Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Content based websites 1

Content sites are websites such as news sites or blogs and you can use Google Analytics to track key performance indicators (or KPIs) for content sites.

As a content site owner, first you have to start by articulating your objectives, and then determine your metrics. For example if your objective is to generate revenue from ads, how do advertisers determine what content sites would be of value to them? What metrics are they looking at?

Here are a few metrics that advertisers would be interested and GA would help you track:

Pages per session

Simply put, this is the average number of pages on your website a person views in a given session. This metric is calculated by dividing the number of pageviews by the total number of sessions. This metric can be helpful for gauging how sticky and engaging your website is. Users who consume more content are more likely to see more ads. Pages per session is a standard Google Analytics metric that's commonly used to measure this type of engagement. With this, advertisers are able to know if they can place product or service ads on your site. So if you are selling advertising, more page views can mean more money in your pocket.

Pages per user

This calculated by dividing the number of Pageviews by the number of users in a given period. Pages per user is not a standard metric, but you can use calculated metrics to create it. While pages per session is a standard engagement metric, pages per user may actually be more interesting. Calculated metrics are user-defined metrics that are computed from existing metrics. But what does pages per user actually mean? Are more pages per user desirable or undesirable? For example, if you're a help centre, it may be undesirable because as a help centre, you want to direct people to the content that matters, get them the answers they need, and get them out as fast as possible, so you may want to have less pages per user. But if you are a content site, more pages per user may actually be a success indicator for your business.

Repeated Users

Let's discuss one more metric you may want to use, which is repeated users. When people come back to your site repeatedly, we may conclude that they enjoy your site, or that they're getting value from your site, or that they are a high-value customer for your business. While users and new users are standard metrics, repeated users is not, so we can use a calculated metric to create this one too. This is going to be users minus our new users.

Scroll Depth

If your site earns revenue from advertising, you might want to know how ads are seen on each page.  Scroll depth measures how far down the page a user actually scrolls. If we know that a user scrolls down to, say, 75% of the page, they've most likely seen most of the ads on that page and we have success. Your developers can track these interactions as hard-coded events with Google Analytics. They can also track this with Google Tag Manager and the scroll depth trigger.

How is your site performing against this metrics?

What are your thoughts about the insights this metrics provide?

In my next blog post, I will be discussing some more metrics.

Until then, stay safe and keep analysing.