 Um, I know a lot of speakers have said this, but it's so nice to be back in my house. My cats wouldn't laugh at my jokes when I did talks. You all laugh at my jokes, right? You already did. It wasn't even a joke. So I appreciate that. Uh, and hopefully you're not all too hungover today, right? Cause this is just like a real light, no technical stuff presentation. Okay, good. So, let me take you back in time. This is Mozcon 2011. This is the very first Mozcon I ever attended. It looks a little bit different, possibly smaller than what we have now. I went back and looked at the agenda. There were talks on content marketing, link building, paid and organic, working together, analytics. This is the same kind of stuff that have been on any SEO conference agenda, you know, for the last 11 years up until this Mozcon. But the ways in which we did SEO 11 years ago, a little bit different than how we do things now. Then you could just like say the keyword 11 times and the title tag and then be magical, right? You just rank number one forever, a little bit more work now, but the tactics have changed, but the fundamentals of SEO have not changed. We want our websites to rank well. We want them to beat our clients or our website's competitors. We want our customers to visit our ranking first websites first and we want them to buy what we're selling. That's the fundamental goal. This is why we all have jobs. So you think after all these years we'd have this stuff nailed, but it's actually gotten harder, not easier to figure out how things are going and if we're doing a good job, right? Add blockers, didn't used to have those. Third party cookies, are they going away? Are they not going away? Who knows? You know, there's even more concern that we're not going to be able to actually measure what is successful and what is not successful. We spend so much time and effort thinking about how to get people to our websites, but we don't do enough to make sure that we're actually making those visitors are happy with what they're seeing when they actually get there. All that work you put in getting people to the website really doesn't mean anything if they don't care for what you have to say. So why is the actual is this thing on part of SEO so difficult? One metric that everyone's used at some point to determine content success is the humble page view, but realistically what does a page view actually tell you? You think someone opened up a page, it's a view. They looked at the page, right? Maybe they didn't. How many of you have ever, you know, you're on your phone, you load up a page, you accidentally click on an ad, you didn't mean to, you immediately hit back? That was a page view. You clicked on a search result, you're like, oh, this isn't right, you hit back. Also a page view. You probably have left a tab open in your browser for weeks thinking I'll read this one day, I'll never read it, but you think you will, right? Also a page view. Do they count as much as the person who actually read, engaged, enjoyed what you had to say, did the thing you wanted them to do? I don't think that they do count as much. But really, if page views is your only measure of success, then yeah, they would be equal, but they're really not. How are we going to fix this? This isn't going to do it, sorry. Google Analytics is not the solution. It's actually part of the problem that got us into this mess. Because to Google Analytics, all page views are created equal. And the new Google Analytics GA4, also not going to fix things, so sorry. I do like GA4. I even have stickers. I find myself a kick pointer and get a sticker that says I heart GA4, even if this is a lie. I mean, we can all complain about GA4 at lunch, I promise. But the thing is that you're putting the data in, and it's not necessarily going to give you what you need to get out of it, right? It's page views are still there. Switching to GA4 isn't magically going to make your data better. It's not going to magically improve your measurement. You have to change your approach to content success. So how are we going to do that? To start, we're going to think about content success from different perspectives. What a small business wants from their content versus what a charity wants out of their content versus what a multi-location business or an enterprise organization wants out of their content are totally different. And even different pages on the same website will have different measures of success. So while I'm going to talk about the different ways you can measure content success, not every method is necessarily going to apply to you. Now, time to ask one of my favorite questions. How many tabs do you have open right now? Five, 10,000, 12, I don't believe you. You counted on purpose. That's nice. Thank you. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but I am going to say that I have this Marie Kondo philosophy to tabs, right? If that tab isn't going to bring you joy, you should probably close it, right? Just like declare browser bankruptcy, because what happens is all those tabs you have open every time you open up your laptop and it wakes up from a nap, a page view is sent. Every time you are on your mobile device and you look at all those 80,000 tabs you have open in Chrome on your phone, you think, why is my phone running so slow? That's why. Page views are sometimes sent. So that page, you don't actually look at it. It's just sitting there in your tabs waiting for that one bright, shiny day in the future. You might click on it again, which is really the dream of any browser tab, right? Maybe to look at me again one day. But it's actually sending page views. And you're probably counting them and thinking, look at all the page views this page has. It's just people hanging onto that tab forever. It's not page views. It's just people thinking they might read it later. So the question we need to ask ourselves is how many of your visitors are tab hoarders? Which is what I lately referred to all of you. I'm not a tab hoarder. I never actually have been. So it's not like I learned this and then changed my behavior. I just am always a very, like, browser minimalist. Unlike the rest of my life, I'm a maximalist and everything else. But for the browser, very few tabs. So how many of your visitors are tab hoarders? To answer this, we have to ask ourselves, how was the page loaded? So was it loaded through navigation? Like, they clicked a link internally or, say, from Google Search. Was the page you from a reload instead? Which means that someone actually refreshed the page. You know, like, F5 on a Windows machine or, I don't know, on a Mac, not a Mac person. I don't know what you do. Just kind of wave your hand over it, right? Or the browser could have woken up from a nap. And then the browser checks to make sure that all those tabs are still active. And so it reloads all of them. You've probably seen this happen multiple times. So if it was reloaded, we know the visitor had it open already and is coming back to it. Then the next question is, what kind of tab is that page loaded in? Was it a new tab or an existing tab? Because lots of people right click and then choose open a new tab, right? And then if they have lots of tabs open, how are we supposed to know how they're navigating the site? Because they've got your site open in six different tabs, right? But if it was a reloaded page in an existing tab, we can probably safely assume that that is the result of tab hoarding. And then, of course, as I mentioned, how many tabs of your website does this person have open? So if this person has opened up, say, 10 tabs of your website, it's going to be really difficult to tell any sort of navigation path because they're probably flipping back and forth. Google Analytics cannot account for people switching between different tabs. It's something that broke Google Analytics from the moment the tabs are introduced. So it's actually really easy to get this information. It's shockingly easy. So here's a sample of the data from our website. This report is built in Google Data Studio using data that's generated in Google Tag Manager and sent to GA4. This is the GA4 data source in Google Data Studio. The navigation action is how they got to the page. So they reload, they navigate, they back or forward buttons, or click back or forward, even on your mouse if you use a mouse key to go back or forward, it recognizes it. And then the tab type existing or new. Average number of tabs open is the average number of tabs. Not the total that they have open, that would be far too large. We also can't measure that. We can't escape the analytics of the current tab. But we can know that they have, for example, one on average people who are looking at the home page had an average of 1.5 tabs open of our website. So before you ask, yes, there is a link at the end of the presentation so you too can generate this. I promise it is very easy. I am not a developer. If I can do this, you can do this. I assure you, it is my promise to you. So how to set it up is the boring part. Let's talk about the interesting part. What are you going to do with this? So remember, if it's a reloaded navigation existing tab, this person is a tab hoarder. And so remember, it could be the refresh key. It's probably not the refresh key. It's very unusual for people to use this. I'm pretty sure the only people using refreshes, especially hard refreshes, are marketers who are saying to the web developer, I'm not seeing the change yet. And they say, oh, did you try clearing your cache? So, yeah, we all heard that before. If the page is open, it's a reload navigation and existing tab. It's probably the result of a tab hoarder. So this is an example of this data aggregated from one of our clients. The percentage of tab hoarder's column tells us what percentage of those pages were the result of a reload and navigation action and an existing tab type. I can't show you the actual URLs, client data, blah, blah, blah. But I've included some hints as to what type of pages these were. Let's see, third one down. It says items added daily. 74% of those page views are from tab hoarders. So, one of the goals for this client was to get new people to the website, fresh page views. And they're like, wow, so many people are going to this. It's like a promotions page. And unfortunately, it's only 25% of the traffic is actually new. A bunch of this is people just hoarding the tab forever. And that's both depressing and insightful, because it's sad, because your reports are wrong and you were lying all this time, but you didn't know it's okay. And then the other half of it is, well, now that you know, you can actually do something with this information. So take that 25% of that 1600 number and you know that those are the fresh page views and then you can say, how did those particular people get to the site? Or how do people who are tab hoarders get to the site and how can we encourage them to maybe sign up for our email newsletter instead? You know, there is some light that comes out of the darkness when you realize exactly how many people are tab hoarding, which is a lot of you, shame on you. So knowing is half the battle. You can expand on this information. You can say, you know, what is the source of these tab hoarders, et cetera. And then also look at things like conversions for tab hoarders versus non-tab hoarders, because a page view has to be associated with a session if they're just looking all the time and not actually buying, that's probably driving down your conversion rate. So maybe you said, you know what, I'm just gonna look at conversion rate for people who aren't tab hoarders, which could positively influence how you calculate conversion rate and make your site look a lot better and actually better reflect the true reality of what's happening on your website. You can learn with all kinds of other information to better understand your visitors. Next question. Do your reports include the long-term or just the short-term? I'm sure you have very nice reports. I'm sure they use time periods to report on. Last week, last month, last quarter, et cetera. But none of them are probably since the beginning of your website, right? Because that's a lot of data, isn't meaningful, et cetera. But I would encourage you to rethink that and think, well, why not? Why would you not include all the data or all the information since your website was launched? Because if you're looking at, say, your most popular pages in your report, which you probably are, most people include top pages in a dashboard, you're only looking at top pages in that time period that you're reporting on. And what you're missing out on are the quiet performers that have been around since the beginning of the website, who day after day bring in tons of page views but may not be recognized because maybe they're not as flashy as that new blog post that just launched and got a whole bunch of traffic for three days and then dropped off, but those three days of traffic makes it look amazing. So the first way to answer this is to ask yourself, how long has this page been around? So we need to figure out when the page was originally published. Depending upon how your website is set up, this can be easy or difficult. If you use, say, WordPress and you have Ghost in the code for the website, you'll see that there's this meta property article published. You grab this information at Google Tag Manager. Again, on the link at the end, don't go there early, there is JavaScript that you can copy and paste into your Google Tag Manager to grab this information. This is like real stuff that we do. So then you would grab this date and save it in GA4 along with the page view. So now you know this page was viewed. This was the published date. If you don't use WordPress, if you have, say, schema structured data, you can also grab a different piece of JavaScript also in the link at the end just to grab that information as well. Again, save it along with the page view. And you can also, if you're gonna be clever, grab the modified time as well as the published time. And because it's saved with every single page view, then you can start to see, I modified this post. Am I seeing an increase in page views per day or a decrease in page views per day? Did the change I make to the page actually improve things? This is a really nice piece of information to be able to use for long-term content analysis. And you say, Dana, I have none of these things. My website is in a custom CMS and the developer hates me. What am I supposed to do? So I have been there. We have a site right now that we're thankfully redesigning that I think was built on Ruby was like, right? Those are choices that they made. Yeah, it's pretty good. I'm so glad we're redoing it. Anyway, you couldn't change anything. It was just like the technical audit was basically one page that said no. It was, oh, this isn't why you're ranking, all of it. Yeah, so anyway, what we ended up doing was actually doing a streaming frog crawl on the site and then scraping the date because it actually was on the page itself but not in anything useful. So we just did a streaming frog crawl and scraped the date using that custom extraction option and then saved it in a spreadsheet. There's ways to do this. Of course, if you have a million-page website and you don't have access to this, like, those are problems to hire much more technical people than me for. But for smaller websites, there are definitely ways to get this kind of information. So you know now when it was published. The next thing is how many views does this page or post have? So when you actually set up this report in Google Data Studio, because I trust all of you will dutifully go out and do this and then report back later, you'll set the time period to be the advanced option. And so for the start date, you set it to be the day that the very first page or post on the site was published. And so just look through the data that you get and figure out what date that is. This is actually the client that had the horrible website. It was, yeah, the horrible website was published March 2018. Not that old either. It's not only to spend money on trash, but like spent it recently, it was very sad. Anyway, and then the end date will be today minus one date. I know no one from the company made the site is here, so I can just talk crap about it. Hopefully not in the live stream. That'd be awkward, wouldn't it? Although I don't think they know I'm talking about them, but anyway. So anyway, by doing this, the analysis is always up to date. And the actual analysis itself is done in Google Data Studio. There's a function, don't be scared. It's like Excel. It's called date diff. And in this case, we're saying, tell us the number of days between the published date we have saved in Google Analytics and whatever the current day is again. So this way, the information's always up to date. Make sure to change the time zone, this is set to Pacific Time, to the time zone of your Google Analytics. Otherwise you're gonna run into a little bit of sadness. Then it's a simple matter of math. Page views divided by the number of days since the page was published. Very simple at this point. And then you get something like this. So I had to block the URLs again, client data on the SAD website. So I really like using heat map option in Google Data Studio because it makes it extremely obvious where the really good stuff is. So you can see, for example, the fourth option down, it has 18,000 page views. It is a page that was published relatively recently. But it does not have as many page views per day as the other top three posts, which were published, you know, more recently. So I think it's a matter of you're looking at the pages that are delivering consistent traffic over the long term, but maybe aren't as sexy as a post that suddenly looks like it's a traffic rocket. And actually I can tell you that this fourth post down was a COVID-related post. So that's why it has all these page views. But again, it's not necessarily as good as some of the other pages on their website. But that's the post that gets all the attention because when they look at their reports at this more recent time period, that's what they see all the time. They don't see the quiet performers over a long period of time. So then you can look at these top three page views per day and say, all right, are these pages converting? These are the pages that day after day bring in the most traffic to our website. Do they actually perform for us the way that we want them to? And then if you look, say, further down, you can see them other pages that have a good number of page views. They might be relatively recent. They have a low number of pages per day. If those were published relatively recently, is there something that we can do in order to improve that? You can really set like a baseline. This is the expectation of pages per day that we would have for a page or post when we publish it. And if this isn't reaching this benchmark, then maybe we need to improve something on it. Okay, next question. Did someone actually read what you had to say? So if it's video, you can tell that they clicked on it. They watched some of it, whatever. It's lots of people love video. I'm not one of them, but other people enjoy video. Video you can measure. But actually the reading part is really difficult. So content consumption is a metric that we made up several years ago and it measures how long it would take someone to read the content on the page and then sees if the person stayed long enough to read that content, and then if they actually saw all the content on that page. If they sit on the page long enough to read it and they saw the whole thing, the content is consumed. If they scrolled, but didn't stay, they skimmed. If they stayed, but didn't scroll, they hoarded. And if they didn't do any of those things, they abandoned. So we published this post back at MozCon 2018. We gave away a Google Tag Manager recipe. So it's now updated. To use GA4, it's also significantly simpler than it was back then, because things have gotten a little bit better in Tag Manager. And most excitingly, we now have a WordPress plugin. So you can actually install this on your WordPress website and start measuring this right away. Thanks. It's, I was very excited when our developer Renee put this together. It's great. So I'll have the link at the end again. But you don't need to be using a WordPress website to do this. There is a Google Tag Manager container that has everything you need, including lots of instructions on how to set it up. We are running on all kinds of websites. Okay, so next question. Could the visitor actually do the thing you wanted them to do? Because you include conversion data in your reports, but did you consider if they could actually convert? It's kind of unfair to be measuring conversion rate if the person couldn't actually do the thing you wanted them to do, right? How are they expected to convert if they never saw the button or the purchase link? Or, you know, it just wasn't visible to them. Can't expect them to convert, right? Not fair. So here's an example, and I'm picking on Moz, sorry, but it was a nice, safe example. So here's the screenshot of the Moz homepage taken on my enormous desktop monitor at home. You can see the tiny Moz per free button clicking, kind of peeking out at the bottom. But on mobile, of course, you don't see that right away. You see the CTA from MozCon. And if you scroll down, then you see the button. So how many people are actually scrolling down far enough to see that button? You might be tempted to say, well, I'm gonna record scroll depth, and that'll tell me how far they're scrolling down. But, different screens, different sizes, and that means the scroll depth varies from device to device. So to find this out, we use Google Tag Manager to listen for when this button is in someone's view. We set up what's called an element visibility trigger. Again, it looks technical. It's really, really not. If you open this up, you'll see, it's just the only thing you really have to think about is this element selector field. So we know that the class of that button, again, like you should know the tiniest bit of HTML to figure out the class of the button, is this, I think it's like JS dash primary CTA. So we're just saying, look for anything that has this class, and then you have a tag, and it says, hey, a CTA was viewed, and it fires off into GA4, and then we know that it was viewed. If you only wanna record, say, the try and roll is put a free button, because the live stream button also uses the same class, then you would add a condition to this trigger. So you're saying that the click URL starts with moz.com slash checkout slash free trial. Now you say, well, it's clicked, but click URL, but they didn't click it. They don't have to click it. It's the URL that they would go to if they clicked it. They don't have to actually click it for this to be active. So you can limit. So here's an example of the kind of data you'd get out of this. Let's see, you've had 1,000 visits. You had, you know, should that be 100 conversions? Math is hard, guys. I think I did it wrong in the next slide. Cool, 10 conversions, 1% conversion rate. Very sad, no raise for you, no promotions. You're bad at your job. How about instead, you have 1,000 visits. 250 people saw the CTA. You had, I think this should be 10 conversions, guys. I don't know anymore. Math is hard. This is why I use Data Studio. We'll correct this later. Anyway, but the point is that you had more conversions. And now you have this 40% view to conversion rate. 40% sure looks a lot better than 1%, doesn't it? And now you know, wow, the CTA is really effective. Maybe more people should see it, right? And so then you know, hey, this wasn't my fault. I got lots of people here. They would convert if only they saw the thing that we wanted them to do. It won't always necessarily be this clear, but sometimes it really is. Sometimes it's like, hey, they literally can't see the button. All people want to do is to be told what to do, right? Just tell them where the button is, click this thing, then they'll do it. And so why would you hide it and then be like, oh, our conversion rate is crap? Well, because they couldn't do it, guys. They couldn't convert. So there's some options. But are all the things I just talked about success? Helen will just talk, go on, you wonder. But do all these things together, do they measure content success? Yes and no, because there's one more question I want you to ask yourself. What is the point? Why are we here? Existential crisis time. But it's a good question to ask of every single page on your website. There's a concept called jobs to be done that you might be familiar with. Thank you, Noah. The jobs to be done is what is the job of this page and is it doing this job? Like why does this page exist? Which is a good question to ask in a content audit anyway. But in general, some pages are gonna have different roles. So if we know that, for example, some pages are focused on content consumption, some pages are focused on conversion, some pages are focused on moving them on as quickly as possible, if we judge all pages on the same metric, again, not fair, the theme of my presentation is life should be fair, which I know it's not, but let's pretend. So if we say, for example, dwell time is the only metric on our website that we care about, okay, but what if it's something like a sign up page or purchase page? You don't want them dwelling on the checkout page. It's probably not a good sign. Oh look, we have a 10 minute dwell time on our checkout page. Very bad, right? Why would you consider that to be a success metric? So you can't look at everything exactly the same. So we can organize the site's pages by job. What is the point of that page? So for example, you can use a spreadsheet that you look up values against. This is against some pages from our site. Or we use something that's on the page itself. So on websites in WordPress that we build, we have a dropdown and you can choose the page purpose from the dropdown, which is, this is a customizable list. And then that's exported as a meta tag. And then you can use the same JavaScript that I showed you earlier to get the published date to grab this meta tag data and save it along with the page view. And now you know what the purpose of that particular page was. Then you can use that purpose to keep your reports focused on the goal. Because you can only then include the pages. Say you have a content conversion report. Only include the pages on that content conversion report where content conversion was the goal. Only include the pages in the conversion report where conversion was the goal. And it's not necessarily complex because you're taking this data and saving it in Google Analytics along with the page view. So you don't need to do a lot of extra work to make this happen. It's just all in one place. It makes it a lot simpler for reporting as well. Because remember, ignoring what doesn't help you is just as important as looking at what does help you. Keep this in mind every time you look at your data, every time you create a report. How much signal or how much noise are you introducing for the poor people who are gonna have to read your report? Are you including pages in your conversion analysis that are actually fair to include them? That isn't the point of that page. For example, you have conversations, I'm sure you've all had conversations like this and they say, oh wow, the conversion rate for this page is really bad. And you say, oh well, people can only see that page if they've already signed up. So yeah, the conversion rate is bad because they already signed up. Don't include that page. Don't have it there. Don't introduce that element of doubt into the client or your boss or the leadership team or the board's mind when you present this data. Only show them what matters because they'll ask weird questions about stuff that doesn't fit the pattern that they're predicting to see. So don't say things like, oh well yeah, this page converts better because it's a job to convert. Well yeah, then don't include the other pages where their job doesn't convert, right? Like the homepage shows up a lot. On top page views, what is the homepage's job? Literally to move people to other pages of the website. Why would you include it in a content consumption report or in a conversion report? Its job is like the, why are you here? Great, let's send you over here. It's the, I Googled this and I didn't know where I was supposed to go so I ended up on the homepage part of marketing. Ideally, right, we all know this is SEOs. Ideally people Google stuff and they end up on the right page for what it is that they're looking for. They shouldn't be on the homepage, that's the bad place. So why would you include that in your report? Just only show the information that matters for the question at hand. That means that when you talk to clients, your conversations are all over focused. When you talk to leadership, they're not asking you weird questions that you're like, I feel like you're not understanding what I'm telling you because that question makes no sense. Don't give them the data that's going to confuse them, right? Marketing is not their job, it's your job and it's also your job to ensure that you're telling them a clear narrative and introducing as little noise as possible. So, here's the link I promised. I'll leave it up for a second so you can all dutifully go to the website. Lots of information on there including a link to sign up for our new course called Analytics for Agencies, which will be out this fall. Everything I've talked about is at that link. Questions, of course, you get stuck. You can always contact us or tweet us and thank you very much.