What Vaccines Can Teach Us About Content Strategies?

Testing vaccines requires using both a test and control group. The test group gets the real vaccine while the control group gets a placebo (some innocuous injection). When testing the impact of investing in a rich content presentation it’s important to use a similar approach with a test group (pages that get enhanced) against a control group (pages that don’t get enhanced). Measuring the change in performance of these pages in terms of conversion rate, acquisition and revenue per click metrics gets put into context by comparing these metrics to the same pages in a control group.

The control group will benefit from things like seasonality, advertising campaigns and any momentum that the site is generating. In other words, everything that is NOT incremental content is baked into the success of the control group. Thus, the difference is the incremental benefit of content. This becomes the basis for measuring the return on content spend (ROCS).

Learn more about how to calculate return on content spend.