One of the primary functions of analytics is to tell the webmaster what content in the website is being viewed and how users move through the site. This data helps make decisions regarding what content is effective and what needs additional work. The standard reporting in google analytics will show all of the pages or landing pages by various metrics. Landing pages are session based and will report on sessions, pages per session and conversion rate. Page reports are focused on hit level metrics, a page will have pageviews, time on page, and page value.

The Problem with Page Reporting

If you have a small brochure site with a couple dozen pages, then it’s easy to completely understand what needs to be done with that information. As website grow into ecommerce sites with hundreds of thousands of unique pages, then you begin to lose the ability to understand how to optimize your content.

The Fix - Page Grouping

Page grouping leverages pattern matching rules to aggregate metric data across organized groupings of pages. This can reduce a list of 10,000 pages to a few dozen. Page grouping can be leveraged in Google Analytics from the Admin menu under the view list.

 

 

After you click into the Content Grouping menu you just need to press the button to create a new grouping. The free version of Google Analytics has a limited amount of content groupings, you will have 5 different ways of organizing content for your site.


 

 

After choosing to create a new content grouping you will be given the above options in the interface. Groupings can be accomplished by injecting code on the webpage, leveraging regular expressions to match patterns in the URL path or grouping pages using rule definitions which are similar to regular expressions but easier to use for beginners.

 

Once this layer of tracking is completed, there will be a new dimension available in the standard page and landing page reports. In addition it will be possible to add secondary dimensions and segmentation to this high level content data to understand the performance for each content group by marketing attribution or device category. All of this will also work seamlessly to allow for both high-level and granular analysis of your website’s content.

 

To see the content grouping in action, go to the official Google Analytics Demo account ( click here if you do not have access) and move to the landing page reports (Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages). Then it will be on the dropdown menu titled “Content Groupings”. Googlehas created some very useful examples for their merchandise store such as “brands”, “product categories” and “clothing by gender”.


 

 

Finally you can see what it looks like when you filter only the mobile traffic and plot our the product category trends above.

 

 

This data is powerful for understanding how to grow your content and what audiences are consuming it. One important note that should be made is that this will only aggregate data from the point of creation, so make your content groups today.

 

If you would like to learn more about SEO, web analytics, or user experience as it regards to your website and Truvisibility you can learn more at http://www.truvisibility.com/en/blog. If you are interested in trying Truvisibility out today simply go to truvisibility.com and press the “Get Started” button, it is free and easy.