Measuring the value of informational content 

 Your typical content strategy will usually have a mix of tasks. Most commonly, it will focus on your money-makers — the category pages — and for good reason! If your category pages rank well, they’re easier for your customers to find. 

Being more visible in the SERPs increases the likelihood of a customer finding and purchasing your products or services, ultimately increasing revenue.

As a more obvious route to conversion, improving and optimising category pages is often the priority in any content strategy, but don’t sleep on informational content. There’s still a huge amount of value in having useful guides and blog posts on the site.

Why is informational content important?

Your category pages can only do so much. Their primary aim is to sell your products and services. While they can answer FAQs, category pages only offer limited advisory content. 

To maximise success, you must supplement your money-making pages with informational content. 

Doing so allows you to:

• Support the user journey by covering topics customers want to know about in more detail.
  • For example, a fitted wardrobe company may create a guide on how to fit sliding wardrobe doors. This topic is too detailed to cover on the category page, but users will want to know more before purchasing.
• Rank for longer-tail queries related to your product, improving your visibility in the SERPs and growing traffic to your site. 
• Create contextual relevance for Google. Multiple pages relating to a topic help the search engine to understand your expertise better.
• Include multiple, relevant internal links to support the user journey and flow of authority to key category pages. 
• Attract backlinks through digital PR activity. Being sales-orientated, category pages are the antithesis of how journalists link to other sites. Informational content provides value without being too promotional, so creating informational content could support your backlink profile over time. 

Informational content can drive conversions too but usually at a lesser rate than category and product pages. Because the user journey isn’t often linear (e.g. Category Page > Product Page > Purchase), it can be difficult to establish what value your informational content adds outside of keyword rankings and traffic. 

But it is possible. Using Google Analytics, you can establish how your informational content contributes to site conversions. 

Establishing which conversions are important 

Every website is different so you’ll need to establish your priority conversions. What you’re tracking will depend on the type of website you have, but commonly tracked conversions include:

• Purchases
• Product added to basket
• Checkout started
• Product/service page viewed
• Contact form completed
• Callback requested
• Quote requested
• Newsletter sign-ups

How to measure conversions from informational content 

There are two ways you can measure the value of your informational content within Google Analytics:

1. Setting up a funnel exploration
2. Creating a free-form exploration                                                                                                                                           

1. Funnel Explorations

Funnel explorations are pre-set up in Google Analytics and allow you to track how users move through your site. Simple to set up, funnels are a great way of seeing how users drop off as they move through your site. 

If set up correctly, you should see a funnel visualisation and a table similar to the below:

This shows us that while not a typical ‘money-making’ page, informational content plays a role in directing people through your website and can lead to conversions, albeit at a lesser rate. 

Now imagine you had no informational content at all on your website; you’d essentially lose these visitors landing on your site, and the conversions that come with them. 

2. Creating a Free-Form Exploration

A funnel exploration only provides a top-level view of how your informational content informs the user journey through your site. To get the individual performance of each guide or blog URL, you can use a Free-Form Exploration. These take a little more work to set up but it’s worth it if you’re looking for more detail around your best-performing informational content. 

Once set up, you should see a breakdown of user behaviour on a URL-by-URL basis, so you can see specifically which guides and blog posts are driving the most interest throughout the rest of your site. 

There are other ways of evaluating the performance of your informational content. Time spent on the page is another good indicator of the quality of the content. Generally speaking, the longer a user spends on the page, the greater engagement they tend to have with the content. 

Tips for turning your data into actionable findings

Once you have your data, you can unlock a wealth of insights to report on content strategy performance and shape the success of your future strategies. 

• Proving the worth of informational content – informational content can fall victim to marketing budget cuts, given that it’s not a direct ‘money-maker’. However, this process helps to prove the worth of informational content. This information can help you justify future investments when securing budget for your marketing plans. 
• Better understand the informational content that converts best – by drilling down into your informational content, you can understand which topics best support the user journey. This could inform future content strategies, so you can spend more time on the content that converts. 
• Improve your existing content to drive additional conversions – whatever your goal, is your informational content encouraging users to do what you want them to? If your content isn’t telling users what you want them to do, you can’t be shocked to learn that they aren’t doing it. Finding out which content isn’t performing as well to drive conversions could provide an action list of things to improve. 

How to optimise your informational content to drive conversions

1. Make sure it’s relevant

All too often, companies are ploughing their marketing spend into irrelevant content. The content on your website should make sense to a user; for example, a fitted wardrobe company writing about bedroom storage solutions is logical. The same wardrobe company writing about Beyonce’s chances of winning Album of the Year at the Grammys, not so logical. 

Making sure your content is relevant to your product and services gives you the best chance of driving those conversions, as you’ll naturally be able to link the topic back to your offering. 

2. Showcase your products

Say you’re writing a listicle of the top wardrobes for small bedroom types. This is the perfect opportunity to showcase your product range. Incorporate panels to highlight your available product range and the benefits they can offer potential customers. By doing so, you’re presenting a solution to a problem a user is already researching, offering convenience that could potentially lead to more conversions. 

3. Use internal links to your advantage

Make it easy for a user to read your informational content and end up on one of your money-making pages. Talking about sliding door wardrobes? Link to the category page. Have a specific solution to a user’s problem in stock? Link to the product page. You can even link to related guides to aid users who need to continue their research. 

Use internal linking to your advantage and you’ll improve the user journey and help bolster your rankings in the process. 

4. End with a strong call to action

Tell the user where you want them to go when rounding up your article. This could be anything from shopping the full product range or signing up for your newsletter to stay up-to-date with the latest news on a particular topic. 

It has long been difficult for marketers to prove the value of investing in informational content. However, with the right know-how, you can unlock how well your informational content directs users through your site and leads to conversions. With this knowledge, you can create more engaging content for your audience and move closer to your overall goals. 

At Evolved, we create onsite content strategies tailored to your marketing needs, using a mix of both commercial and informational content to build your brand’s online presence. To find out more, get in touch with our team today.