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WP Bulk Publishing

Quality signals → User satisfaction

User satisfaction

Every other quality signal is about the content itself; user satisfaction is about the human reading it. A page can be perfect on freshness, differentiation and E-E-A-T yet still fail if the reader doesn't find what they need. It's also the hardest signal to measure honestly — WBP uses five proxy metrics from Analytics rolled into a composite Satisfaction Score.
TL;DR: Composite Satisfaction Score = Dwell 25% + Interaction 25% + Task Completion 20% + Scroll Depth 15% + Return Rate 15%. Scores below 40/100 trigger a four-week diagnose → intervene → re-measure workflow.

1. What user satisfaction actually is

Google, Bing and every LLM ranking system converge on the same working definition: did the user complete the task they came to do, on this page, in one visit. Everything else — dwell time, scroll depth, click-back, follow-up query — is a proxy for that one question.

The failure mode for programmatic sites is subtle: pages rank because they match the query on the surface, users land, immediately realise the page is a shell, and bounce. The ranking system counts the bounce and quietly demotes the whole template.

2. The five proxy metrics

Dwell time — 25%

Time from click-in to click-out. Compared against category expected, not global average.

Interaction rate — 25%

Clicks, form starts, copies, expansions, video plays. Measures active engagement, not passive scrolling.

Task completion — 20%

Did the user do the thing the page promised — filled the form, copied the code, downloaded the file, added to cart.

Scroll depth — 15%

How far down the page users read. Lower weight because it's easily gamed by long intros.

Return rate — 15%

Users coming back to the same URL later. Bookmark-worthy content earns this signal over time.

3. Low-satisfaction workflow (4 weeks)

  1. 1

    Week 1 — Diagnose

    Analytics flags URLs with a composite score below 40. Drill into which of the five metrics is the outlier — dwell alone means intent mismatch, interaction alone means missing CTA.

  2. 2

    Week 2 — Intervene

    Fix at the template layer where possible. Rewrite the intro to match query intent, move the primary action above the fold, cut boilerplate that inflates dwell without helping.

  3. 3

    Week 3 — Republish + tag

    Push the fixed template, tag the affected URLs for satisfaction re-measurement. Do not touch pages the fix does not affect.

  4. 4

    Week 4 — Re-measure

    Compare the new composite score against the pre-intervention baseline. If it hasn't moved, the intervention was wrong — do not chain a second fix on top.

4. What we don't do

  • We do not use satisfaction scores as pre-publish gates. They need real user data first — that means post-publish, not template-time.
  • We do not compare satisfaction across query classes. A definitional page's dwell target is different from a buying guide's.
  • We do not treat pogo-sticking as satisfaction data on its own — small samples are noisy.
  • We do not sell 'satisfaction guarantees' on rankings. Satisfaction feeds ranking; ranking is not a satisfaction guarantee.

5. How WBP measures it

WBP measures template-level satisfaction weekly and surfaces the worst-performing templates on your dashboard. A template with a pogo-stick rate above cohort average gets an amber flag; two consecutive weeks red and the template is auto-paused until the underlying page contract is fixed.

Combined with the Bulk Publisher's page contract system, this means bad templates cannot silently poison your whole site — they fail fast, on a small slice, and get pulled before they scale.

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