The Conversion Map

Take different types of content you produce—from blog posts, to ebooks, webinars, and even landing pages—and plug them into the 2x2 matrix above. That way you can get a handle on what performs the best, and you can eventually componentize them into templates. There’s a ridiculous number of tools that people can use to measure these things—what’s more important is to build a framework that allows you to zero in on opportunities to improve. If you’ve got enough data you can measure, you can test, learn, and iterate.

• High traffic and high conversions is the hot zone of content. Do a happy dance, but keep your eyes peeled to make sure your legs don’t get cut out beneath you. Google changes its algorithm constantly. New competition emerges. Stay vigilant, and use Moz’s search engine rankings or Buzzsumo alerts to make sure the competition doesn’t outpace you.
• When you’re in the bottom left and bottom right quadrants, you basically have one option: get more traffic. Go back to ToFu and build your top of funnel, which will increase your conversions and give you more people to learn from.

The top left quadrant is where you have a huge opportunity—you’re getting great traffic, but you’re not converting those people. Knock up your conversion rate a bit via A/B testing, and you’ll massively increase your number of total conversions.

isolate your opportunities to increase conversions:

Find pages with high traffic and high bounce rate: Bounce rates are good signposts of engagement with your content, and they’re also something that Google Analytics will tell you for free. Posts that get high amounts of shares and a large volume of traffic tend to have lower bounce rates—the ToFu audience cares about the content to actually read it through. High bounce rates are more frequent for conversion-oriented posts.

• Quality content, clickbait headlines: Headlines are everything, true. But headlines create the expectation of value—if you don’t fulfill them, you turn your back on quality and violate the fundamental rule of content.
• Examine keyword strategy and marketing channels. Do you get a low quality of traffic from these? High bounce rates can be indicative of reaching the wrong audience.
• Create more relevant content. If you’re missing the target on your bounce rate, check to make sure your content is easy to read, with clear structure and section headings.

Find pages with high traffic and low conversions: If you have a high volume of traffic, you have enough touch points to start working off of. Use a tool like Unbounce for low conversion rates on high-traffic pages to create and test conversion opportunities. A low conversion rate means you’re not being productive with that traffic—but that’s your opportunity to make that higher converting. You can add more variations and test. At Kissmetrics, for example, we blew content on social media out of the water in terms of traffic—but it never converted very well.

• A/B test. Test headlines, images, word counts, colors, and call-to-actions (CTAs). Test everything—but test it in isolation.
• Re-purpose existing content and steer it toward conversion. You want to achieve the equivalent of product-market fit for content. Take that infographic, webinar, or whatever, and turn it into something that can actually convert—for example, turn a general interest brand post into a “how-to” that applies the same concept, but gears it toward solving a specific problem.
• Use as fodder for long-form content. Turn your high-performing blog posts into ebooks and guides.

Find traffic sources with high traffic and low conversions: When looking toward improving conversions, considering each channel individually against conversions is crucial.You can do this with most analytics platforms—the example above uses HubSpot’s. Conversion rates differ wildly across channels. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so crucial to separate various channels.

• A/B test the channel. For email, for example, test a variety of call-to-actions. Experiment with different lengths of the body text and places to link to your blog. See which lead to the highest clickthrough rates.
• Decide which channels to optimize. Marketers often get tempted to explore entirely new channels where they don’t have any experience. The problem is that there tends to be a learning curve. More often than not, you’ll see larger gains from building out existing channels and making them more conversion efficient before dipping your toes into something completely new.
• Cut the channel. If you’re spending a lot on social, for example, and it’s not paying off, you have to know when to cut your losses. If you can’t significantly increase conversions, it might not be worth it in the long-run.