Measuring product content success

There’s a massive industry built around measuring the effectiveness of content marketing, but only a small group of people building ways to measure the effectiveness of product content. Here are some examples of promising product content measurement approaches I’ve found…

Optimists: “Stickers are so magical that they can also be used to test content. After printing out your content, ask participants to put relevant stickers next to the words as they read.”

Pessimists: “I need to share with you some bad news about content that nearly everyone is hiding from you. There is no return on investment from content.”

Pragmatists: “With digital products or services that mostly contain information, measuring success is more difficult. Combining a range of metrics and collecting user feedback will help you find out if your content is actually helping people do what they need to do.”

Professionals: “A good metric is normalized, comparative, actionable, clear, specific, and able to change the direction of your company.”

Fans of process: “After the experience is designed, content testing can help us understand if the words we’ve finalized after all those iterations are still meeting our communications goals.”

And, of course, contrarians:

What did I miss on the topic of product content measurement? Let me know below. Thanks!