So, you’ve built a great asset on your site. It cost you 10K to build, plus media spend to get the word out on social, and now you have to report to the boss/client on how well this piece of work did. You can report on how many sessions it received and how many links you got, but what of ROI?
You could use ‘conversion rate’, but that relies on your asset being the first thing someone saw when they arrived at your website.
So instead, let’s talk about Page Value, which is one of the many indicators of how well pages perform within the conversion cycle.
You can find Page Value if you go into the Behaviour>Site Content>All Pages report. It’s the right-most metric in the table.
What is Page Value and how is it calculated by Google Analytics?
Page Value is Google Analytics’ way of answering the question “how much money is a session that includes this page worth?”
In order for Google Analytics to calculate Page Value, you need to be tracking goals with goal values set, or have ecommerce tracking enabled. Google Analytics uses the value of each goal or transaction, as well as the number of page views to calculate page value, otherwise the value is zero.
Google gives a full overview of how it calculates Page Value here.
Page Value = Total Goal Value / Unique Pageviews
Total Goal Value is the combined total for all goals and transaction for the time period you’re looking at. Unique pageviews are the number of sessions that include that specific page. If a page was viewed more than once in one session, it is only counted as one unique pageview.
Page Value is showing zero
If your Google Analytics Page Value is showing as zero, there may be a few reasons for this:
- You don’t have any goals set up
- You have goals set up but there is no goal value associated with this
- Your ecommerce transactions aren’t pulling in revenue
- The page/set of pages you are looking at did not contribute to any goals
You need goals that have a value (or revenue) in order to see a page value higher than zero.
How do I use page value to measure ROI for my page?
If you want to understand how much value a page is worth overall, change the date to reflect the campaign length. We suggest changing the end date to be as late as possible, as often content marketing efforts can build up over time.
To get an idea of ‘total value’, multiply the Page Value by the Unique Pageviews for that date range.
An example as to who this is useful for is looking at the analytics for our Who We Are page. This page isn’t a very popular landing page, but for someone scoping out a digital agency in Leeds, it’s an important page to view before converting.
In September 2017, Who We Are got 83 entrances, 1 of which moved onto conversion which was worth £10. This makes it seem like it isn’t a very valuable page, however this page isn’t designed as a landing page, it’s designed to help build trust with potential clients.
In that month, Who We Are received 655 unique page views and was worth £0.79. If we multiply these together we can see that it’s worth £517.45, which is a better indicator as to its importance as a page in general.
Although I say Who We Are is ‘worth £517.45’, it’s a rough guide to the worth of this page. It helped generate that £517.45, not by itself but as a part of a larger journey. This is why it’s important to compare other pages, and use other measures of page value.
As with any sort of analysis of pages, it is important to compare like pages to like pages. For example, compare blog posts to blog posts rather than blog posts to product pages. If you have content groupings enabled, you can easily split your analysis.
How else should I measure the ROI of my content?
When proving to your boss/client that your content is important, you can show a combination of the following
- What is the purpose of this page?
- Is it achieving its purpose?
- What were the KPIs when building?
- How much did it cost to produce?
- How many sessions did it get?
- What was the engagement (bounce rate, time on page) like?
- Did it generate any goals?
- What was the page value?
- Are there links pointing towards it?
With this in mind, you can pull together a good report of page ROI.