Today I posted my first entry as guest blogger on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer. Not surprisingly for those who know me, I kicked things off with a description of Content Index Index — a general description and a case for its use. Posting something in such esteemed company is truly humbling and frankly more thrilling than is probably healthy to admit. (I can hear friends and loved ones chiming in now about all of my work / life balance hoo-hah!)
Content Interest Index — CII for short — forgets for a moment whether a particular user has “converted” in that user session. It scores a page’s content on behavior that takes place on that page only (or offline, regarding that page’s content, in social media). That’s quite different from the scoring of, say, a page in a conversion funnel. Google Analytics (GA) has a Funnel Report that gives value to the pages leading directly to a conversion (Google calls these conversions “Goals”).
Another GA metric that tries to rank based on conversion is its “$ Index.” This can be compared to Google’s PageRank,  but it’s for estimating dollars earned by a page view, not search engine Google juice conferred by the quality of back links a page receives. It confers a portion of the dollar value of a conversion (Goal) onto pages that were viewed in the same session. Here’s an explanation and some examples (the graphic below is from that post):
Those GA scoring systems are all about the conversion, which I’m usually all for.
But as I mentioned in my post on Jason’s blog site, and yesterday, at a Translator Lab Hours discussion, people “snack” on content. They may come back to your site many times before they convert.
That means the session where they convert is likely to be brief, and the pages viewed (the ones given $ Index value) can be unfairly inflated in value.
Follow me here, and on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer, to learn more about how CII is calculated and how it can be used to improve the content on your web site that surrounds your conversion funnels.