There’s always a funnel. Understand it and optimize each step.

Good content always accomplishes a goal. But content doesn’t accomplish its goal if the right people don’t know of its existence; or don’t choose to read it; or start reading it and abandon (bounce); or don’t trust what it says; or don’t take the action that you intend. If any of these happens, something along the funnel is broken and the content isn’t working.

Before you start writing, you need to understand the specific funnel, or funnels, for your content. It’s fine that content will have multiple funnels (like traffic coming from Search and traffic coming from a link on the site’s homepage).

In the case of our vacuum cleaner pamphlet, the right people are very likely to notice the content. But will she choose to read it? Will she read enough to understand how to assemble, use and maintain the machine? Will she trust that the instructions are for her? Will she decide to take action and assemble it, or open the support QR before returning the product to the store?

And, most funnels are much more complicated than the vacuum cleaner pamphlet.

Understanding what funnel optimization means

Every funnel has predictable stages where you can lose readers:

Discovery: Your content appears when the right people are looking
Selection: People choose your content over alternatives
Retention: Readers stay engaged rather than bounce
Trust: Readers believe what you’re telling them
Action: Readers take the step you want them to take

Problems at any stage break the funnel. A common example: someone searches for “how to translate WooCommerce product descriptions,” clicks your result, sees a page about general multilingual setup, and leaves immediately. The funnel broke at stage 3 (retention) because your content didn’t match what the search preview promised.

Understanding metrics

Different metrics tell you how each part of the funnel performs:

Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave immediately without any interaction. High bounce usually means your content doesn’t match what people expected when they clicked.
Time on page: How long readers stay. Very short time with high bounce means the content didn’t match expectations. Moderate time with low conversion might mean the content is unclear or doesn’t lead to action.
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who see your content in search results and click it. Low CTR means your preview doesn’t appeal to searchers.

Good and bad values for metrics

There’s no universal “good” or “bad” for metrics. Context determines whether a number indicates success or failure.

For example, a 5% click-through rate (CTR) from search results would be excellent for a general topic like “best summer trips” ranking in position #9. But a 30% CTR for your brand name search when your homepage ranks #1 would be terrible. It means that 70% of people searching specifically for you aren’t clicking your result, which signals a serious problem with your title and preview text.

Similarly, 40% bounce rate is good for a troubleshooting guide (people found their answer and left) but bad for a landing page (people left without taking action).

You’ll learn to access and interpret these metrics through your practice assignments and feedback. For now, understand that metrics don’t tell you what’s wrong. They tell you what to measure.

Content funnels that you’ll likely run into

Below are several examples of content funnels. There are many others that will apply to different projects that you’ll be working on. Use them as examples. Each case deserves its own analysis, but the basic questions to answer are similar.

Search driven content

When we think of Content Marketing, search-engine traffic is what comes to mind. People search for something, they see different results (possible answers), choose one that looks the most promising, read some, and “if you’re lucky” take action. Of course, we already know that luck has little to do with the performance of your content.

Your content in search results

In Google (which accounts for the vast majority of searches), your content will include a subject and a preview text. That’s it. According to these two pieces of information, along with the position of your page in the search results, the people searching will decide if they click into your content or somewhere else.

People searching are already looking for something. Good search results will provide the answer for what the person is searching for. Bad search preview will ignore the person searching and focus on what the business wants to say. Google will compose the search preview from your content. Make this easy for Google and increase the reader’s trust by opening the content with exactly what you’d like to appear in these short search results.

Why so many people bounce and what it causes

The Bounce Rate for content is the percentage of people visiting your content and immediately leaving without taking any action. Google goes deeper. It also checks the amount of time readers are on your page. When people bounce quickly, the reader says that “this is not actually what I was looking for”. This should be a signal for you, that you’re either targeting the wrong audience or your content doesn’t look like what people are searching for. Google wants to deliver the right options to people searching, so when it sees high bounce rates for your content, it’s going to show your content to much fewer people.

We get a lot of stuff in our inboxes. Actually, much of the email heading our way doesn’t even reach our inbox. Our email provider will decide for us that it’s SPAM or promotion or something else that we normally don’t care to read.

When you’re writing content where the “discovery” is via an email, you need to make sure that:

It actually appears in the inbox
The subject line (alone) makes people want to read the email
The email appears to be digestible (most of us don’t care for long stories in our inbox)
The email is relevant to the reader
The email asks for a clear and reasonable (to the reader) action

The entire content might be in the email. The content might be part in the email and part online (like a landing page). The logic is the same. Every piece is a step in a funnel, where you’ll lose the reader if done wrongly.

Advertisement driven content

Usually, we’re not sitting and waiting to consume advertisements. Advertisements interrupt us from whatever else we were doing and try to draw our attention to something that the advertiser wants to promote. Content that appears in ads needs to fight uphill for the reader’s attention, because that reader was engaged in something else when the ad showed up.

All the principles that we explained until now are valid for any type of content, but they’re especially critical for advertisements, because the reader’s attention and patience is much thinner.