I recently wrote up a short, actionable custom report from Google Analytics [6] to help you get at some useful SEO and keyword level analytic data in a few short steps. This time we'll try to keep it equally short and just as sweet, and walk through a custom report that can help you to understand how different types of content perform.
Getting Unique Visitor & Goal Data on Content Segments with Custom Reports
SEO Moz had a couple of great [7] posts [8] on benchmarking and analyzing different segments of your site's content. Those posts do a really nice job of explaining exactly why comparing various types of content are important, and what we'll do here is walk through how you can get a bit higher resolution look at exactly what's going on with different types of content.
First, we need to set up a custom report. We walked through this in the first post in this series, but here are the first two simple steps:
First, you select Manage Custom Reports:
[9]
Next, you can create a new report:
[10]
Google has a nice overview [11] of how to create custom reports, so check out the quick start or the video below if you get tripped up on any of the logistics along the way:
Again here we're just focused on creating a single, simple custom report.
Unique Visitors, Unique Pageviews, & Goals by Content Type
Next we'll just set our parameters using the super-simple drag and drop functionality offered by the Google Analytics custom reports. We're using three metrics:
- Total Goal Completions
- Unique Page Views
- Unique Visitors
And one Dimension:
- Page
You could potentially add some metrics like page views, depending on how you monetize, or even focus solely on unique visitors and goal completions if you're doing lead-gen and aren't as concerned with pageviews. For our example we'll use the three metrics listed above:
[12]
Next you'll have a pretty interesting report in and of itself that can tell you which are your best performing pages (in a much cleaner and more accurate way than your default content views can, if you're driving your strategy based on goals):
[13]
Depending on how your conversions and thank you pages are set up, you may want to filter out "thank-you" here. You can also start to drill to the type of segmentation outlined in the SEO Moz posts, adding a nice layer of data (unique visitors and total goal completions):
[14]
That's it, you're done! Now you have a couple of really handy custom reports set up.
So What Can I Do With All This Data?
Good question! Google analytics tips and tricks [15] are great, but practical applications are even better. Next week, we'll walk through some specific applications for the custom reports we set up this week.
About The Author
This is a guest post from Tom Demers [16]. Tom is in charge of the online marketing efforts at Aspen Square Management, a national property management company. Tom also takes on pay-per click and search engine optimization consulting projects through Measured SEM Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per Click Consulting [17] for a wide variety of clients in a number of different verticals (you can contact him at tom at measuredsem dot com to learn more). He is also a happy WordStream customer.
