by Viget Labs

Google Analytics Content Reports: What Can They Tell You

The set of Content reports in Google Analytics is of great value and can teach you a lot on what is going on in your web-site. By selecting some of the default reports of Google Analytics you can receive a large amount of insight, analyze the situation & take actions that will improve your visitors’ experience on your site as well as drive them down the path you wish them to take.

With all the efforts around SEO, Pay per Click, incoming links, social media & so on, it is easy to forget that sometime it is not about bringing the (correct kind of) visitors to your site. They need to them to follow the path that they drew up for them in our site’s architecture.

The set of Content reports in Google Analytics is of great value & can teach you a lot on what is going on in your web-site. by clicking on few of the default links on Google Analytics you can receive a huge amount of insight, analyze the situation & take actions that will improve your visitors’ experience on your site as well as drive them down the path you wish them to take.

Sites’ owners and marketers obviously wish to see which pages are interesting to their visitors, are they following the navigation & internal links to see more content on their web-site, which of that content they consume and more.

Google Analytics set of Content reports is a brilliant resource to teach exactly that and to answer exactly those questions as well as plenty of more. It is advised to analyze those reports on a regular basis to see what is going on with the site’s traffic, what needs to be done and if what was designed has the correct effect and impact on the visitors arriving to the site.

The analysis should start with clicking on the “Content” link on the Google Analytics menu. The default is the Content Overview, where a high-level impression of the site’s content is presented. This report presents a lot of valuable information, but this is only the beginning. Following the link “View Full Report” under the “Top Content” table marks the beginning of the interesting analysis road:

Apart from presenting all the statistics on the pages that were viewed in the period of time being analyzed (with totals on average time on site, bounce rate & more) a breakdown is presented, sorted by the pageviews of the pages of the site & how the visitors interacted with them.

For each page it is possible to see how plenty of times it was viewed (pageviews), what was the average time the visitors spent on that page, how plenty of unique pageviews this specific page received, the bounce rate of the page & the percentage of exists that took place from this page (i.e. ended the visit on the site & left).

Each of the parameter is brilliant on its own & can be used to take decisions & actions, but it is strongly recommended to look at the parameters also as a whole, per page & by comparison between the different pages.

Moving on with the analysis, the next step is the “Navigation Summary” for this page:

On this report, per the selected page, an overview of where the visitors came from to this page (left side) & where did they go from after visiting this page (right side) is presented.

To start with, there is a split between the percentages of visitors that landed on that page (the first page they saw on the web-site) and those that came from other internal pages (and of course – the list of those pages as well as the click percentages of the source pages for driving the traffic to this specific page).

Then, a similar split related to those that left this page is presented: the percentages of exists from the web-site from this page (if it is a content page and not the finish of a conversion aim – why they did leave?), and for those that continue navigating the site – to which pages did they go? (are those the pages you wanted them to visit? are they missing a call to action to drive them down the conversion funnel from this page? is the navigation as effective as it needs to be?).

Clicking on each of the pages’ links on the report will bring up the same report, this time for the page selected by clicking on its name.

More analysis (much more actually): analyzing the “flow” of the visit. Selecting the “Entrance Paths” report from the left-hand drop down below the graph will present more details on the visits that took place, originating in the page being analyzing.

Now it is possible to analyze each of the pages by clicking their names from the same document, or by following the steps all the way from the “Top Content” report and then on to the “Navigation Summery” or by choosing the pages from the right-hand drop down that reads “Content” below the presented graph. Clicking this drop down and selecting any of the pages that got visits during the analyzed period, will adjust the report as per the page that was selected.

With the example that one of the funnels from the home page is designed to take the visitor to an information page on a product being offered and then taking this visitor to a contact details form (with a lovely bold call to action placed for that). Is it working? Are the visitors following this path? This page should help you to see the flow of the visit and to see if what was designed is working in reality.

To complete the review and analysis of the content and pages on the site, there are three more reports that Google Analytics puts under a section named “Landing Page Optimization” (as it reads on the Content Detail page) that should be analyzed

This report is organized in following way: on the left side (read “This Page”) is the page being analyzing (e.g. the home page). The table to the right of that picture contains the list of the pages that the visitors visited following that page (same as shown in the Navigation Summery page). Only now there is an additional table to the right that shows to which pages the visitors went after those steps. Clicking on any of the pages on “Then viewed these pages:” table will change the table on the right side so it is reflecting the pages visited after those two steps. This is the way to see three-steps navigation path of the site’s pages.

The next report to look at is the Entrance Sources. Part of the analysis necessary to be performed on the site’s pages contains the aspect of where did those visitors arrive from (externally). This is what this report is for.

Similar to the Top Content report, this one presents the same parameters as well, only organized by the source from which the visitors arrive to this specific page. Combining this information with the previous analysis can show if there is a difference in behavior by the source of the visit & drive actions accordingly.

The last part has to do with the keywords that brought visitors to the site’s pages and this is presented in the “Entrance Keywords” report. The same parameters but organized by the keywords that were the trigger to drive traffic to this page. Again, it should be analyzed to see if there is a difference in behavior and if traffic is coming from the keywords this page should get? Maybe there are some keywords that were not thought about? Perhaps some that are irrelevant to this page? Anything else?

Final note: it is highly important to look at those reports (actually to look at all of Google Analytics reports) in a holistic way. A lot of insight can be found from a specific report, but in order to get actionable insight and to understand patterns or possible causes, it is better to cross-check different aspect and dimensions from the different reports. Much more can be learned by following this approach.

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