August 20, 2018

Content Performance

Creating good content for your website takes valuable time and effort – wouldn’t it be nice to know how effectively you are reaching your audience? We are super excited to be able to offer our hosted clients a mechanism to provide in-depth analysis. WPEngine’s Content Performance plugin takes Google Analytics and integrates it right into your WordPress dashboard with an interface that is easy to read and analyze. Quickly filter reports to evaluate which topics are driving the highest engagement, which content is worth promoting, or evaluate your publication trends over time. Simplify your analysis and start building a smarter content strategy.

Below are a few key ways teams have utilized this tool.

Example Uses

Optimize content relevance to increase audience engagement, conversion, and revenue partnerships.
Plan your content calendar by understanding which topics are getting traction or require a refresh.
Improve call to action for high-performing content to drive signups or conversions.
Repurpose popular content and categories into ebooks or whitepapers.
Improve content for posts with high bounce rates.
Adjust author assignments based on user page views or engagement levels.
Track overall performance/growth of your publication over time.

MOST POPULAR CONTENT

Select “Posts” or “Pages” in the top navigation, then “Unique Page Views” from the dropdown menu to see which content is receiving the most traffic from unique visitors to your site. This is a good gauge of how popular your posts and pages are with real users.

CONTENT WITH LOWEST BOUNCE RATE

Select “Posts” or “Pages” in the top navigation, then “Bounce Rate (%)” from the dropdown menu to see which content has the lowest bounce rate, indicating the content is fast and engaging.

AUTHORS WITH MOST SUCCESSFUL CONTENT

Choose “Authors” in the top navigation, then “Unique Page Views,” “Sessions,” or “Bounce Rate (%)” from the dropdown menu to see which authors are creating the most content or drive the most engagement for your users.

MOST USEFUL TAGS

Choose “Tags” in the top navigation, then “Unique Page Views” to see which tags used on pages are driving more views, or which content topics are most popular.

For each report you run, you can download the report as a CSV to generate your own graphs and integrate into your own data as needed.

CUSTOM POST TYPES

Choose the type of post you would like to view from the “Type” dropdown menu if you would like to view aggregate performance data for posts classified as a “custom post type.” To view only standard posts, choose “Posts” (default).

VIEW TRAFFIC SOURCES

Select the “Traffic Sources” checkbox to view the origin of the traffic to each post on your site. This feature sorts traffic into four categories: Organic, Referral, Direct, and Other.

Organic: This refers to search engine traffic, indicating users are getting to this page by clicking a link on a search results page.

Referral: This refers to traffic referred from other websites. This includes social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Direct: This refers to traffic that came from users typing the URL in their web browser, going to the site via a bookmark, or clicking an external link from an email, text message, or a PDF.

Other: This refers to traffic from paid advertising and custom campaign channels, as well as unidentified channels

This feature can help your team identify the success ratio of various campaigns, and how to effectively invest marketing funds. Since Traffic Sources identifies the sources of traffic to your site, this additional insight is invaluable to marketers to better understand their audience.

COMPARE SECONDARY METRIC

Choose to compare two metrics side-by-side. Simply click the “+” sign next to the first metric drop-down menu, and select a second metric to compare. Once you make a selection, it will show your results for both metrics.

WEEKLY TRENDS

Select the “Trends” tab to view a graph showing week-over-week performance for metrics. Sort by Unique Page Views, Page Views, Users, New Users, and Sessions.