A lot of attention is given to measuring a website’s conversions and goals. After all, these transactions are the ultimate end points of a successful visit. But what about the content that drives users to these goals? Measuring and improving the effectiveness of your website’s content is often overlooked. The good news is that Google Analytics makes it easier than ever to understand the value of your content. You just need to know where to look.

Segment

When you think about content you also have to think about your target audiences. Understanding the audiences for your site, content types and calls to action will help you segment your content analytics in a way that delivers far more relevant reports. Take the example of a site with both paid search traffic and organic search traffic. Paid search traffic is directed to a lead form, but organic traffic goes to the home page, or another content rich page. Each of these audiences has a very different way that they use your site. Looking at this data in aggregate can give you a skewed perspective and lead to some incorrect conclusions. This overview of all traffic shows that this site has a 62% bounce rate and average time on site of 1minute and 53 seconds.

Use Google Analytics custom segments to separate different audiences.

Applying the segments to the same report now shows me that the paid search traffic time on site and bounce rate had a dramatic impact on the total, and that perhaps the landing pages for paid search campaign needs to be optimized to lift the engagement of paid search visitors.

Engage

Engagement is a squishy term with a lot of definitions. It’s certainly not an out-of-the-box metric that you will find in any web analytics tool. However, there are some sophisticated methods of using Google Analytics to measure engagement. Many times, looking at individual metrics such as bounce rates, exit rates, page views and average time on page do not tell us the complete story about that visitor’s experience.

Creating custom engagement segments in Google Analytics that combine multiple activity metrics can help get deeper insight on content engagement.

In the below example, we set up a custom report with multiple conditions including time on site and pageviews. This can be customized to define your own measure of an engaged visitor.

Another method of measuring engagement is to create goals for page views / visit, and time on site.

Persuade

Regardless of your target audiences , your website is ultimately trying to persuade visitors to take action. This may be an information request, newsletter sign-up or a purchase. Whatever the goal, the successful completion will be dependent on your content persuading a visitor to take action.

To find out which pages have the most persuasive impact on conversions, first make sure all of your goals have a value associated with them. Even if you do not have an e-commerce site, you can assign values to each goal.

After applying goal values, you will see a metric in the Top Content report called $Index. This metric shows the average value that a page contributed to the combined value from all conversions. By looking at pages and directories by $Index you can see which content has the most and least impact on conversions.

Search

Organizations spend a lot of money on acquiring visitors from search engines. But how well is your website content aligned with your spend? It’s important to not just focus on number of visitors, but how engaged they are with your content.

Here are some important metrics that can help you refine the content to help keep search visitors engaged with your website.

• Look at the bounce rate, time on site, and page depth for organic keywords.
• Create a custom report that shows organic keywords by landing page.
• Find which organic keywords have the highest bounce rate, and figure out why the content on the landing pages are not engaging search visitors.
• Look at the goal value or ecommerce value for organic search keywords to see how they contribute to conversion.

A custom report can be created that looks at these metrics on a per keyword basis.

Brand

Your website is an important extension of your brand. Understanding how your brand contributes to your website traffic and conversion is important. Use Google Analytics to cross-section your traffic by visits that came from a keyword that is specific to your brand. These keywords could be your company name, product names, employee’s names, or publications you produce.

For example, we created an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics using the keywords “Isite” and “Insight”

By creating this segment we can see that visitors from these brand search terms make up 13% of our total site traffic over the year, and have higher average engagement metrics.