Start looking at page intent when measuring the success of content.

As an affiliate marketer, especially when promoting loan products, SEO can be the best method for driving traffic and conversions. One of the keys to ranking on search engines like Google is creating quality content.

There are many tools and ways to measure content, but not all are created equal. To understand what content is working and driving conversions, it’s important to look beyond sitewide conversion rates. Discover actionable content insights that can help your content rank and drive the right results.

The issue with tracking sitewide conversion rates

Not all website pages have the same intent, so it doesn’t make sense to track conversions the same way across your site. If your site has product pages or lead generation forms, those pages have a completely different intent than your blog posts, customer service pages, FAQ page, and so on. Growing traffic to those pages won’t lead to the same increase in revenue as increasing traffic to your product, ecommerce, or lead gen pages.

How to measure pages for intent

Instead of looking at analytics for all of your pages, you can build segments in reporting that include pages with similar intent. This is easily done if your website has a clear hierarchy or defined URL structure.

Define your pages by intent

Make a list of all your website pages and categorize them by intent (informational, navigational, transactional/commercial). You can do this manually using a spreadsheet. If you have a WordPress site, you can use a plug-in to export all your website pages. The different types of intent are:

Informational – people who land on these pages are looking for answers to questions

Navigational – people who land on these pages are looking for a specific website or page

Transactional – people who land on these pages are looking to purchase something or request a quote

You should put your website pages into one of these buckets to help with segmentation.

Google Analytics

Chances are you use Google Analytics to measure your site traffic. It’s a free tool that allows you to track your website traffic sources, click through rates, bounce rates, user behavior, goals, and more. You can set up a Google Analytics account for free here.

Google Analytics defaults to tracking all users and all pages. To create segments, you will need to follow a few steps:

1. Click on +Add Segment.
2. Click on the +New Segment button.
3. Click on Conditions under “Advanced”
4. Next add a word that identifies pages with the same intent. One of the easiest segments to build is a blog segment. You simply enter “blog” into the empty field.
5. Name your segment and click save

You will repeat these steps for all your segmented pages so that your affiliate or lead gen pages have their own segment which you can use to track performance. Your content pages will also have their own segment, so you can find out which of your content pieces actually convert. You can also use different metrics to measure success based on the intent of that segment. For example, if a segment is measuring informational pages, you might want to focus on visits, page views per session, etc. You will be able to login and pull a conversion performance report within seconds, whenever you need.

Summary

It’s time to go beyond measuring conversions sitewide. By creating segments, you can avoid looking at conversions as a whole and start measuring the performance of individual pages and content types. By using segments, you can make decisions on what content is moving customers forward and what to write more of.

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