To achieve their goals, marketers utilize different content formats and employ different content marketing tactics. Which ones are the best for you? The answer lies in the data. ImpactHero will help you analyze the performance of your website content at different funnel stages, find the best pieces, and see what you can do to increase their performance even more.
Set Clear Goals
Performance is a multi-faceted term, you can measure your content efficiency by traffic, engagement, user activity, or anything else depending on your strategy and funnel stage.
- Set up the ImpactHero tool and let it collect the data about your content performance.
- Start by exploring the user journey and deciding which stage and metrics you are going to look at.
Determine the Most Successful Content Format
Now, when you know the funnel stage, let’s check how well the existing content performs to understand what perfect copy looks like.
- Go to the Overview tab and check out the Content Performance Insights. There you’ll find information about the top-performing formats for some of the funnel stages.
In the example, we see that How-tos and 1,800+ word articles have a really high Impact Score, which means they work well for converting users into leads.
- Open the full report (go to the Analytics tab) and choose the metric that correlates with the selected funnel stage, e.g. Total Traffic for the top of the funnel (Attraction), Engagement Score for the middle of the funnel (Impact), etc. You’ll have your content distributed by type.
As you can see, questions and guides bring more traffic than lists and How-tos. If you plan to increase reach, you can correct your strategy and focus on creating these types of articles.
- Switch to Content Length. Here you have your content distributed by type, which will let you estimate the word count of a top-performing article at a specific stage.
In this example, pieces of over 1,800 words are absolute leaders in terms of traffic, so you would definitely benefit from producing some well-researched guides, or providing very detailed answers to your users’ questions.
Go Down to the Copy Level
After you’ve defined the best format for your content, it’s time for in-depth analysis which will let you find specific pieces that follow his format and make sure you make the most of these.
Find the Top-Performing Copy
- Go to the Contents tab and choose your funnel stage.
- Filter the content list by type and length you’ve come up with in the step above. E.g. if you found that 1800+ word How-tos perform best at the Attraction stage, set the Select content length and Select content type filters accordingly.
Analyze Their Performance In Depth
- Look at the performance of the pieces you find. In the example, the traffic to one of the top-performing articles has dropped significantly, so it may need an update. The other articles drive a lot of traffic but have huge bounce rates and dropping engagement scores, which means that they work well at the top of the funnel but don’t help to take the users to the middle.
- Try to increase the content performance. Click on the ‘bulb’ icon in front of the article to see the insights offered by the tool. Here are some of the recommendations you can get:
- A page gets a large amount of external traffic but has a low engagement score: check if the content is relevant to the title and if the first paragraph is engaging enough.
- A page gets a large amount of external traffic but has a high bounce rate: check the content quality, UX, and if it aligns with search intent.
- A page has a high engagement score and low bounce rate, but gets little traffic: promote the page more actively.
Check Out the Traffic Sources
- Click on the Traffic Sources of each item to see the total daily or weekly traffic trend and traffic sources for each page. This information will help you identify the most promising distribution channels for your content and reach long-term results, as promotion contributes greatly to content success.
In this example, we have a piece that consistently brings significant search traffic and has the potential of becoming evergreen if you consider updating it on a regular basis.
Next Steps
With the list of your top-performing content you can proceed in a variety of ways; to name just a few:
- Create more pieces in the format you found to be the most effective and use ImpactHero to monitor their success.
- Find the pages that underperform and consider rewriting or repurposing these based on the type and length of a perfect piece.
- Analyze your content performance throughout the funnel and see how else you can adjust your strategy.