How to use Google Analytics to see which content really works for you

I wrote a post last week about how to create killer content that drives traffic to your blog using Google Analytics. The post was about seeing what types of blog posts have worked well for you in the past and using your most viewed articles to plan future content.

What I didn’t talk about so much is how to what type of blog posts work for you in terms of how sticky they are.

When I say sticky, I mean the type of blog posts that people actually read rather than clicking straight off. The type of posts that get people clicking around your blog to find out more.

You can write a click-bait title with an awesome graphic that drawers people in, but if your content is a pile of dog shit then they’ll click right off, increasing your bounce rate and actually harming where you will show up in search!

So this post is all about how you can use Google Analytics to gauge what type of content really works for you.

The first thing you want to do is go to site content -> all pages. This gives you a view of the pages that have the most page views in your time frame specified.

If you find that there are some pages that you don’t want to display, just click the ‘advanced’ button (demonstrated by my highly accurate portrayal of a circle), use the drop-down menu to select ‘exclude’ and type in which you wish to exclude. You may find some pages or categories appear on this list so this is a quick way to exclude them.

Here are the things we are looking for:

We cover pageviews in the previous post, so I won’t go into that too much here.

Time on page:

Time on your page you page is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s the time someone has spent on your page before clicking somewhere else. If the tab or browser is closed, no time is recorded.

The longer someone is on the page the better – it shows they probably read the post. Although they could have opened it in a tab in the background to read after finishing their current task! It’s important to note that if someone reads just the one page and then exits, the session is recorded as 0.

Bounce rate:

Bounce rate is slightly different as it shows the percentage of page views that were followed by someone leaving your site. It can be seen that if you have a high bounce rate, your post isn’t drawing the reader in and causing them to explore the rest of your site.

Searching for keywords

If you write about different topics, you can search keywords in the URL to see what topics work the best for you. If you look in the example below, posts about Twitter do lots better than posts about Mascara on my blog!

Twitter vs Mascara

And that, my friends, is how you can dig a bit deeper into your Google Analytics to find out which content is grabbing your readers attention.