5 Google Analytics Reports to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

Today almost every digital marketing professional knows about Google Analytics and uses it to track the audience on their website. Indeed, this tool is outstanding when it comes to analyzing user behavior to make informed business decisions. Most marketers rely on this type of data to inform better digital and content marketing strategies. And the best part is it’s free.

Analytics offers a wide range of primary and secondary dimensions and metrics to track users’ behavior. But, very few people know how to utilize these insights when building a digital marketing strategy.

Search marketing activities, content strategies, campaign planning and social media planning strategies could be refined and improved by Google Analytics data if used wisely.

In this article, we unpack five Google Analytics reports and consider how they impact your marketing operations:

1. Make the Most of Your Conversion Goals in Analytics

Most marketers are limited to tracking destination goals, which are the thank-you page URLs. But Google offers other goal types too that each has a unique role to play in your marketing strategy.

Goal tracking is the opportunity to know your audience better. It would be best to track all the possible primary and secondary goals, even each button on your website or landing pages.

Types of Goals You Should Implement on Your Website

• Destination page tracking
• Duration on pages
• Pages/sessions
• Events
• Button tracking

By tracking different goals you can better understand your users’ behavior. For example, if a visitor is spending a good amount on time on the “About Us” page, they could be your new customer and worth reaching out to. If the user visits more than two pages on your site, they are worth re-targeting. You can observe audience or user patterns by creating different goals and paths for your business. 

Reverse Goal Path Analysis

Keeping track of goals achieved is important, but what’s more valuable is analyzing why certain goals were achieved. With this insight you can replicate what worked and, hopefully, continue achieving goals. Here’s what you should consider about your users’ behavior:

• Know which pages they visited before submitting the inquiry
• Establish where your users come from
• Consider what time did they visit your website
• Note the landing pages they spent time on
• Which buttons did they click on?
• See the pages visited before the user filled out the form

You can create custom metrics and dimensions to align with your business goals to refine the data and add filters. You can analyze the reverse goal path to see which pages drive more conversions for your business and enhance the internal linking of that page with other pages of your website. You should also perform a goal flow analysis to help increase your conversions. You can find the goal flow tab under the conversion section in Analytics.

Did you know adding more informational content options on your website thank-you pages can keep them engaged and delighted?

By offering relative and informative pieces of content to the user, their experience with your website is enhanced every step. 

2. Custom Reports Discovering the Room of Improvements

Unfortunately, while many marketers are aware of the custom reporting options and know the value of having one configured in their analytics, they don’t make use of this Analytics tool. 

Understandable when there are time constraints or the like, as it takes a lot of thought and logic building to create a custom report.

However, it’s worthwhile to create a report that lets you find all the data you want to be tracked using the primary and secondary metrics you have chosen, to see the bigger picture of your efforts in one place. 

You can find the custom report tab in the customization section in the Analytics dashboard. If you don’t want to create the custom reports, you can import them Analytics Solution Gallery as well.

You can select the type of custom report you want and download the template. It’s worthwhile to spend time exploring how these reports fetch the data and help you find the insights. It helps you make better campaign recommendations or strategic updates in your digital marketing plans.

There is a wide range of templates available such as eCommerce reports, social shares reports, PPC keywords matched queries reports and even a self-referral troubleshooting report. 

Custom reports highlight what’s working for you or what is not working in your favor. You can save time and money by focusing on the important metrics highlighted as positively impacting your brand, in the custom report.

3. Find the Zombie Pages Using the Content Drill-Down Report

Do you know your website has a lot of zombie pages? Every website has. Google hates zombie pages, so you need to get rid of them.

Content drill-down reports help you to find these zombie pages. You can simply select the date range and compare it with last year’s report, see which pages were getting enough traffic at the same time last year, that aren’t getting any today. These pages are called zombie pages and they don’t add value to your site. 

You can either, redirect these pages to other pages that offer more relevant content or revamp those pages with fresh content. After the recent Google core update that impacted a lot of sites with old and thin content, this is particularly important.

You can find the content drill down report in the behavior section in analytics. 

Bonus tip: See the exit page report, too. These pages are the weak point of your website and not able to hold visitors on your site.

4. Content Grouping Segment for Better Content Planning

You publish a lot of content on your website to attract more visitors with various keywords. But do you know which content is bringing you most of the traffic? This is where content grouping is going to help you. You can create a logical structure for your content and see each segment’s performance with aggregated metrics in analytics. That report would make more sense than just checking users on each page.

You can find the content grouping section in the Admin section. You can create the content group in three different ways; you can group by tracking code, group using extraction, or group using rule definitions. For example, if you have an eCommerce site, you can group the content by category. However, if you have a marketing blog you can segment it with SEO articles, PPC articles and content marketing posts. Then you can see which types of content are performing in your favor and which segments need more attention. 

Find the most valuable set of content to leverage the other content of your site.

5. Custom Alerts to Notify You if Your Strategy is Going Wrong

Like most digital marketers, you probably check Analytics data regularly if not daily. But do you know you can create custom alerts in Analytics to warn you when you are not meeting your projected traffic goals or any other goals you have set up? Also, you can create alerts to get notified when a specific event occurs. You can find the custom alert tab in the admin section. 

For example, the traffic target is 10,000 per month and you’re not receiving the daily or weekly traffic of 2500, then you’ll be notified and you can work on improving your strategy to make up the shortfall.  

Conclusion

Data is an essential ingredient in any digital strategy. You can design and implement a better campaign and content strategy with the help of the right set of reports in Google Analytics. These reports feed you the data you need for better content marketing decision-making. 

Do not ignore the signals Analytics gives you. The data derived from Analytics can let you know if your strategy is falling short or even failing.

If you use this tool when planning strategies and campaigns you are bound to enjoy a higher conversion rate and increased retention rate.