Every day, over two million articles are published to the web. That’s nearly a billion articles per year! As brands and publishers utilize content production as part of their digital currency, it becomes tougher and tougher to stand out online. The web has become heavily saturated with content; some of it highly effective, and some…not so much.
The content you create must keep readers engaged, make them take action, and draw in new audiences to create brand advocates. You can’t rely on your intuition of what’s working and what isn’t—you need a solid digital content strategy with the right analytics to drive meaningful experiences online. And while many of us lean on Google Analytics, few of us are self-proclaimed experts with the tool and the sheer volume of GA data can be daunting.
That’s why we released Content Performance back in June. Designed with WordPress in mind, it takes the power of Google Analytics and enables you to slice its metrics by WordPress dimensions so that your content stays fresh, relevant, and delivers ongoing ROI for your business.
As we continue to enhance Content Performance and its capabilities, we’re happy to announce two new feature enhancements today!
TRAFFIC SOURCES:
Customers now have visibility into Traffic Sources, which provides a breakdown of your Posts and Pages traffic sources to help you understand where the site traffic is originating from. Did the visitor get to your post by doing a search for related terms? Or were external referrals effective in driving site traffic? Traffic Sources will provide you with answers to these questions.
You can enable this feature for Posts and Pages by clicking on the Traffic Sources checkbox next to the metrics dropdown. Content Performance organizes Sources into Organic, Direct, Referral, and Other categories, all visible directly in your WP Admin.
- Organic – This refers to search engine traffic. Site visitors are getting to your page by clicking on a link on a search results page. High organic traffic is reflective of your SEO and content relevance, and your ability to rank for competitive keywords in your category.
- Referrals – Visitors from other websites. Content Performance ‘Referrals’ include traffic from other websites, as well as social channels.
- Direct – Site visitors are getting to your post by typing in the URL, going directly to it via a bookmark, or clicking on a link (email, SMS, PDF). Direct traffic can be an indicator of your brand strength, offline marketing, or your effectiveness in email marketing.
- Other – Generally traffic from paid advertising and custom campaign tags. ‘Other’ also includes unidentified channels.
Secondary Metrics:
Secondary Metrics delivers deeper context around your content performance by allowing you to view and compare two different Google Analytics metrics side by side within a single Content Performance report view. A post that is receiving high traffic may not be getting high audience engagement, or you might have posts that get fewer hits overall but is killing it with new site visitors. By adding a secondary metrics layer, you gain multi-dimensional insights to know what’s working and what’s not. You can fine-tune your content strategy and make smarter decisions on where to invest your resources.
As an example, customers can run a second metric (e.g., Average Time on Page) against their primary metric (e.g., Unique Page Views) to understand if the most popular posts by traffic are also getting high engagement. Marketers and content publishers can choose to compare any two performance metrics of their choice:
- Unique Page Views
- Page Views
- Users
- New Users
- Sessions
- Bounce Rate
- Page Views per Session
- Average Time on Page
- Average Session Duration
Traffic Sources and Metric Comparison features are available today to all customers on Business plans and higher who have access to Content Performance! Head to your WP Engine User Portal under Installs » Utilities to install Content Performance and check out the features.
Want to know more? Check out our support garage article for installation instructions, use cases, and a glossary of terms.
What most new bloggers don’t pay a lot of attention to is bounce rate. I know I didn’t. If you have a decent number of unique page views but a high bounce rate, that is a waste of potential. Its very easy to fix — better content, more attractive copy, better UI/UX — because the hard part of bringing the people to the website has already been achieved.
Agreed!!
Great release!