compare with non-participants, and how does participation in the process impact the quality of and satisfaction levels with other interactions (sales, customer service). 

So that’s what I’ve got. What techniques have you used to measure the success of your content sites?

Comments

[Promotional Dude]

I have done a bunch of research on website conversions. I recommend reading several books written by Bryan Eisenburg. If you ever get a chance to see him speak at a conference, I highly recommend it, he really knows this space well. His site is grokdotcom.com.

[Amy Cham]

Thanks for the suggestion. That site looks great, by the way...very useful info. Just a skim provided several good tips!

[imprinted promotional products]

Website conversion are a very important factor these days. It's really a great question " what is the conversion factor for content sites?"

Well If I am not wrong the conversion should be adsense clicks and affiliate sales. I don't see any other way of converting for content sites.

[David Anderson]

Thanks for the good suggestions. I got lots of useful information that could help in my site conversions.

[David Anderson]

Thanks for the good suggestions. I got lots of useful information that could help in my site conversions.

[JakeLynagh]

Thankyou so much, this information really helped me...

[Amy Cham]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

With regard to ways of converting, and what a conversion could be beyond adsense and affiliate clicks, that question is what inspired the post. Sometimes, the value that we are hoping to get from a site is not so readily measured. It might be increasing engagement with our brand, spreading important information, or getting to know our audience better. In these instances, our desired effect on the audience goes beyond achieving clickthroughs on monetization elements like adsense.

The challenge lies in clearly identifying our qualitative goals, creating a quantitative representation (value) of these goals, and identifying the behavior that represents a conversion of a visitor from one who simply observes to someone who reached the milestone of our defined goal.

Without redefining "conversions" it becomes nearly impossible to gauge the effectiveness of a content-based site in a useful manner.

[Texas Defensive Driving]

In my case there are more goals than one - and I think it is fairly common for content sites.

First, I want to get my message(s) out - and this does not have any monetary or other measurable value. May be except for number of visits - but this is straight forward.

Second, I want to make money - and here the exact measure depends on the monetizing method(s), but pretty much boils down to how much money I make at the end :)

[LLC Operating Agreement]

Tracking conversions and for some of my clients is very simple, and for others it seems down right impossible.
For the e-commerce sites the conversion rate is really easy to figure based on sales. You have gave some great tips and got the ball rolling for me on just how productive some of my client's sites are. Thanks for the view point.

[SEO Web Design]

Conversions tracking are what many websites are lacking nowadays. Get a good copywriters that can capture the hearts of the visitors and successfully convert them into potential buyers after subsequent visits.

[Astrid Lee, Reiki Master Teacher]

Hi,

Thanks for an excellent marketing post.
You are really setting it out nicely.

Personally, I find that metrics work,
both in terms of motivating: keeping 'score' and celebrating progress, and
also in terms of goal setting.
By choosing numbers that are high enough to stretch you close to 'unrealistically', i.e goals that are a real challenge, I find that it spurs me on to be more creative, more organized and more driven.

I recommend those numbers, and I recommend celebration of interim successes.

For We Are One World Healing, a worldwide initiative hosted at http://www.therapeuticreiki.com/blog
the core metrics is people joining our worldwide group of meditation and giving unconditional love to humanity.

As well as this, I keep track of half a dozen other metrics that are 'means to the end goal' so we'll get to my 2 million participants target faster.

Cheers!

[Amy Cham]

Hi Astrid- I agree with your sentiments, and it sounds like your organization has given some real thought to how you measure your site. Good luck on reaching your end goal!

[Top Rated]

Nice article. There's plenty to consider there. Goals and measurement are critical to the success of any project. Websites, or otherwise. One of Bob Parsons rules for success has to do with how anything that's measured tends to improve. Things not measured, tend to die off.