Putting a $ Value on all that Content…

For those of you who do not subscribe to MarketingProfs.com, you should if only to learn the interesting ways Marketing Managers are measuring their websites for value and success. In his article “Killer, not Filler” dated 9/5/05, Gerry McGovern discusses how the 80/20 rule applies to content viewers and the costs per page to maintain a large site’s content. Gerry’s quick example is all it takes to understand why web marketing teams need to be concise and clear in providing content…

“Let’s say your Web site has 5,000 pages of content. Let’s say that the total cost for publishing each page is $100. Thus, the total cost is $500,000. Let’s also say that you have 100,000 visitors over the lifetime of these 5,000 pages. Let’s say that the top 20% of pages get 80% of visitors (which is very common, in my experience). That means that 1,000 pages are getting 80,000 visitors, and 4,000 pages are getting 20,000 visitors. The “cost” per page for the top 20% of pages is then $1.25 per visitor. The cost per page for the bottom 80% of pages is then $20 per visitor.”

How would your site look if you did this type of analysis. Pretty similar I’d venture to say…

From a marketing perspective, how much additional money are you spending to support weak pages of little interest to visitors/prospects/customers? What is your opportunity cost of providing all of these pages to your visitor versus maintaining the top pages or assets and removing the lower ranked assets? Do visitors get lost in your content?

When you are marketing online, you must remember that visitors are fast with the mouse to move to another site if they don’t quickly find what they want. Instead of supporting a library, consider supporting only the non-fiction area. It’s cheaper and will improve your user satisfaction with your site.

Back to the blog