In order to create content that will really help you scale your business, it’s important to understand which content grabs your visitors’ attention, which one keeps it, and ultimately, which content gets them to convert.
And how do you do this? Well, one way is with the content grouping feature in Google Analytics. With content grouping, you can get a much deeper understanding of your site’s content, in terms of engagement, navigation, and ultimately conversions.
So, instead of relying on page-level data, it’s time to be more insightful and understand how each distinct section of your site performs, especially when compared to others.
Let’s dive in.
- What is Content Grouping?
- How to Setup Content Grouping in Google Analytics?
- 7 Ways to Analyze Your Content with Content Grouping
What is Content Grouping?
Looking to understand and point out the exact content that works on your website? Content grouping is a way to segregate and group your website content to analyze and drill down on the most important metrics.
Google Analytics already provides insight into your content performance with the All page report. Although this report is great for tracking and measuring different content marketing metrics such as bounce rate, sessions, page views, and similar, content grouping gives us an entirely new perspective and allows us to understand how each distinct section of the site performs, especially since we have the opportunity to compare different groups of content.
Thad Warren of EnergyBot says content grouping helps us answer 2 important questions:
- “What content is converting the most customers
- What content group should I focus on improving.”
Nick Comber of Jellyfish Training explains why Content Grouping is necessary.
“Content grouping is a great way to improve the relevance of your site content reports in Google Analytics.
Reporting on individual page performance can be too granular and difficult to draw insight from, so even doing something as simple as building a rule-based content grouping against page URL to contain product categories on your site can add much more context to your day to day reporting.
Rather than comparing performance between different distinct pages, with a content grouping, we can compare performance between our product categories themselves – and with no extra coding or custom dimension setup required!”
Related:
How to Set Up Content Groupings?
To create a top-level Content Grouping, you have to create individual Content Groups by one of the following methods:
- Modifying the tracking code on each page you want to group
- Extracting pages with regex capture groups
- Creating rules to include pages in a group
In the exact order as above, analytics processes the code, then the regex, and then the rules. Once it finds a match, your content is grouped according to that first match.
How do you create a content grouping?
- Login into your Google Analytics account.
- Click Admin, and navigate to the view you want.
- In the VIEW column, click Content Grouping.
- Click +New Content Grouping.
- Enter a name for the new grouping.
- Select the methods you want to use (tracking code, extraction, or rules) to create Content Groups.
Note: You can create up to five Content Groupings and once created, you can’t delete a content grouping. You can choose to either edit it or turn it off.
Related: 26 Tips for Properly Setting Up Google Analytics On Your Website
7 Ways to Analyze Data Your Content with Content Grouping
- Follow your website navigation
- Segment content into buckets based on buyer’s journey
- Group your content based on top-level categories
- Group the content based on a template design and URL pattern
- Create different content groups for long-form and short-form content
- Create content groups based on the level of expertise
- Sort your landing pages by their root subfolder
Content groups are one of the most powerful yet underutilized tools within Google Analytics. There are times when you want to see consolidated reports on various elements and groupings allow an easy view of that.
PRO TIP: Measure Your Website Content Marketing Performance Like a Pro
To optimize your website’s content for conversion, you probably use Google Analytics to learn how many people are interacting with your site, which pages brought them to the site in the first place, which pages they engage with the most, and more.
You may have to navigate multiple areas and reports within Google Analytics to get the data you want though. Now you can quickly assess your content performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
- Pageviews by page, city and country. Where are your visitors located?
- Goal completions by landing page. Which pages receive the most traffic and convert the best?
- Bounce rate by page title. Which pages encourage visitors to read further?
- Sessions by landing page. Which pages do new visitors view first?
- Exits and pageviews by page. Which pages do visitors last view before leaving your website?
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for measuring your website content marketing performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Get the template free
Related: 18 Google Analytics Custom Dimensions for Drilling Down Into Your Website’s Performance
1. Follow your website navigation
Mike Yared of Broadview Digital Marketing adds a tip when setting up your groupings. Yared suggests, “Use a logical layout. This way, your content groupings will follow your website navigation. You are able to set up groupings very quickly using Rule Set to target specific URLs.”
Troy Fawkes of Delta Growth Inc adds a similar experience.
“Our non-e-commerce clients benefit by grouping content by section of their websites. These are Core Content (bottom of the funnel, conversion targeted content like service pages, location pages, etc.), Resource Centre (middle of the funnel, high-quality content, and tools), Blog (top of the funnel, informational and timely content in your industry) and Help Center (post-purchase, content intended to improve the post-purchase experience).
When our clients are building their marketing budgets they’re trying to figure out where their money will make the most impact. With this breakdown view, we can see the conversion rate by site section. It’s a lot easier to say, “We should build more core content like sub-service or city pages and less on the blog” when we have this type of data at our fingertips.
Below is an example from one of our clients’ Analytics views showing how drastic a difference there is in conversion rate. Traffic may shoot up for your blog and you may feel great, but with a low conversion rate, you’re not actually going to be achieving your business goals.”
2. Segment content into buckets based on buyer’s journey
Thad Warren of EnergyBot explains how they do it for their content strategy. “We use content groups to segment content into buckets based on a buyer’s journey stage or a niche-specific to our industry. Those buckets are then wrapped up into High or Low intent.
The below-attached example is a report that we use to determine the content that converts best for us.
Since we are really only getting started with our content marketing strategy you can see that most of our users are coming from high intent searches. Since that’s the intent we wanted to capture first, that’s great, but it also showed us that there may be a solid opportunity to target lower intent search volume and nurture them to a user.”
Sasha Matviienko of Growth360 shares the same tip on content grouping:
“We recommend grouping your content the same way you look at the consumer journey on your website and creating smaller product groups underneath each stage of the consumer journey.
This enables marketing teams to have a holistic picture of how consumers move through the funnel and what stage of the funnel requires more support.
Keep in mind, you can only create 5 content groupings and an unlimited number of content (product) groups underneath them. Once set up, content groupings can’t be changed and that’s another argument to map high-level Content Groupings after the Consumer Journey.”
Sheila Rae Opulencia of Thrive Internet Marketing Agency says, “I use Google Analytics’ content groupings to analyze data when I’m doing a content audit. This allows me to see which pages are bringing in the most traffic to our website and which ones aren’t doing so well.
Once I have the data, I can easily spot which pages need more work because the bounce rate is high and which ones are performing really well, in which case, we tweak a little bit more so we can take advantage of all the traffic it’s pulling into the website. We usually turn high performing pages into pillar pages so we can redirect the traffic to other pages on the site.”
Bonus tip: “On top of analyzing the data for individual pages, content groupings also gives us insight on most popular products on the websites of our e-commerce clients. This gives us an idea of what types of info articles we should be created to support the product page. If we do inbound marketing for the client, this data gives us an idea of what types of content offers we should come out with and what we need to push for in our email marketing campaigns”, says Opulencia.
Related: 25 Examples of Google Analytics Segments That Enable Deeper Analysis
3. Group your content based on top-level categories
James Taylor of Dispense Digital says, “My advice would be to start by categorizing content at the top-level, for example by categories or by blog subcategory. This way, you’re making a start and you’ll quickly be able to see how content grouping allows you to quickly jump into the data and identify any initial positives within the data; then you can focus on really drilling-down.
This approach has helped me to justify-content strategies for both my own sites and the sites I manage for my clients. For example, I can identify top performers within a content hub section of a site, and immediately justify a specific section as a priority for content growth as I have the data at hand.”
4. Group the content based on a template design and URL pattern
Specifically for e-commerce websites, Eliot Kelly of Clickvoyant shares, “Definitely group content also by template design. It’s easy to analyze groups of content when the URL structure follows a subdirectory taxonomy.
If you wanted to view all content under women, you could simply search or filter for “/women/” from the Page dimension. Example: abc.com/women or abc.com/women/shoes
It’s harder to analyze a set of pages that may have a unique URL structure. For example, if you wanted to see how overall the template for a news section landing page behaves, you couldn’t easily aggregate these URLs:
- news.com/politics
- news.com/lifestyle
- news.com/business
By using this content grouping method, you can see how well a content site design influences a user’s ability to find content.”
Blake Smith of SEO Consultant Australia also adds a similar point. “Content grouping allows me to measure the impact of page template design changes.
For large sites that have hundreds or thousands of pages per page template/layout, it can be a helpful way to measure the overall effectiveness of a certain page type.
In WordPress, I do this with Google Tag Manager. I push the page type into the dataLayer in GTM and neatly categorize them as content groups in Analytics.
This allows me to check page layout performance at a glance. It is then really easy to see which page layouts may need some work, which is performing well, etc.”
Smith adds, “In this screenshot, you can see the single post & single page, and the stats that go along with this.”
5. Create different content groups for long-form and short-form content
Jared Bauman of 201 Creative, LLC says, “With one client, we use content groupings to separate long-form content from short-form content. This allows us to evaluate if longer content produces more visitors. It also allows us to quickly understand if longer-form content is worth the increased financial estimate.”
Michelle Tresemer of TGroup Marketing Method adds, “Organize your content via folders in the URL and group content beyond just your blog posts. This way you can quickly see if blog posts, case studies, or other resource documents led to a lead or conversion. It also allows you to see trends over time.
For example, by grouping content (beyond just blog posts) you can see WHICH case study is most popular…or WHICH white paper was most popular and which pieces of content didn’t perform well. Again, this allows us to create more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.”
Tresemer adds, “You can see in the screenshot I’ve included only content in one grouping, in this case, any URL containing /blog/ so I can quickly see what content is performing the best. If I didn’t have the URLs set up this way it would be much more difficult to see what is performing within each content category.”
6. Create content groups based on the level of expertise
Adelina Karpenkova of Joinative explains this tip with an example.
“Group blog content based on the level of expertise. As we at Joinative offer services for people with completely different knowledge of the topic, it’s important for us to be able to analyze the demand for basic guides, more detailed tutorials, and comprehensive tech instructions. To make it possible, we group articles according to types of audiences they might appeal to and then measure how effective we are at reaching people at this or another stage of their journey.”
Datis Mohsenipour of HeyOrca adds, “Users will interact with different types of content on your site in different ways. For instance, your blog will likely have a higher bounce rate than core pages on your website about your product or services.
If you are only looking at your data from a bird’s eye view, it may be skewed and you could be missing out on key opportunities to improve your site. While you can go through steps to manually dig into content groupings, creating content groups in GA will save you a lot of time.
There are many ways to group your content, but I like to keep things simple by using the following categories:
- Blog
- Product
- Resources
- Careers
- App Usage
Depending on the type of services or products you offer, you may want to break things out by product categories (IE: shoes, pants, coats, etc.), or in the case of a SaaS company using an app, you’ll want to create a content grouping for app traffic.”
Bonus tip: Mohsenipour of HeyOrca adds a bonus tip, “Segmenting out blog traffic is easy to too and helps you better understand your data.
Let’s say you’ve focused on optimizing your blog over the past few months and now you’ve tripled your traffic – this may increase your overall bounce rate. By looking at your content groupings, you can quickly check and see if your core site’s bounce rate has been impacted or if the bounce rate has increased because of the increase in your blog traffic.”
7. Sort your landing pages by their root subfolder
Adam Jackson of Big Leap suggests, “Depending on how your site is configured, I would suggest filtering by Content Groupings. You can sort by /blog/ or by a /tag/ or by a /category/. You can also filter landing pages by their root subfolder like /resources/ if you have it.
The purpose of this filtering method is to track the progress/performance of your in a more granular and categorical sense. You can see how each category is performing in terms of CTR, Rankings, Clicks, and Impressions. This lets you see what kinds of content on your site is succeeding and what areas need the most improvement.”
FAQs
How do I use content grouping in Google Analytics? ›
- Sign in to your Analytics account.
- Click Admin, and navigate to the view you want.
- In the VIEW column, click Content Grouping.
- Click +New Content Grouping.
- Enter a name for the new grouping.
- Select the methods you want to use (tracking code, extraction, or rules) to create Content Groups.
Through content grouping in GA4, you can quickly check the performance of a content group or compare the performance of different content groups with each other. Content groups allow you to measure the performance of a set of web pages at the content category or product category level.
What is Google Analytics content grouping? ›Content Grouping lets you group content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site or app, and then view and compare aggregated metrics by group name in addition to being able to drill down to the individual URL, page title, or screen name.
How do I use Google Analytics on my blog? ›- Sign in to Blogger.
- Select the blog you want to analyze.
- From the menu, click Settings.
- Under "Basic," click Google Analytics Measurement.
- Enter your Analytics "G-" ID.
- Click Save.
Content grouping lets you put your content into different pots (groups) that allows you to view metrics by that group in reports. This means you can drill down into specific sections of the site to see what is and isn't working and make adjustments to the site based on that information.
What is the purpose of content grouping? ›Content grouping is a way to segregate and group your website content to analyze and drill down on the most important metrics. Google Analytics already provides insight into your content performance with the All page report.
What is the purpose of groups in Google? ›Google Groups allow you to communicate with colleagues, by sharing a common email address. Once a group has been created, you can use the group to set up chat rooms, invite all users to a Google Meet and share documents for collaboration.
What are Google Groups and how do they work? ›- Email everyone in a group with a single email address. ...
- Meet people with similar hobbies, interests, or backgrounds. ...
- Learn about a topic and join discussions. ...
- Organize meetings, conferences, and events. ...
- Create a Collaborative Inbox and assign conversations to members for tracking.
- Keep an Eye on Your Bounce Rate. ...
- Analyze Potential New Markets. ...
- Identify Your Best Content. ...
- Use the Proper Attribution Model. ...
- Study the Behavior Flow. ...
- Analyze Trends. ...
- Discover the Best Sources of Traffic. ...
- Study the User Flow.
Google Analytics is a must-have for bloggers. It helps you understand your best content and readers so you can improve your blog. Because it is such an essential tool, this article will show you how to get started with Google Analytics (GA) for your WordPress blog.
How do I use Google Analytics for my website? ›
- On a computer, open a classic Google Sites.
- Click Settings. Manage site.
- Under "Statistics," click the Down arrow. Use Universal Analytics.
- In the text box, under "Analytics Web Property ID," enter a valid Analytics Property ID. ...
- At the top, click Save.
Google Analytics, or GA, is a free analytics tool that gives you an in-depth look at your website and/or app performance.
Why do you need grouping give an example? ›The grouping or the classification of materials makes the study easier and also saves our time and energy. Periodic table is a perfect example of this grouping. Different elements are kept in rows and columns on the basis of their chemical properties and behaviour.
Why is grouping activities are important? ›Effective learning
Working with others enables you to pool your ideas and see problems from different perspectives. In a group situation, you can attempt tasks that could not be accomplished by an individual, combining a variety of skills and expertise to tackle more complex and larger scale problems.
Group work helps students build stronger communication skills. Students learn to plan and manage time and become more responsible learners. Group problem solving teaches students how to reach consensus.
How do I create a content group? ›- On your Android phone or tablet, open the Contacts app .
- At the bottom, tap Contacts.
- At the top left, tap Menu. Create label.
- Enter a label name and tap OK. Add one contact to a label: Tap Add contact . Select a Contact. Add multiple contacts to a label: Tap Add contact . Touch and hold a Contact.
Groups are important to personal development as they can provide support and encouragement to help individuals to make changes in behaviour and attitude. Some groups also provide a setting to explore and discuss personal issues.
How do you make a good Google Group? ›- Sign in to Google Groups.
- At the top, click Create group.
- Enter information and choose settings for the group. Settings reference.
- Click Create group. Wait a few minutes for your new group to become active before sending a message to it. ...
- (Optional) Next steps: Choose advanced settings for your group.
- Sign in to Google Groups.
- Click the name of a group.
- To create a label: In the left panel, point to Labels click More. Add label. Enter a label name. click Add. ...
- To delete a label: In the left panel, to the right of Labels, click More. Delete label. Click OK.
Cragon, Wright, and Kasch (2008) state that the primary defining characteristic of group interaction is that it is purposeful. They go on to break down purposeful interaction into four types: problem-solving, role playing, team building, and trust building. Without purposeful interaction, a true group does not exist.
What are the different types of user groups? ›
- Manual Internal Groups. Manual internal groups are not visible to users. ...
- Conditional Groups. Similar to manual internal groups, conditional groups are not visible to users. ...
- Open Groups. ...
- Mandatory Groups.
- Member permissions can be adjusted.
- A unique email address unifies all members of the group.
- Groups is built for large group communication.
- Interact via web or email.
The service has been running since 2001.
How do I optimize my website content? ›- Make sure you're targeting a keyword with traffic potential. ...
- Make sure it aligns with search intent. ...
- Make sure it covers everything searchers want to know. ...
- Make sure it's easy and enticing to read. ...
- Make sure it has a compelling title tag and description. ...
- Make sure it has enough backlinks.
- Build Trust. ...
- Match Intent. ...
- Create Quality. ...
- Establish Authority. ...
- Produce Calls-To-Action. ...
- Optimize Engagement With Visuals.
- Refine Your Buyer Persona. Creating content requires you to understand who your audience is. ...
- Research or the Best Target Keywords. ...
- Write Better Content. ...
- Promote Content to the Right Channels. ...
- Track and Measure Your Progress.
If you have a website, you should be using Google Analytics. There are no exceptions here – it's a useful and important tool for every website owner. One of the first things we recommend website owners do when launching a new site is get tracking set up for Google Analytics.
How do you analyze blog traffic? ›Most blogging platforms have built-in analytics (e.g. HubSpot) or a Google Analytics plug-in (e.g. WordPress) to track blog traffic and site visitors. Regardless of the blogging platform you're using, we recommend that you check blog traffic with Google Analytics using the Google Analytics website.
Can I analyze any website with Google Analytics? ›No, Google Analytics does not track if your users visit your competitor's websites after visiting your website. Google Analytics shows only your website's bounce rate and click-through rate. However, you can compare your results with a competitor using other third-party tools like SemRush.
How do you Analyse website data in Google Analytics? ›- Ask a Business Question First. This is the first and probably most important tip I can give you: ...
- Use a Data Analysis Framework. Having a process in place is very important as well. ...
- Set Up Goals and Goal Values. ...
- Set Up Annotations. ...
- Set Up Intelligence Events.
What sites can use Google Analytics? ›
...
Websites using Google Analytics.
| # | Website | Traffic |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | auth0.openai.com | 0.7% |
| 2 | chat.openai.com | 0.6% |
| 3 | askubuntu.com | 0.5% |
| 4 | account.godaddy.com | 0.4% |
You can use it to create a personal blog or website, amongst other things. It was originally launched in 1999 by a company called Pyra Labs. In 2003, Google bought Blogger and went on to become one of the most popular blogging sites on the web.
What are the 4 scope types? ›There are four levels of scope: product, hit, session, and user: Product – value is applied to the product for which it has been set (Enhanced Ecommerce only). Hit – value is applied to the single hit for which it has been set.
How do I start a data analytics blog? ›- Select your domain. There are multiple things even in Data Science that you can blog about. ...
- Research. If you think of a certain topic, there are tons of articles probably with the same title as you thought of on the internet. ...
- Understand your audience. ...
- Submit to a publication. ...
- Monitor your metrics. ...
- Be patient.
The GROUPING function can be used in the above example to differentiate NULLs produced by ROLLUP from NULLs from the grouped data. GROUPING function for a column returns a value of 1 when the NULL generated for that column is a result of ROLLUP operation. Else it returns a value of 0.
How do you use grouping feature? ›- Select the rows or columns you want to group. In this example, we'll select columns B, C, and D.
- Select the Data tab on the Ribbon, then click the Group command.
- The selected rows or columns will be grouped. In our example, columns B, C, and D are grouped.
There are two major types of grouping: data binning of a single-dimensional variable, replacing individual numbers by counts in bins; and grouping multi-dimensional variables by some of the dimensions (especially by independent variables), obtaining the distribution of ungrouped dimensions (especially the dependent ...
What are the steps for grouping data? ›Step 1: Identify the highest and the lowest (least) data values in the given observations. Step 2: Find the difference between the highest and least value. Step 3: Now, assume the number of class intervals we need (usually 5 to 20 classes are suggested to take based the number of observations).
What is method of grouping? ›It is the method of calculating mode in cases where more than one value has the highest frequency and it becomes impossible to find the mode. The grouping method involves the preparation of two tables; viz., the Grouping Table and the Analysis Table.
What are the different types of group functions? ›These are some of the group functions to achieve different functionalities. SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MAX and MIN, VARIANCE and standard deviation.
For which situation would you use a group function? ›
You can use group functions in any clause of a SELECT statement. You can use group functions only in the column list of the select clause and in the WHERE clause of a SELECT statement. You can mix single row columns with group functions in the column list of a SELECT statement by grouping on the single row columns.
Why is using various grouping strategies important? ›By using instructional grouping strategies, teachers can encourage students of similar or complementary levels to work together and collaborate on projects, discussions and daily assignments where students learn as a team.
What are the 3 best rules for data grouping? ›Guidelines for classes
The classes must be all inclusive or exhaustive. This means that all data values must be included. The classes must be continuous. There are no gaps in a frequency distribution.
Four basic types of groups have traditionally been recognized: primary groups, secondary groups, collective groups, and categories.
What is grouping method analysis? ›What is grouping analysis? Grouping analysis is used in surveys to filter survey responses based on the type of response received on a particular question. It is natural for researchers to classify respondents based on the responses received to get a more in-depth understanding of the market.