Google Analytics can provide valuable empirical data about how users are engaging with your website, and how successful your content marketing strategy is. These insights can be crucial when it comes to tweaking website design to make it more effective and also evaluating how successful marketing efforts have been in terms of driving people towards engaging with your online presence.
The most popular pages
Google Analytics reveals the most popular pages via the All Pages report under the Behaviour menu. Don’t just look for the pages with the most visits but also the most conversions and the lowest bounce rates. This will give you key insight into where customer interest lies in terms of your products and services – essential knowledge for future marketing campaigns.
Best performing blog posts
Investment in content marketing can be substantial so insights into which content pieces perform best are incredibly useful. You’ll find the most popular blogs in the same place as the most popular pages and can use the information you see there to identify which blog posts users engage with the most.
How users engage with interactive elements of a page
Via the In-Page Analytics Report you’ll be able to see which clickable elements of your web pages are engaging consumers. This is crucial insight if you’re looking to ensure that your website is fully optimised for conversions. Upgrading to In-Page Analytics to incorporate Enhanced Link Attribution will give you much more accurate numbers that are based on individual elements, as opposed to the destination page as a whole.
Social shares and advocates
Social is an increasingly important component in content marketing and Google Analytics has two key tools for revealing the role that social plays in your website engagement. Trackbacks will show the pages containing a link to your website that are being shared via social networks. Data Hub will reveal not only those who are posting links back to your website but also what those people said about your brand or the link they were posting.
UTM Parameters
By using Google Analytics UTM Parameters you’ll be able to attach additional information to links that point back to your website to get more information about them. For example, you can use UTM Parameters to tag social posts sharing content to see which networks are the most supportive for your brand and which types of content work best in terms of generating website engagement.
Site Search
Enabling Site Search in Google Analytics will provide insight into website engagement in terms of what users are looking for on your website. This isn’t an automatic function so you’ll need to ensure the Site Search Tracking slider is set to “on” and that you have entered a Query parameter. Once this is set up you’ll be able to see which searches are made on your website via Search Terms Report. under Behaviour, to determine what content is missing or whether users might be finding certain pages difficult to locate.
Google Analytics has a wealth of insight to offer when it comes to understanding website engagement. We can help you to optimise your use of Google Analytics to gain more perspective on how your site is used and viewed. Give the Iconic Digital team a call today to find out how Google Analytics could help your business.