Audit your content and SEO with our content strategy tool to get more from your content marketing
One of the biggest appeals of digital marketing is that it's data-driven - we can readily review the effectiveness of our activities and make informed improvements. This is particularly true for using content marketing and SEO to attract and convert visitors to lead or sale.
Yet, the tools that are available within analytics to help us visualize and optimize our content haven't really changed since I've been involved in digital marketing.
If you dig into the Behaviour reports in Google Analytics you still see long lists of Top Content and Landing pages to try to interpret. Using content groups in Google Analytics can help simplify by grouping related content.
Although you can sort the lists, it's not easy to identify which content is performing well and can be enhanced and which is under-performing…
A tutorial showing you the options to set up this new GA feature
When Google Analytics launched in 2005 it democratised web analytics with its feature rich offering, since then Google has worked hard to add new features to a product that is now considered a viable alternative to most enterprise level web analytics tools. But until recently GA lacked a key feature that many of it’s competitors have had since the first half of the last decade, that is the ability to group content at the session level.
Grouping content has lot's of applications, for retail sites grouping categories and products is important, for media sites, different types of stories and today all businesses need to know which types and formats of content are supporting their content marketing.
Other tools around the time of Google Analytics’ launch, such as HBX, dealt with this very well but Google, with its URL based content reports…
Google introduces 3 options to review content effectiveness in Google Analytics
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics announcement
The lack of options for content grouping in Google Analytics has been surprising given that it has been a core feature of established analytics systems like Webtrends and Site Catalyst since as long as I can remember.
It’s true that you can use the Content Drilldown to review the effectiveness of different content types in driving visits leads and sales as we recommend in our guide to Google Analytics, but this only works if you have a site structured with a clear hierarchy of folders.
In the real-world, many sites particularly Ecommerce sites, or other sites pulling products from a database don’t have this. In these cases your best option was to create a custom filter for grouping content as Peter O’Neill outlines.
Google has introduced 3 options for setting up content grouping and reporting.…
