My 15 Minutes of Fame: Google Analytics Content Reports: Understanding the Key Benefits

We all know that content is a key part of a website, but do you regularly analyze performance of content to see what's working and what hasn't hit the spot?

If you haven't checked your Content Reports in Google Analytics recently, now is the time.

Whatever your website, you'll find the Site Content reports very useful. This post will focus on all four sections:

All Pages: For detailed interaction data on all pages.
Content Drilldown: Data broken down by subfolder.
Landing Pages: Pages on which visitors entered the site.
Exit Pages: Pages which have been the final page of a session.

You can access these reports under Behavior > Site Content.

All Pages

Here you will find a list of all the pages of your site that have been viewed during the date range you have set. If there are pages missing from this list, they either didn't get viewed or the tracking code isn't installed properly.

You can break the data down by Page or Page Title. If your URLs don't help you easily understand what the Page is then Page Title might be for you.

If some pages have the same title as each other, their data will be combined under the Page Title view. Consider how you can filter this report to compare similar pages together based on what's in the URL or title.

Alongside each URL in this report, before the data you will see a little gray square with an arrow; click this and a pop-up window showing the page live on your site will appear. This is useful for troubleshooting and getting to know the different types of pages on a website you aren't yet familiar with.

Be aware that this preview may not be the same version that the user saw if the content has changed and that this URL is built based on the domain name you have put in the admin area of the profile, so if you use one profile for multiple domains this may not work for every URL.

The data shown for each page gives you a picture of the interaction level of the page:

Pageviews: How many times the page was viewed.
Unique Pageviews: This de-duplicates pageviews to show how many sessions contained a view of the page.
Avg. Time on Page: Uses the time metrics available for the page and works out the average across the pageviews.
Entrances: How many times this page was the first page in a session.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of entrances on this page where the user did not interact with the website any further.
% Exit: The percentage of pageviews that were the final page in a session.
Page Value: Calculated using ecommerce and goal values, this divides the total value by the number of pageviews for this page.

The Page Value data requires goals to have values against them or for e-commerce tracking to be running.

As with all reports, the data here can be seen in a pie chart, but this isn't very useful if you have a lot of pages, and also bar charts which can be helpful with date comparisons if you are trying to identify any changes in content activity.

Full article here