Having data is vital to making good decisions, and Google analytics is the best way for a website owner to get as much data as possible. Perhaps the most useful purpose of this data is to influence your content and marketing strategies.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a toolset that allows website owners to track the behavior of the users on their sites. For example; you will be able to see where your users come from, what they do on your website and who they are. While you don’t get a huge amount of personal information, you get enough so that you can see where users are located.
This data can obviously be incredibly powerful for a website owner who is interested in optimizing their business to generate better margins.
How Can it Impact Your Content Strategy?
Perhaps the most useful part of Google Analytics is the ability to see which pages do well, where that traffic comes from and how users interact on each page. This data gives you the ability to do tests and learn from your past experiences.
While you can infer from sales data, looking at the information that Google Analytics gives you far more in-depth data that allows you to make better decisions.
Determining Your Most Popular Pages
Without any configuration of your Google Analytics tools, you can easily see which of your pages get the most traffic. Of course, you must wait until you have a decent amount of data, which might be days or months depending on how much traffic you get each day.
But once you have this data you can see which of your posts the most traffic, this can help you to create better content in the future. By looking at which of your posts do well and which do poorly, you can quickly infer what topics people are interested in hearing about.
This tactic is particularly useful for websites that cover a broad industry that has plenty of subsections. By looking at the pages that perform well, you can see which of those subsections most people care about, allowing you to direct the majority of your resources towards the most popular sections.
By doing this, you can optimize your website to get the highest number of visitors from your current level of spending. Presuming that your conversion rate stays constant this will allow you to see a better ROI.
Compare Content Types
While it’s great to see which pages perform best this doesn’t give you as much information as you might assume. For one, it’s easy to get outlying examples because of further promotion or just luck. But it also doesn’t tell you which types of posts are the most popular; it shows the individual pages.
However, with a little bit of configuration, you can group individual pages into types of posts or any other group you prefer. By doing this, you can create a different interpretation of the same data, show you which types of posts are the most popular.
This tactic is useful if you’re creating different styles of content, i.e., long form content, quizzes, videos, list posts, and guides. By looking at this data, you’ll be able to see which types of content are performing well and which should be discarded.
Again, this allows you to prioritize certain types of content for when you are merely interested in getting the most traffic to your website as possible.
Prioritize the Highest Converting Post Types
However, that indeed shouldn’t be your only goal, and it’s unlikely to be your primary goal either. Unsurprisingly, your primary goal is probably to generate as much profit as possible. To do this, you will need to make more sales, and therefore you should be interested in seeing which content converts the best.
By creating this dataset, you will be able to see which of your posts generate the most leads, but to do this, you must first develop goals in Google Analytics. Goals can be nearly anything from sales through to email list sign-ups.
By creating goals, you can track any conversion and get more data into who is completing these objectives, on what pages and where they came from. This gives you far more insight into which are your highest converting post types, helping you to make better content choices in the future.
For example; it’s possible that you might find that while guides get the least traffic they covert the best. On the other hand, quizzes might get the most traffic, but they could have a terrible conversion rate. This information provides insight into the uses of each content type so that you can develop a superior strategy.
While there is some truth that this information parallels across all websites, every niche is unique, and that means that while guides convert well for some sites, they won’t work for all. That’s why it’s vital that everybody tracks their analytics and makes their conclusions.
Identify Your Best Traffic Sources
Finally, another great use for Google Analytics is to figure out which of your traffic sources is the best. The word ‘best’ is going to mean something different to each business owner depending on how your business generates revenue, but it’s likely the traffic source which has the highest revenue per visitor.
Many websites find that while Facebook traffic is relatively easy to get it has a tremendously low conversion rate. On the other hand, traffic from search engines tends to convert much better because these users are explicitly looking for solutions to their problems.
That’s why so many business owners come to us to help them improve their rankings through SEO. By ranking on the first page for queries that are directly related to your business you can generate targeted traffic.
But without looking at your Google Analytics data, it’s impossible for you to know which types of traffic convert the best and where most of your traffic is coming from. Once you are armed with this data, you can make more informed decisions and refine your content strategy so that you can generate more profit.