Is your brand one of the 56% which used Google Analytics exclusively for web analytics in 2013? Showing a marked rise from last year (47%), according to figures from Econsultancy, the search engine’s content analytics tool is becoming increasingly valuable as content marketing continues to boom.
If you’ve ever used Google Analytics for your content marketing you will have seen statistics relating to unique pageviews, average time on page and bounce rate, which can be used to gauge how successful an article is and update your content strategy document.
Obviously, the articles which got the most pageviews clue you in with regards to what people are searching for and what they want to read. However, this is only scratching the surface – it is worth digging a little deeper to find out what browsers are really looking for.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate and average length of stay on site are important figures which Google uses to determine how valuable and relevant your site is to users. If the bounce rate is high – meaning people click on one of your links in a search result and then almost immediately bounce back to Google – this suggests that browsers did not find what they were looking for.
If the bounce rate is consistently high, the algorithms that power Google may decide that your site is inferior in quality because it isn’t serving the needs of browsers, meaning your site will not fare well in terms of rankings.
In an ideal world, you want people to spend time on your site before checking out and returning to Google, or even better head to another page on your site. Once you have pinpointed the pages on your site that are attracting these ‘long clicks’ you can go about updating your content strategy in the following way.
- Create new content in the same style of the articles that work. This will help you determine the specific aspects that draw in readers, whether that is the topic, word length or number or size of images.
- Once you have all this information to hand, you are then in a position to create evergreen content – or content which keeps on giving.
- Enhance original articles that have enjoyed notable success by creating related content that updates, adds to or reinforces these older pieces.
- If there are internal links in successful articles, try replacing these with links to new articles or articles that aren’t doing so well to drive traffic more evenly across the site.
Jenny Maclean
