Measuring Content Consumption and Engagement

[Amanda_Schalyo]

Hello all! In the middle of building a new website. Our company is research organization and one of our main value propositions is our knowledge base filled with articles and white papers and reports etc. Our members download those items. Internally we are tracking consumption of those items based off the "download" button click. Dilemma - we want the best customer experience but we still internally need to understand engagement with our resources, if we are pushing the needle in terms of growth and we have to report back to our members their account usage to justify renewal. Next dilemma - in new website world we are moving away from just PDF downloads to HTML based content as well etc. where just a button click will no longer do.

Ask - What ways do you all track this type of engagement/consumption of content that works well. Benchmarks? Like should we use how long someone stays on that page where content exists? How long is a good length to justify engagement? Wanting to hear your ideas and best practices.

Thanks in advance!

[Dory_Viscoglio]

I'd look at Heap. Sort of like GA on steroids! www.heapanalytics.com

[Anonymous]

Hi Amanda! What a great problem to have. Most marketers are starving for content and you've got a ton of it at your fingertips! I used to work for a global market research company with a similar challenge (Euromonitor) and since becoming a consultant, I have yet to see one client who has too much content!

I'm going to take the Marketo angle on this one: As long as you have munchkin code on your website, you can use web page visits or form fills to indicate that someone has engaged with that piece of content. Then in Marketo, create a program for each piece of content, or at least the "type" of content if tracking individual pieces is too much. For example, you could have a program that catches engagement with a specific white paper OR one program that catches engagement with all white papers each month/quarter. That way, if you have a CRM and are using opportunities, you can tie revenue back to the content using MT attribution.

If you're not using opportunities and simply want to understand engagement, traditional metrics like page views and time on site are good starters. Benchmarks for engagement really depend on the type of content. There could be some research out there somewhere to give you a benchmark...but I doubt anyone here can give you a "best practice" without asking more questions.

[Chris_Johnston]

Ask your customers would be one of my first thoughts. Think "like" in a Facebook or Netflix sense with a thumbs up or thumbs down and get your community to rate their interaction with the content.

[Anonymous]

Hi Amanda,

I use to work for a publisher and our sole focus was on understanding subscriber content consumption to better position our sales team to speak with advertisers about how our audience was interested in their products and services, and the editorial team to write the trending stories. In this role, I used Marketo tags and folder naming conventions to reflect my CMS article tagging. For example, if we had a whitepaper on Account & Tax, the program folder would have a specialized code that reflect that the whitepaper with *ACCT. This allowed me to pull reports by email, program performance, etc by topic. I was able to also pull Google Analytics reports to get a full view of the performance of all article content.

We had over 21,000 original articles, and on average 80 webinars per year, 90 ebooks per year, 180 whitepapers per year. As Jamie mentioned, there was never too much content.