Measuring the impact of content based on intent

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Apr 8, 2022 / by
Measuring the impact of content based on intent

Intent-based analytics is something of a holy grail for many marketers. Traditionally, marketers have always been focused on bottom-line metrics like sales or conversions but those metrics are limited in one vital way – they don’t take into account the people who might be convinced to buy or convert later but are not quite ready yet.

Conversion rate optimisation is, by no means, a bad way to manage your online marketing campaign. But when between 79% and 80% of site users are looking for information more than to actually make a considered purchase, shouldn’t we be analysing content based on intent as well as action?

Good intentions

Real actionable insights are what all analytics are ultimately trying to gather and it’s more complicated to get actionable insights based on user intent because we can read clicks but we can’t read minds. What we can read, however, is how long a user spends on a page and how many times they return to that page.

For many marketers, when asked to measure the impact of content based on intent they’d consider site-wide conversion rates as a valuable metric. However, this would only work on a site where every page has the same intent. So, if your site is just a shop with no blogs, contact pages, FAQ pages or information, it might do the trick but for most of us, something a little more complicated and refined is called for.

Separation anxiety

The best way to measure how impactful your content is on an intentional level is to separate the pages in your analytics based on page intent. It’s a long and potentially tedious process but if you set up your URL structure in a certain way (so that all pages with the same intentions are grouped together) then it’ll make things a lot easier in the long run.

Thankfully, Google Analytics allows you to segregate your data in a way that makes sense to you and pull these segments into other reports, should you so desire. This feature lets you create segments to work out your conversion rate based on the intent of the page landed on and give each of these segments a name.

Worth the effort

It’s a pretty complicated process that would take far more room than I have available here to explain but dozens of YouTube tutorials will be able to talk you through to process. It may seem daunting at first but persevere.

Because once you start to measure how successful your content is based on user intent – either informational, service-based or commercial intent – then you’ll get a top-level picture of how your whole site is performing on a more granular and ultimately useful level.