How to improve the content and business strategy of your media with simple Google Analytics techniques

Buzzfeed publisher Dao Nguyen recently told in an interview how the publication uses data to plan and promote publications.

Tao Nguyen, publisher of Buzzfeed

I don't think Buzzfeed has a monopoly on the data. I think we just use them correctly.

We have translated the article Publishing Executive, which describes Google Analytics tools that will help the media to analyze data, draw conclusions and adjust editorial policies.
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Short retelling:

Demographics

To expand the audience, write materials based on data about the interests of users. Tell about the cities in which they live.

Unique visitors and conversion

What percentage of unikiers subscribe to your newsletters and watch your ad?

Bounce rate

How many users continue to use your site after having read one article. How to engage them through personalization?

Average check

How to apply e-commerce metrics for the media platform.

Content grouping

Find out which articles and sections of your site generate more money and subscriptions.

Publishers compete fiercely for traffic from sites and services that distribute content (read Facebook, Google News, Flipboard). Media seeks to better understand the benefits of content and what needs to be done to earn more content. It's analytics time.



Surely your editorial board and marketing team are already analyzing the content in some form. Most likely, you use Google Analytics. And, most likely, you do not use all the tools.

Content analysis is methods and metrics that show what each content page does for a business. How it affects advertising revenue, sales of subscriptions, subscriptions to the newsletter, and any of the many ways to monetize content .

Content analysis is an invaluable strategic tool. It gives a detailed picture of whether a particular article or section was necessary for a business. It is also a tool for identifying insights that help make the right business decisions.

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Comment Relap.io

There is another point of view. Our clients Bigpicture.ru abandoned Google Analytics. According to the editors, GA does not give all the answers that the media manager needs.
“Google Analytics is good, but does not provide a complete picture in all sections. We have created our own tool "Monitor". "
Read more about how Bigpicture.ru analyzes content, read in the interview:
As a team of blog Bigpicture.ru sells Longrida for 1 million views and opens the agency "SALO"

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Read a brief overview of the metrics and methods that publishers can take into their arsenal. Content analysis is an extensive topic, so treat this information as a basis.

Identify goals

How do you earn? As an example, take these goals:

• You are trying to increase the number of email subscribers, but there are fewer subscribers than you want.

• You want to increase advertising revenue by increasing traffic.

• Subscription is the most profitable channel, but only 1% of visitors are ready to issue it.

Let's see which metrics are useful in each case, and let us designate why we should pay attention to them.

Demographics

GA collects detailed information about visitors: age, gender, geographical location, browser language settings, and, most importantly, their area of ​​interest (sports, cooking, etc.)

How to use

SEO consultant Stephanie Chang advises to pay close attention to demographic indicators in GA: where they live, how old they are, what they are addicted to.

Chang offers to create content based on the interests of readers. For example, if GA shows that last week many visitors were on culinary sites, write articles on culinary topics as part of your publication. Geographical data will help you to plan your content point-wise: if most of your readers are from the Midwest, a few articles about Chicago are a good idea.

All three of the above business objectives imply an increase in audience. See who is coming to your site right now. Data on demographics is much more useful than analyzing old content.

Unique visitors

Unique visitors (or "unique") - the number of people who came to the site or page.

How to use

Sites that sell media advertising, based on the statistics of unique visitors, so for business goal 2, this figure is simply necessary.

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Comment Relap.io

See what percentage of your visitors convert to clicks on ads or subscriptions. A low score means you need to try new ad formats or better engage the audience .

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Conversion

The conversion rate indicates the percentage of visitors who performed a particular action — usually made a purchase. There is a conversion by goals, it indicates the number of people who left the email, for example.

How to use

The conversion rate may vary depending on what you want. If you sell a one-year subscription for $ 12,000 on a highly specialized topic, the ratio will be lower than if you offered your readers a less expensive subscription to diverse topics.

75% of e-commerce sites have less than 5.3% conversion; content-oriented sites tend to have lower rates.

If articles on a particular topic have lower conversion rates than other topics, this is a clear signal that the content is not working.

Bounce rate

When someone enters a page and leaves without committing an action, GA marks this visit as a “rejection”. The lower the bounce rate, the better. A low score means your content is interesting to readers. SEO blogger Avinash Kaushik once mentioned (somewhat deceptive, as we shall see later) that the bounce rate is “Came, vomited, gone.”

How to use

If any page collects more traffic than others, but at the same time it has a higher bounce rate or a lower conversion - do not worry. Something on this page attracts an audience, but does not involve. A high bounce rate may be due to problems with the interface. Or there is nothing interesting on the page besides the content of the page itself.

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Comment Relap.io

Your media is around the article. From the frame around the content depends on whether the reader will remain or leave. To engage the reader, personalize the blocks around the article. So each user will find on your site what interests him. When RIA Novosti started using a personalized Relap.io block, the number of referrals increased by 101% according to recommendations, and the time on the site increased by 19%.
Read the details in the case: Relap.io will collect “The Main” on Ria.ru

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From time to time you will have pages with a high bounce rate and high traffic. This is not always bad - if you sell ad impressions, this page is useful, regardless of the bounce.

The failure rate, by definition, is not self-sufficient: it does not indicate the course to action. You did everything right to attract readers if traffic is high. It is worth paying special attention to the bounce rate if no one subscribes to your newsletters or does not issue a paid subscription.

Average check

AOV (Average Order Value) - indicates the average income per visitor.

How to use

AOV is a key indicator in e-commerce. It is useful media with sales pages, and those who are trying to increase the number of subscriptions or the sale of tickets to the conference. With AOV, you can evaluate the effectiveness of discounts. Therefore, if you offer a discount for a second or third subscription and want to know if the system works, AOV is a necessary metric.

Set Goals

In GA, you can configure triggers - the so-called Goals, which record the fact of an event X on the site. An event can be a click on an advertisement, or if someone has been on the page for more than 5 minutes, or someone has bought a subscription, or has reached the “purchase confirmation” page, or has subscribed to an email newsletter and others.

Frequent Script

You create a page where the user gets when he performs an action - a purchase confirmation page, or the page “Thank you for sharing your email address”. The goal is configured to visit such a page, and you can track which way users get there most often.

Content grouping

You never wondered why posts about fish stimulate more email requests than posts about cats? Readers who see the font Comic Sans subscribe less often than those who see Helvetica? Want to find out which author has more fans?

How to use

Grouping content in GA allows you to compare one part of the content with another. Grouping is probably one of the most useful features of GA.

Categories can be formed by date, author, subject. Compare pages and see which text contributes to the conversion. Or you can see which users have a higher average check (or number of subscriptions) depending on their conversion path.

The content grouping is organized into three levels, so that each group will have a subgroup and each subgroup of pages.

Example:

Anna and Bob worked together on article 1 - this is a useful feature: each web page may belong to more than one subgroup.



The lack of grouping by content is the need to plan everything. If you want to add a new author or a topic within the next 6 months, let's say your fishing website will release a series of articles on deer hunting, the results will be distorted if you do not add a new category in advance. So think ahead.

Grouping the content will not show how effectively your previously published articles about fish and cats attracted an audience and converted traffic. Data begins to be collected from the time categories are set up. Therefore, the effective use of grouping involves the accumulation of information.

What conclusions can you draw?

For example, fans of Carlita's articles are more likely to buy a subscription than fans of other authors. Set up a Target on the subscription confirmation page, set up groups of authors, and after a few hundred visits to the page, you will receive answers.

Consider the sample size

The larger the sample, the better. To track the conversion rate or failures on the example of 1000 uniquely better than 100, and 10 000 - even better. The required sample size depends on what actions you expect from visitors. If you sell something for $ 50,000, the conversion will be lower than if you collect email addresses for distribution.

Instead of thinking about the size of the sample from the point of view of unique visitors, think about the time needed to measure data: will you wait a week to find out if articles on agriculture encourage more subscriptions than articles on the grill? And wait six weeks? Two months? Often, strategic thinking in time is more useful than in terms of visitors.

The more time, the more accurate the results. Accuracy is when the numbers stop jumping sharply. If you are tracking how the new article affects the conversion, it is better to wait for the moment when the quantitative indicators on it stabilize and draw conclusions based on the data obtained. It is wiser than to fall into euphoria and change the design or content strategy only because 20% of the 10 visitors to the new page bought a subscription.