How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Content Strategy

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information for site owners, making it an invaluable tool for any worthwhile content strategy. The data that it collects can help you hone in on what works best, and what needs to be changed. Here are some tips on how to use Google Analytics to improve your content strategy:

Know your audience

Knowing and understanding your audience is one of the keys to attracting and keeping visitors to your site. It’s not enough to simply attract visitors, though. You need to maintain your audience by providing plenty of useful, interesting, and smart information. Google Analytics provides you with an audience overview, allowing you to get a better idea of just who those visitors are, including gender, age group, and their interests. The info on their interest is gleaned from their behavior, such as their searches, purchases, and browsing history.

Utilize behavior reports and identify well performing content

Click on the Behavior tab to access the data about specific pages and blog posts. This will give you insight on which posts are most popular based on traffic, and from that, you can determine the topics that are of greatest interest to your audience. Likewise, you can see which posts perform the worst, and try to figure out why that may be. Take a look at the content of your top performing posts and see what they have in common. If new and relevant information is available since the post was originally written, it’s a good idea to update the content to reflect that. You may consider updating old or under performing content to see if that makes a difference in attracting more readers.

Find out what posts convert

While much of your content is likely designed to inform and educate your readers, you also want them to take certain actions, like signing up for a newsletter, clicking on a product link, etc. Adding links and calls to action within posts can be much more effective when you can see which of your posts are successfully converting. In order to do so, you simply need to set up goals within Google Analytics. You can create different goals for different posts. Over time, the data will be collected, allowing you to get a clearer picture of how the posts perform.

Create goals for calls to action, and then track progress

You don’t want visitors to just stop by your site and read the content. You want and need them to take action from time to time. Whether you want to sell products from your site, build your email list, get visitors to download content, or take any other number of actions, you need to be specific about it. Set goals for the calls to action on particular pages and posts, and then track their performance. Google Analytics makes it easy to measure visitor engagement, which can help inform future goals and help you shape your content strategy going forward. It can take time to dig through all of the data that it collects, but it will be one of the most useful tools that you’ll have available.

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