The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
When it comes to measuring the impact of content, you might think of KPIs like “sitewide conversion rate”, or picture an upward graph that shows an increase in traffic.
But are those metrics really meaningful? In this piece, I’ll argue that, no, they’re not. Instead, let’s focus on getting you actionable insights that can help your content flourish, by measuring its impact in a meaningful way.
The problem with sitewide conversion rates
Unless your website is a one-pager, the likelihood is that not all of your pages have the same intent. So why do we still measure conversion rates across an entire site?
The quick and honest answer here is that we do this because it’s easy and because that’s the way it’s always been done. But in reality, measuring your conversion rate across an entire site doesn’t give you any actionable insight - even when used in conjunction with volume of traffic.
It’s an oversimplification.
Using a sitewide conversion rate neglects to consider pages where the intent isn’t to buy something. Think about your blog pages, customer services or FAQ pages. A growth in traffic to these sections won’t directly lead to an increase in sales. But what it will do is drop your sitewide conversion rate. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that using sitewide conversion rates on their own isn’t the best way of measuring performance here.
The answer instead, is to make sure you can report on the intent of your pages to be able to understand what’s performing well and what’s not in their own right.
How can you do this? Well… we separate the pages in