Measuring content performance in 2025

Key things to think about

Measuring content performance should aim to measure the influence your content has on your audience, in terms of the audience taking action that aligns with your goals.

While metrics like page views and unique visitors provide insight into your content's reach, they obviously don't tell the full story in terms of how effective it is for actually resonating with your audience.

Similarly, focusing on conversions resulting from views of your pages doesn't necessarily mean that a page has been influential within that audience's journey. A user may convert after viewing a page, but that doesn't necessarily mean the page itself was the key influencer in their decision. The user's overall journey and interactions with your brand across multiple touchpoints potentially played a more significant role.

To gauge the performance of your content while providing actionable insight to improve it, you should try to keep things simple:

• Have they spent a reasonable amount of time digesting the information?
• Has the user scrolled down the page?
• Have they gone on to a further destination that shows intent to hit one of your goals?

Measuring engagement time

A key metric to track is how long users are spending on your content pages. Engagement Time, or the average time spent on a page, indicates whether your content is holding users' attention and providing value.

Google Analytics 4 provides this metric out of the box, which is a benefit compared to the old Universal Analytics. In Universal Analytics, measuring time on page required setting up custom tracking, as the default 'Time on Page' metric was often inaccurate due to its reliance on pageviews.

In contrast, GA4's 'average engagement time' metric uses events (like clicks, scrolls, and form submissions) to determine if a session is still active, providing a more reliable way to measure how long users are actually spending on your content.

Therefore, "average engagement time" for each page can give some insight into its performance. Pages with higher-than-average engagement times are likely resonating well with your audience, while those with lower times may need improvement.

Measuring scrolling behavior

Measuring scroll depth is a great way to understand how much of your content users are actually consuming. By tracking scroll depth, you can see what percentage of visitors make it to different parts of your page. This gives you insight into whether your content is engaging enough to keep people reading or if they are quickly bouncing.

One summary metric that you can use out of the box from Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Engagement Rate. Engagement Rate measures the percentage of sessions that were "engaged sessions". An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.

By default, a page scroll is a conversion event in GA4, so if a user scrolls, this counts as an "engaged session". Therefore, the higher the engagement rate for your page, the higher the proportion of users embarking on some kind of journey on the page without bouncing straight off. This is a useful starting point for understanding if your content is meeting the expectation in terms of where it was linked from or found via search.

Scrolling journeys can also be tracked in more detail by setting up scroll depth values in Google Tag Manager. This allows you to track what percentage of users scroll 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the way down your pages.

However, you will need to set this up in Google Tag Manager to get more granular data on scroll behavior. Here's how:

• Create a new trigger of type 'Scroll Depth' in Google Tag Manager.
• Configure the trigger to fire at the desired scroll percentages, such as 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%.
• Create a new Google Analytics 4 event tag for each scroll depth percentage.
• Set the event name to something like 'scroll25percent', 'scroll50percent', etc.
• Under 'Triggering', select the corresponding Scroll Depth trigger you created.

Publish your container, and you will start seeing the scroll depth events flow through to GA4. With this more detailed scroll data, you can get a clearer picture of how users are engaging with your content beyond the Engagement Rate metric.

For example, you may find that most users scroll 50% of the way through your articles, but very few make it to 100%.

Percentage of content consumed

However, for those of you that are unable to add scroll depth to Google Tag Manager—or if you want to use a single, simpler metric— you can use the percentage of content consumed. This is essentially the average engagement time of the page according to Google Analytics 4 (as outlined above) as a percentage of the estimated reading time for the page.

To measure this, you need to estimate how long it takes to consume the content on the whole. Reading time is a reasonable proxy for this—although it isn't perfect if the page contains video content, for example. If you can extract the duration of videos featured on the page, you can combine these with the reading time to create a fuller total consumption time to measure against.

A/B testing

A/B testing allows you to definitively prove which changes have the biggest impact and is an important part of content optimization. With A/B testing, you create two versions of a piece of content—version A (the control) and version B (the variation with the change you want to test). Half of your traffic is shown version A, and half is shown version B. By measuring the difference in engagement metrics between the two versions, you can determine whether the change had a statistically significant impact.

However, A/B testing is difficult and not always accessible. It requires significant traffic to each variation to reach statistical significance, and the technical setup can be complex. This puts it out of reach for many content teams, especially those working on lower-traffic pages or lacking dedicated development resources.

contentEnhance allows you to take an alternative approach. It uses a statistical approach called Pettitt's test to detect significant changes in your content performance metrics over time, without the need for a separate control group.

Considering journey flow

Finally, while engagement metrics are important, to get a full picture of content performance, you also need to consider the user journey. What matters is not just how many people are viewing a page or how long they stay, but what action they take next.

In contentEnhance, you can use the URL journey mapper to visualize the typical paths users take to and from each content piece. This shows you which pages are acting as effective entry points and which ones are driving users towards key conversion pages. See the following example:

By combining engagement data with user flow insights, contentEnhance gives you a comprehensive view of how your content is performing and where the biggest opportunities lie for improvement.

Putting it all together

To effectively measure content performance, focus on a combination of key metrics:

• Engagement Time: The average time users spend on a page, indicating how well the content holds their attention.
• Engagement Rate: The percentage of sessions that are "engaged"—lasting longer than 10 seconds, having a conversion event, or having multiple page/screen views.
• Scroll Depth: The percentage of users who scroll to different parts of the page (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%).
• Percentage of Content Consumed: The average engagement time as a percentage of the estimated total consumption time (reading time + video duration).
• User Journey: The paths users take to and from each piece of content.

By continuously tracking these metrics and using tools like contentEnhance to get actionable optimization suggestions, you can take a data-driven approach to improving your content's performance and ensure your content is meeting both user needs and search engine expectations.