Does Your Content Suck or Your Audience Suck?
Quality traffic, not traffic volume, will determine your long-term success on the web. One more time: Quality over Quantity.
Looks like a big success. But is it?
With that in mind, it’s worth taking a minute to see whether your content sucks or your audience sucks. Here’s how you can determine if your content is being viewed by the right audience and whether they’re actually consuming your content.
Note: We use Google Analytics to measure our effectiveness, but these same principles can be applied to whatever tools you use. (If you’re not using any web analytic tools, you shouldn’t be reading this. You’re not the right audience for our content.)
5 Measures
- Average time on site – first take note of the average time a user spends on your site. (For us it’s about 3 minutes.) Immediately, we know that if it is going to take more than three minutes to read this article, we’ve missed the mark.
- Average page views per day – Get a good idea of your average number of page views per day. (We get about 350.) If your time on page for a specific piece of content is lower than your average, and the page views is higher than average, you can immediately assume the wrong audience got hold of your content.
- Top performing content — Choose a piece of content that garners a huge amount of traffic.
- Specific time on page — Look at the time spent on that page. Is it less than your average time on site?
- Top referrers for that page — If the time on that page is less than the average time on the site, you need to see where the majority of the traffic is coming from. Browse that referring site and see if their content is relevant to what you’re writing about. Who are the people on that site? Read about the referrer as much as possible. If the top referrer is a search engine, you need to work on promoting your content at the right places. You’re garnering a ton of irrelevant traffic from an audience that doesn’t care.
So, what does it mean when things don’t measure up? Well, it means one of two things.
- Either you (or someone else) promoted the content to the wrong audience,
- or your content that day was so irrelevant that everyone who arrived couldn’t be bothered to read it.
I did this myself recently. I wrote a piece of content about monetizing a channel’s data. I promoted it at HackerNews (not the right place). I saw ten times our normal daily traffic. But the average time spent reading the content was only 36 seconds. I guess I need to take my own advice.
About the author
Andrew Davis -
In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.
Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.
When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.
He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.
"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."Popular Posts
-
Seth Godin and the Flower Clock
August 24, 2010 -
The Online Brand Value Chain Explained
October 6, 2009 -
Give Most of it Away. The Rest Will Pay.
December 1, 2009
Related Posts
-
Are You Selling Cars at a Boat Show?
October 27, 2009
-
Aggregated Stats Are Key to Social Media ROI
October 4, 2009
-
Most Widely Ignored Monetization Concept: Access to Analytics
September 11, 2009
In regards to my ecommerce business, I always find it interesting to check out google analytics data on my referring sites. I’m very impressed by the top 10 referring site visits. But then I click on the ecommerce tab/revenue and it’s an entirely different ballgame.
Julie,
You make a great point! Thanks for engaging on our post. What we’d suggest is working as hard as possible to help generate more traffic to those sites. (The ones with the interesting referrals.) If they have very high conversion rates then more traffic = more dollars. If there conversion rates are low – well, we can assume that they don’t deliver high-quality traffic.
I’d love to know which referrers continually have a high conversion rate month in and month out.
Anyway, thanks for your comment! I’ll check out childhoodbliss.com!
Thanks again,
Drew
Thanks for the post…and for the laugh at your last sentence…”I guess I need to take my own advice.” I needed that laugh, cuz site analysis can be so laborious…
Martin
Martin,
Thanks for participating. Hey, if I can’t laugh at myself I’d have some serious issues. Glad the post brought a smile to your face.
And you’re dead right. Analytics can be so much work. For me it’s about focusing on a few key analytics each time and trying to assess our success.
Thanks again,
Drew
Ouch! Great article, extremely relevant to me, and as a result I’ve realized I’ve had a lot of irrelevant referrals and inappropriate audiences!
What do you do when unfortunately a lot of your potential audience don’t necessarily spend a lot of time online?
This is the point really isn’t it? You need to get the site seen by the right audience, I have this problem with one of my customers. He want to optimise for a very broad keyword that is not entirely relevant to his products but does bring a lot of traffic to his site. I suggested that we optimise for more relevant keywords and lo and behold he started to make more sales, even though his visitor numbers reduced. He isn’t happy about this. Some people are very hard to please…
Right on, Andrew. Doing the analysis is always the hard part – and determining your signal to noise ratio is critical to building a blog (or any message) that has value. I struggle with this all the time – and have to force myself to remember the delicate balance between what I want to write and what my (small) audience wants to hear. These are not always aligned. Sigh.
Thanks for the post.