Analytics Pt 3: How Much Do You Know About Your Content Popularity?

In part 2 of this Analytics series, we drilled down into the Traffic source components.  This part looks at Content: which pages were most popular; how visitors came to view those pages, and how they navigated after landing on your blog. Learn to better analyze not only our 'best' pages, but also the most 'promising' ones. Such information can help you refine your blog promotion efforts and increase conversion.

Bird’s Eye View of Content

To follow along, login to Analytics, view your blog's report and then press "Content"  to expand the side bar. You'll see summaries of components: total page views, bounce rate, Adsense impressions and revenue, etc. The one we're interested in is the "Top Content" which shows only 5 pages on the summary. Excluding the homepage (/), we see the other four bring about the same page views:

/grab-button-advertise-blog-....373 views (5.8%)
/make-a-professional-logo-    .... 325 views (5.5%)
/how-to-add-attractive-social...323 views (5.2%)
/creating-an-ad-for-your-blog...310 views (4.8%)

Obviously you'd want to know more about these posts: what drives visitors there?  Which sites referred them? Which pages in your blog sent them (navigation) and where visitors went after reading popular pages?

Okay, to answer these questions, we need to expand the full report.

Drill Down View of Top Content

Click the button "Content Drilldown" to see your content popularity for that time period. You can now examine how visitors reacted to your posts.The default view lists 10 of your total posts. Use the menu at the bottom to change the number shown to 25, 50, 100, 250 or 500 at a time.

The click on any one of the header columns to re-sort your selections. Click Bounce Rate header, you'll see the highest to lowest rate; click it again, get the reverse order (toggles). This gives you more insight when you view a longer list.

Observations

• #8 has a fairly low bounce rate, but not as many views as #2. It's a 'contender.' We may want to promote #8 a bit more.
• Our #3 has a much higher bounce but 5 minutes avg time on the page --- readers are very interested. They probably exit the site to visit the logo making software! So don't sell it short, especially if you want page views for Adsense or attracting advertisers.
• Using 250 posts, sorted by lowest bounce rate,  I found one with decent page views.  "/3-tips-surely-improve-content" had 59 views, 47 unique, 1.2 minutes and 50% bounce rate. We'll drill down more on this one!

Drill Down View of Popular Page - Navigation Summary

Select a page in your report with a low bounce rate and good number of page views.In our example we used "3 tips that will surely improve your post content".
Click on your page name to bring up the content detail page.Then use the blue up arrows to get the drop-down menu.

Select "Navigation Summary".

You'll see two lists: "Previous Pages" where readers clicked on  '3- tips-surely-improve-content' and "Next Pages" viewed from there. Of course visitors could then have continued to other pages before exiting. I'm showing only the top 4 for brevity [though it may be too late for that   ].

Observations

• the homepage sent most viewers, probably from the 'recent posts' widget. So we may want to feature this post when it moves off that list!
• none of the  'related posts' for our sample appeared at the top of either list --- surprising!
• viewers were very intrested in  10 Useless Blogging Techniques “Gurus” Recommend, so we have an opportunity to add an internal link.

Drill Down View of Popular Page - Entrance Source

Find the dropdown menu again and press 'Entrance Sources".  Sort it by low bounce rate and you see the referring sites. "(direct)" means they came by RSS feed/email, bookmarked links in their browsers or internal links --- usually the best paths for converting.

Observations

• Direct source was highest traffic with long time on page.
• Lowest traffic from other mail, widget and most referrers (problogger, stumbleupon) sources.
  They had zero bounce rate but did not stay long.
• A surprise: AnnBrien's blog referred traffic via our tips button; readers who stayed 4 minutes.

Call to Action:

I hope this series helps you to analyze how readers found your content and understand what they look were looking for. Take some next steps:

1. Look at other dimensiions for your detail page: Entrance path, Entrance keywords and Adsense Performance.
2. Find some surprises in your content stats and write a post about them.
3. Read these articles for deeper understanding.

• Understanding the Funnel - Seth Godin's post about Google searches --- people at the bottom of the funnel are ready to 'buy.'
• How to Understand Your Audience - DoshDosh recommends polls and survey to gather more information about visitors.
• SearchEngineJournal says "don't settle for simplified analytics overviews " - take a look at her post on advanced segmentation.You'll breeze through it after this article!

Don't forget to subscribe! Happy traffic conversions ...