Tips for working out metrics specific to your content and stories
The truth is these are all very individual to each story. Some questions at you can ask before creating your individual benchmarks:
1. How are you currently measuring the performance of your stories?
2. What would the success of that particular story look like? Eg. realistically how many reads are you expecting?
3. How are you sending your story out? Is this via email, social media or embedded in a website?
4. What does it look like in that particular format? Is it at the top of the page?
5. Can the click-through be improved? How many clicks before the user sees the story? Can this be reduced?
Average Read Time
Average read time will vary from story to story. A number of factors can influence how long it takes for a person to read a story including the number of images, volume of text, the audience it is intended for and even the subject matter.
Bounce Rate
If you see that your bounce rate was 50%, the question needs to be asked, what can YOU do to reduce that number? Is the content not relevant enough? Can the cover page be more enticing to encourage action?
Conversion Rate
The easiest place to start when looking at the conversion from Surf to Immerse is to see if are there any numbers that are much lower than others. If so, why might this be? Can that immerse section be improved or does it need to be removed altogether?
As time goes on and you build a repertoire of stories it will become clear what a well-performing story looks like in terms of metrics and vice versa for poor performing ones.
Tip 1 - Read your content from start to finish and time how long it takes you. This will give you an indication of how to benchmark your analytics
Tip 2 - To get the most out of your analytics it is all about monitoring YOUR metrics. Essentially, you want to try and improve your metrics as much as possible.