3.2 How do I measure content? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->There are several very specific ways</v> that you can measure the quality of your content. Any content that you're using in your marketing tactics. So it could be a web page, email. There are ways of measuring the quality of that content. And they fall into two specific categories. One of them is intrinsic metrics. So intrinsic metrics come directly from the content itself. So you can figure out the intrinsic metrics by just looking at the content. You don't need any outside data for it. Just by examining the content, you can know whether it's at the right grade level, or there are no spelling or grammatical errors, or broken links, whether it meets your accessibility guidelines, does it have a title, is it unique across your website? These are all examples of intrinsic content quality metrics. These are things you can check to see if they conform to what you think high quality means. And those intrinsic metrics, they change only when the content changes. They don't change any other time. Extrinsic metrics goes back to all of those activity metrics we just talked about. And guess when they change? All the time. Just about anything could happen. And those metrics are going to change. Now, they probably also change when the content changes, but they can change for lots of other reasons as well. And so all of those things that we talked about with activity metrics and a few new ones like page speed, how fast the page is, those things are your extrinsic metrics. You can't figure them out just by looking at the content itself. You have to look at other outside factors, like all of those activity metrics that we've been talking about. Now, some people will tell you that those extrinsic metrics are more important. They'll tell you the only way to judge content is by what the audience does with it. If it works, then it's better. It's higher quality. And they have a point. But other people will tell you, "Hey, intrinsic metrics are more important." Now, why would they tell you that? Well, because the extrinsic metrics might tell you what's working, but they don't tell you why. And so you want to look at the intrinsic metrics because if you find a problem with the intrinsic metrics, you immediately know what to do to fix it. And so guess what the real truth is. The real truth is they're both important for both of those reasons. You obviously have to look at extrinsic metrics because if you don't, how will you know which content is working? but you want to use those intrinsic qualities to tell you which ones seem to be correlated and you hope which cause those extrinsic metrics to actually improve. And the intrinsic metrics can actually tell you what things to do to make the content better. So extrinsic metrics are mostly driven by web analytics. It's mostly your web analytics system that's going to tell you your extrinsic metrics. Your intrinsic metrics are not as universal, and you might have to have some kind of separate program that analyzes your content. Siteimprove is an example of that type of program that looks at your content and basically helps you to see when there might be problems. Now, what kind of content data is available? Well, it's limited only by your imagination. There is lots of types of content data that you can collect if you want to, and from all sorts of different sources. So you can look at your analytics system. You could look at metadata in your content. Metadata is data about the data. And what that means is, it's basically labels and tags that apply to the entire piece of content. So for example, it might be the topic of the content. The page content itself is all those little tags and all sorts of stuff that actually format the content and structure the content. So you can look at the words, the tags, you can look at all sorts of things there. You can look at quality signals like social shares and inbound links. And you can look at all sorts of search data. Your marketing automation system may have data about your content, and you can look at different segments. So remember that segment word coming up again, you can segment your data all sorts of different ways so that you can then find some insights with it. And don't forget competitive data. You can look at some of this content quality data about your competition, and compare how you're doing to how they're doing. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you're trying to measure your content quality, there's no shortage of ways to do it. And if you content quality is important for the problem that you selected, use your imagination to try and think about what kind of questions you have and what data there might be available to solve your chosen digital analytics problem.