How Content Providers Can Make the Most of Google Analytics Data

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to get the latest updates in your inbox
Ecommerce businesses often turn to Google Analytics to provide accurate and actionable data around product sales and user behavior. However, you don't need to be an ecommerce business to analyze your particular product's performance. Understanding the type of content users want to watch, read, or interact with is vital to the success of any content provider. Historically, the data that informs this understanding has been limited to baseline metrics like Pageviews, Time on Page, and Pages per Session. Now, with the help of the Analytics Enhancement Toolkit from Analytics Pros, combined with the power of custom dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics, content providers can easily gain advanced insights into how users engage with specific site content.  

How Are Videos Driving Site Engagement?

Want to understand the role videos play in the overall user experience? Want to benchmark the performance of a particular video against site averages or similar posts? Our Enhanced Video Tracker gives you the ability to understand user engagement with video content beyond just play and pause. With this information in hand, you can create content to better reach new and loyal audiences. There are numerous use cases for analyzing video engagement beyond simple plays and pauses. For instance, with this toolkit you would be able to analyze videos by percent watched to understand what parts of your content may have driven people to exit and how many users remain engaged until the very end.     Our Enhanced Video Tracker has pre-built, robust, and reliable solutions for multiple video platforms. It utilizes each platform individually, accounting for and supporting any changes in the API, allowing you to place videos from different platforms on the same page simultaneously and have each tracked in the same manner.  

What If I Don't Make Videos?

Not a video provider? Our Scroll Tracking and Engagement Timer solutions work great for quantifying user engagement on articles and other non-video content. Engaged users typically visit more often, read and share more articles, and generate more ad revenue for the site. Standard page timing tracking is often limited in GA due to non-interactive engagement being processed as a bounce, issues surrounding exit page timings, and other technical limitations to their tracking metrics. Our Engagement Timer deploys a thorough analysis of user, interaction, and site data to more accurately identify a site's most engaged users. This allows for easy segmentation to understand who these users are, where they come from, and what content interests them.    

How Can I Further Segment My Engagement Data?

Once you are properly tracking engagement data, you’ll want to find out what types of content that drive the highest user engagement. This is where content specific Custom Dimensions, Custom Metrics, and Calculated Metrics can help. To give you some ideas on potential analysis capabilities, here are a few of the most common custom dimensions and metrics used by content providers:   Custom Dimensions: Original Author Name Editing Author Name Content Director Content Photographer Content Format or Template Content Topic Content Position Length of Content Original Publish Date Last Updated Date Number of Images Content Sponsor Celebrity Featured Word Count Custom Metrics: Content Starts (video, audio, article, survey, etc) Content Completes Time Engaged Video Playtime Likes Dislikes Shares Comments Favorites Survey Completes Calculated Metrics: Avg. Time Engaged Per Page Avg. User or Session Playtime Video Completion Rate Articles Read Per User or Session Surveys Completed Per User or Session Now that you’ve implemented your Custom Dimensions and Metrics, you can start to compare engagement by different content types. (TIP: In Data Studio, you can add a filter for a Custom Dimension like “Topic” and allow the user to select the topics they are interesting in analyzing.)   Maintaining dimensional consistency across content types will allow for actionable, high level analysis that provides insight into particular content topics or elements that drive user engagement.  

Yes, This Is Awesome… How Can I Get This?

All of the visuals in this post are based on metrics and dimensions that were customized for the needs of individual content providers, meaning there isn't a "one size fits all" approach. Contact us and we can start putting together a custom solution to track your content engagement in a meaningful way.