Are you feeling overwhelmed at the sheer quantity of content that your business needs to produce to stay ahead? Our top 5 Google reports for content marketers will help you make data based decisions on which pieces of content to prioritise, most of these reports are available from within Google Analytics whereas one requires use of another free Google tool.
Time to get those content writing juices flowing…
1. Understand where your content gaps are with site search reports
Behaviour -> Site Search -> Search Terms
The % Search Exits metric tells you what proportion of visitors didn’t find what they were looking for after searching and immediately left your site. Looking at search terms with higher Exit % may help you identify gaps in your content. Now you can go away and produce content to fill the gaps based on exactly what your potential customers are searching for.
A metric that gives you similar insights to the above is Results Pageviews/Search, this is the number of times visitors viewed your search results page are searching. You can usually assume if this figure is higher than 1 that people are having to dig deeper into your search results pages to try and find relevant results – suggesting either your site search isn’t delivering relevant results and/or the content that they searched for doesn’t exist.
2. Find out which traffic sources give you the most engaged visitors for a specific piece of content
Behaviour -> Site Content -> All Pages
In this report you can see the average time on page compared to your site average. By clicking on a page URL in this report you can view data for that specific page, now select Medium from the Secondary Dimension drop-down at the top of the table. Here you can see the time spent on the page broken down by Medium (paid search, organic, referral, etc.). To get actionable insights from this data you can then start drilling down on each Medium, for example to view more specific data for paid search look at keyword level data to identify whether your search campaigns contain keywords that might be less/more relevant to visitors based on their level of engagement. Or drill down to Source for Referral visits to see which sites are sending you your most higher engaged visitors.
You can then shift your focus on optimising those sources of traffic that are resulting in low levels of engagement – perhaps dropping them all together or putting in place an action plan to improve engagement, whilst ensuring that you continue to promote new content through those traffic sources that are providing your most highly engaged visitors.
3. Are your landing pages working?
Behaviour -> Site Content -> Landing Pages
Here you can see whether your landing pages (the first page which visitors see during a visit) are serving their purpose. Bearing in mind that different landing pages may have different objectives, for example
- to engage visitors and encourage them to read more content on your site
- to drive leads
- to make a sale
You can use this view to see which of your objectives are being met by various landing pages and take necessary action. For example if one of your landing pages has a below average visit duration and a higher than average bounce rate you would start by considering the objective of your page and bearing in mind a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing.
4. Get into the detail on traffic acquisition sources
Acquisition -> All traffic/AdWords
Here you can dive into the specific keywords that drove visitors to your site from paid search activity (assuming you’ve linked Google Analytics with AdWords) and you can also view the sites that are sending traffic to your site. By looking at each of these areas and then the subsequent levels of engagement for different segments of visitors you can understand whether the existing content is catering to their requirements.
5. Use off siteTools
Tools like Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends (links below) can help you understand the demand for content focused on various topics. For example a business that’s looking to produce content to engage with potential customers on their latest washing powder could enter terms like “stain removal” and “how to remove stains”, at which point Keyword Planner returns a list of suggested Ad groups as shown below:
You can then drill down on the Ad group that looks like it contains the most relevant keyword set for your research, which takes you to the keyword listing (below):
From here we can see that there are a lot of people searching for information on how to remove deodorant stains from their armpits. There’s a medium level of paid search competition for this term so we might decide to brief our content team on developing a content series on how to remove deodorant stains from clothing to try and capture some of this audience.
This is just a small selection of some of the many ways that you can generate ideas for new content.
Remember that no-matter what content you produce you follow these two golden rules closely:
- That the content is relevant to your business in that it will attract the type of people that you actively want to open up conversations with (or at least that these people play a role in influencing the final decision on whether or not to use you as a supplier)
- That the content is useful to the audience, don’t write content for contents sake, there should be value for the reader, ideally it should help them solve a problem or challenge that they’re facing.
If you’d like assistance with content planning, particularly content that benefits your rank in search engines then please contact us.
