The set of Content reports in Google Analytics is a very valuable one and can teach you a lot on what is going on in your website. Just by clicking on few of the default links on Google Analytics you are able to receive a huge amount of insight, analyze the situation and take actions that will improve your visitors' experience on your site as well as drive them down the path you wish them to take.

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What Google Analytics Content Reports Can Tell You
What Google Analytics Content Reports Can Tell You Published on WSI E-Services Internet Marketing Blog: “Marketing on Internet Road”, January 03, 2010. The set of Content reports in Google Analytics is a very valuable one and can teach you a lot on what is going on in your website. Just by clicking on few of the default links on Google Analytics you are able to receive a huge amount of insight, analyze the situation and take actions that will improve your visitors' experience on your site as well as drive them down the path you wish them to take. With all the efforts around SEO, Pay per Click,incoming links, social media and so on, we might forget that sometime it is not enough to bring the (correct kind of) visitors to your site. We want to them to follow the path that we drew up for them in our site architecture.We obviously wish to see which pages are interesting to our visitors, are they following our navigation and internal links to see more content on our website, which of that content and more.Google Analytics set of Content reports is an amazing resource to teach us exactly that and to answer those questions and more. Personally, I love those reports and I'm analyzing them on a regular basis to see what's going on, what needs to be done and if what we have done has the correct effect on our visitors.Start your analysis by clicking on the
Content
link on the Google Analytics menu. The default report is the Content Overview, where you can get a high-level impression of your site's content. A lot of valuable information, but this is only the starting point. Click on
View Full Report
under the
Top Content
table. Now it's starting to get interesting: Google Analytics Top Content Report: Click for bigger image Apart from presenting all the statistics on the pages that were viewed in the period of time being analyzed (with totals on average time on site, bounce rate and more) we are getting a breakdown, sorted by the pageviews, of the pages of our site and how our visitors interacted with them.For each page we are able to see how many times it was viewed (pageviews), how many unique pageviews this specific page received, what was the average time our visitors spent on that page, the bounce rate of the page and the percentage of exists that took place from this page.Each of the parameter is amazing and can drive us to take decisions and actions, but it is strongly recommended to look at the parameters also as a whole, per page and by comparison between the different pages.But hold on, this is only the beginning. Clicking on a specific page will take us to a Content Detail page of this page. This page will present you again with the details you had seen as part of the pages' information on the
Top Content
report along with some in-depth analysis options on the right site.Let's start with the first link:
Navigation Summary
for this page: Google Analytics Navigation Summery Report: Click for bigger image I truly love this report: per the selected page we are getting an overview of where our visitors came from to this page (left side) and where did they go from after visiting this page (right side). First, we are getting a split between the percentages of visitors that landed on that page (the first page they saw on our website) and those that came from other internal pages on the site (and of course - the list of those page and the click percentages of those source pages for driving the traffic to this specific page).Then, we are getting a similar split for the those that left this page: the percentages of exists from our website from this page (if it's a content page and not the end of a conversion goal - why they did leave?) and for those that continue navigating our site - to which pages did they go (are those the pages we wish them to visit? are we missing a call to action to drive them down the conversion funnel from this page? is our navigation as good as we need it to be?).Clicking on each of the pages' links on the report will bring up the same report, this time for the page you just selected by clicking on its name: Google Analytics Navigation Summery2: Click for bigger image You can analyze each of the pages by clicking its name from the same report, or by following the steps all the way from the
Top Content
report and then on to the
Navigation Summery
, or you can chose your pages from the right-hand drop down that reads
Content
just below the presented graph. Click this drop down and select any of the pages that got visits during the analyzed period. The report will change as per the page you are selecting.But hold on, there is more (much more actually): you are further analyze the
flow
of the visit. Select the
Entrance Paths
report from the left-hand drop down below the graph. Now you are able to see more details on the visits that took place, originating in the page you are analyzing.Say that you have designed one of your funnels from the home page, to an information page on a service you are offering and then you wish to visitor to contact you (and you placed a nice big bold call to action for that). Is it working? Are you visitors following this path? This report should help you to see the flow of the visit. Google Analytics Entrance Paths: Click for bigger image This report is organized in following way: on the left side (read
This Page
) is the page you are analyzing (e.g. your home page). The table to the right of that image contains the list of the pages that the visitors visit following that page (same as shown in the Navigation Summery report). Only now we have another table to the right that shows us to which pages the visitors went after those 2 steps. Simply click on any of the pages on
Then viewed these pages:
table and the table of the right side will change to reflect the pages visited after those two steps. Starting to understand why I love those reports so much?To complete the review and analysis of our content and pages, let's check the last two reports that Google Analytics puts under a section named
Landing Page Optimization
(as it reads on the Content Detail page.The first one is the Entrance Sources report. Part of the analysis we wish to run on our pages contains the aspect of where did those visitors arrive from (externally)? This is what this report is for. Google Analytics Entrance Sources: Click for bigger image Similar to the Top Content report, this report presents the same parameters, only organized by the source from which the visitors arrive to this specific page. Combining this data with the previous analysis can show you if there is a difference in behavior by the source of the visit and take decisions accordingly.The last part has to do with the keywords that brought visitors to our pages and this is presented in the
Entrance Keywords
report. Same parameters but organized by the keywords that were the trigger to drive traffic to this page. Again, analyze to see if there is a difference in behavior and if you are getting traffic from the keywords this page should receive, some that you didn't think of, some that are irrelevant to this page, anything else? Google Analytics Entrance Keywords: Click for bigger image Remember once again to look at those reports (actually, look at all of your Google Analytics report) in a holistic way. You can find a lot of insight from a specific repot, but to get actionable insight and really understanding patterns and possible causes, cross-check different aspect and dimensions from the different reports. You will learn much more by following this approach.With a special expertise and focus on Web Analytics, WSI E-Services will be more than glad to help you analyzing your Google Analytics' content reports and helping you to take the right decisions for maximizing your online presence.