Google Analytics content reports

Overview

Funnily enough, this report isn’t just a basic view of your data, it provides you with options that do not appear in the menu but which can be pretty important for content analysis.

Extra report options

On the right hand side of the view you’ll find the following reports which are not accessible through the menu:

Navigation Summary

This report shows you a very basic path flow view for all the pages on your site. From the content drop-down menu you can select the page you wish to view data for, and the report shows you:

how many visits entered the site through the selected page
how many visted the selected page coming from other pages on your site (and lists these pages)
how many of them exited upon visiting the selected pages
how many moved to other pages on your site (and lists these pages)

Entrance Paths

Entrance path analysis

This report offers a more detailed view of what paths visitors follow once they enter your site. Choose your entrance page from the Content drop-down menu and Google Analytics pulls up the data for the next-step pages and shows you two levels (e.g. first they went to page B and then to page C). The report will show you the number of clicks and the percentage rank of each of the follow up pages.

Entrance Sources

Analyze how visitors from different sources of traffic used a particular page (which can again be selected from the Content drop-down menu). Shows you Unique Page views, time on page, bounce rate, % exit and revenue ($ index).

Entrance Keywords

Shows you similar data to the Entrance Sources report, but focuses solely on keywords and how these visitors ‘performed’ on your site, in terms of content. Note that you can distinguish between paid and non-paid keywords, separating pay-per-click traffic from organic search result traffic.

The other reports in the Content section are:

Content by Title

A different representation of Top Content: Instead of showing you the most popular pages with the associated URL, the report shows you the top content based on page title. Might only be useful if you use the same title for multiple pages, so that you can view which group of content pages perform best.

Content Drilldown

This report has a rather deceptive name: There’s no drilling down and the data is represented exactly the same way as Top Content. No added value.

Top Landing Pages

Know which landing pages perform best in terms of stickiness: keeping your visitors interested and motivating them to explore your site further. The most important metric here is bounce rate. The lower the bounce rate, the less visitors exited the site and the better the page in question served them with the information they were looking for. For the best view, click on the % Bounce title of the last column to sort the data according to that metric.

Top Exit Pages

This is the opposite perspective of Top Landing Pages – Which pages are the most popular points of exit from your site? For the best view, click on the % Exit title of the last column to sort the data according to that metric.

Site Overlay

“A picture says a thousand words” – Very true, which is why the Site Overlay is one of my favourite reports. The report function opens up a new window, displaying your site and showing you small indicator bars, filled in partially with a light blue colour. These bars show you the most popular links on all of your site’s pages. When you hover over the indicator bars the click and goal ($) values are shown.

Very basic compared to the more expensive web analytics tools, but extremely useful. Cause of many “huh?” and “hmmm…” moments, as you discover some links are less/more popular than you’d previously thought.

Another great representation of page hot spots are heatmaps/clickmaps – These are generally available through other free tools such as Rawstream and CrazyEgg.