Beyond Pageviews: How To Measure Top-Performing Content

By Ajsi Petrela

As content marketers, we put a lot of effort into content strategy. We work to understand our customers and develop content specific to their needs, and yet not every piece of content performs as we would expect. Some content underperforms, while other posts surprise us by driving organic traffic, sign-ups or sales.

But this isn’t a guessing game — success in content marketing is largely dependent on testing ideas and refining your content strategy over time. It’s crucial to pay attention to your best-performing content and attempt to replicate that success. But what does “best-performing” mean? Many marketers start with pageviews, but that’s not the only way to identify effective content.

The Problem With Pageviews

Pageviews should be part of your measurement arsenal, but you shouldn’t completely rely on them to identify your best content.

To illustrate, let’s say you manage a healthcare site and you publish two pieces of content. The first is titled “How Running Contributes to Osteoporosis” and the second is titled “The Shocking Reason You Should Avoid Orange Juice.” If the first article gets 3,000 pageviews during the two weeks after its publication and the second gets 2,000, then we can assume that the first article is performing better, right?

Maybe not. Maybe the first article received three times the paid media spend of the second. It’s possible the first article didn’t lead to any revenue, while the second led to thousands in revenue. Without a holistic assessment of content performance using multiple data points, it would be hard to say with any certainty which article is better.

To get a stronger analytical foundation for assessing performance, include the following data points in your analysis.

Key Events

In Google Analytics 4, important actions are tracked as events. Some events are collected automatically, but you still need to define the actions that matter most to your organization and mark the most valuable ones as key events before using them to assess content performance.

Key events are actions that signal meaningful progress toward your business goals. Some actions you might want to measure include: 

• Email subscriptions
• Form submissions
• Product purchases
• Clicks to important external sites
• Users who stayed on a page for a specified length of time
• Case study downloads

Once key events are in place, you’ll want to identify which content leads to those actions most often. As with the earlier example, the total number of key events that take place after a pageview may be influenced by external factors, so you’ll also want to look at key event rate.

A page with a less-than-impressive total number of key events shouldn’t be overlooked if it has a strong key event rate. This could indicate that the page needs greater promotion to drive more traffic, leading to more conversions. (Need help with measurement and data analysis? We’re here to help — reach out!)

Content Pathways

Not every piece of content drives a conversion directly. Some pages introduce users to your brand, answer early questions or help move someone closer to taking action later.

For example, if you set up a key event to measure form submissions on your “Contact Us” page, where would that key event happen most often? Your “Contact Us” page, of course. That information is helpful, but it doesn’t tell the full story. The better question is: Which pages helped users get there?

In GA4, you can evaluate this by looking at landing pages, path explorations and funnel explorations. These reports can help show which pages begin sessions that later include key events, where users go before or after visiting a page, and how users move through known journeys such as article to service page to form submission.

Engagement Metrics

When you’re identifying top-performing content, you’ll want to look at engagement metrics. In GA4, average engagement time shows how long users are actively engaged with your site, while engagement rate shows the percentage of sessions that included meaningful activity.

If users are highly engaged with an article, they may spend more time reading it, click to related pages or continue exploring the site. These signals can help you understand whether the content is useful, especially when paired with traffic and key event data.

Search Visibility

GA4 can show what users do after they reach your site, but it doesn’t tell the full story of how your content is performing in organic search. For that, review Google Search Console data, which shows how often a page appears in Google search results, how many clicks it received, its click-through rate and its average position. These metrics can help you identify content with room to grow.

As AI-generated search results become more common, AI referral traffic and visibility signals can also be reviewed as supporting data points.

Social Feedback

There are a variety of ways to measure content quality, but what if you could get direct feedback from the people who read your content?

You don’t need to survey your customers to gather opinions — you can start by looking at social performance. What do people comment on? What do they say? What content do they share? These metrics offer insight into the content people find useful.

A Comprehensive View

When identifying top content, avoid relying too heavily on any single metric. Rather, you should complete a comprehensive assessment of performance that considers all the aforementioned metrics, though key events should receive the greatest consideration when assessing performance. This approach will allow you to create more content that helps you reach your objectives.