For this one-pager and other free B2B Marketing best practice downloads go to http://brainrider.info Google Analytics is a powerful but underused web analytics tool. It does a great job of collecting anonymous data about traffic to you website including: visitor data, session data, and page data. But getting real insight about content engagement requires customization of your site & Google Analytics.

1.
Customizing Google Analytics To Track Content Engagement
Google Analytics is a powerful but underused web analytics tool. It does a great job of collecting
anonymous data about traffic to you website including: visitor data, session data, and page data. But
getting real insight about content engagement requires customization of your site & Google Analytics.
Here are 4 steps to using Google Analytics to track content engagement:
The right Data is just data. It takes the right questions to get insight out of your data. We recommend starting
questions with two questions: 1.What topics are most engaging? 2. What content categories are most engaging?
In order to capture relevant content data you need to structure your site to pass that data to Google
Setup your Analytics through the structure of your url’s or by using custom variables. Structuring your site URL’s is
the simplest method to implement for tracking site section, category, and asset name. For example you
site to pass
can structure your url’s to pass the content category data as well as asset name in a structure like this:
content data www.website.com/site_section/category/page_name
to Google Custom variables offer more flexibility and allow tracking for up to 5 variables. Custom variables are
coded on your site in a structure like this and can often be automatically set with a plug‐in if you are
Analytics using a CMS:
_setCustomVar(index, name, value, opt_scope)
Advanced segments are a Google Analytics feature that allows you to choose what types of visits you
want to be considered when generating the data for a report. If you are passing category data to Google
Use advanced Analytics you can create an Advanced segment for each content category you want to analyse. Here is
segments an example of an advanced segment query for a content category where the category data is passed in
the URL structure:
extract Visitors looking at CATEGORY: PAGE contains “/resources/CATEGORY”
category data Here is an example of an advanced segment query for a specific content category where the category
data is passed in the custom variable:
Visitors looking at CATEGORY: Custom Variable (Value 1) contains “CATEGORY”
Topic analysis: select all visits or specific advanced segments for the content categories you want to
analyse and then look at the Google Analytics “Top Content” report to track engagement by topic. This
report gives you a ranked listing of your total site content measured by page views and that page’s % of
the total number of page views on your site that occurred over the time period. Compare the ranking for
How to topic pages.
analyse your Category analysis: select the advanced segments for the content categories you want to analyse and
data then look at Google Analytics “Site Usage” report to track engagement by category. Start with these two
data points:
 Categories with more visits are more engaging
 Categories with higher page views/visitor have visitors that are more engaged across your
whole site
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