[MUSIC] So, why is it so important to measure content and measure its engagement? The answer of course is, if you don't measure it, you really don't know what impact it's had. That's where we're going today. My guest is Professor Rich Gordon, we're long time colleagues at Northwestern University. Rich came after a career in the media and he's really one of the world's experts on this topic, so welcome, Rich. >> Thank you. >> It's great to have you here. Let's begin with the obvious, why is it important to measure content? >> For one thing, we have the worldwide web today. So, everybody that has a website is now a publisher whether they like it or not or whether they know it or not. This includes media companies of course, but also businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies. And the only way to tell whether that content is working, making people come to the site and spend time and view pages, is to measure. And to measure it over time. The Web, as people are fond of saying, is the most measurable medium ever. Which is true, which means that we can now know how often content is viewed, how many people saw it. How much of a video or text article was actually consumed. Whether users have come once come back for more. Another reason it matters is that, what we've learned when we look at the trends over time is that in every category of content there tends to be only one or two big winners in the competition for attention. You would think that with millions of websites that are attention as a audience would be much more wildly dispersed, that it turns out not to be the case. I'm showing some data from NielsenNet Ratings, which is one of the major ratings agencies for online content. And they categorize 4,600 websites as being in the news and information category. Of those, the top 300, just 7% of those sites get 80% of the traffic. And this is due to phenomena unique to the web, things like links, search engines and social media. Once a site gets a little bit more attention than its competitors for attention, this network based phenomena tend to increase their lead over time. So, we see big winners in every category. We see it across the entire Internet. We see it within niches. Generally, there's only one or two sites that get most of the audience attention, and whatever category of content you're in, you want to be one of those sites. You don't want to be one of the 90 plus percent of sites that only get 20% of the traffic. You want to be one of the big winners. >> So Rich, what other challenges are there? >> The biggest challenge is there's just so much data available. There are many different tools you can use to measure engagement with content. And even within any particular tool, say Google Analytics or Bido Analytics, there are literally thousands of data points that you could conceivably extract and maybe want to pay attention to. But, obviously you can't do that. Another issue that is very real is that different tools produce very different metrics. Looking at one site in one month and one metric, the number of unique visitors or users to the site. Different measurement systems estimate that anywhere from 2.4 million unique visitors to 5.2 million unique visitors in a single month. This drives publishers and content strategists crazy because they say this is the most measurable medium ever. Why can't we agree on what the measurements are? But, this is one of the reasons why it's important to understand the different kind of measurement systems that exist because if you understand how they exist and how they work, you can maybe understand why we get different numbers. Finally, there's an issue which is that different organizations may in fact have different engagement goals. So for instance, a reference site or a commerce site may want somebody to come to the site for a very short period of time, accomplish exactly one goal and leave. And that will be a satisfying experience, and they will come back. Whereas if another site, like a publication, a news site or a brand site that has good content that they want people to spend time with. May, in fact, want someone to come and view more than one page, spend multiple minutes looking at content, and so it's important to understand your goals in order to know what to measure. >> That would certainly apply to employees in a company, in an organization where you wanted them to learn more about where the organization is going. >> Absolutely. >> Let me ask a related question because the other thing is, trends over time. Talk to me about that challenge. >> Most metric systems that exist are really good at giving you a snapshot for a particular moment, a day or a week or a month. But, when we're talking about strategy, we obviously say, I have some goals that I'm trying to accomplish and I need to track them over time. And so, a challenge for many organizations is how am I going to do that if the tools that I use are just giving me snapshots. And what typically happens is there's at least one person in the organization who on a regular basis goes in to this analytics tools, extracts data for a day or a month or a year. And maintains that information over time so they can see whether the engagement levels are going up or down or staying the same. Here is an example of a spreadsheet that one site manager shared with me. Literally, he starts his day every day looking at the metrics for yesterday. How they compared to the previous day, the previous month, the same day the previous year. What he finds is that often he learns things about his site through the metrics that he might not otherwise have encountered. He sees that all of a sudden, some metric has gone up or down, it actually gives him a way to diagnose problems on his site and fix them quickly. >> And at the same time, trend lines as true in much research can really bring out and make clear things we otherwise wouldn't have seen, if we just look day to day. >> Yes, I'm a great believer in looking at systems over time. If you want to understand anything that's going on in the world, looking over time is often the best way to do it. Because generally and certainly in the case of content strategy, you want the needle to move in a certain direction. You want more people to come to your site. You want people who do come to view more pages. You want people who view one page to view a second page. And you can measure these things if they are going the direction you want, then you're happy. And if they're not, then you can change your strategy or do something different. [MUSIC]
