Have a looming blogging deadline? Don’t know what to write? Coming up with content ideas is easier than you think. Coming up with a blog post topic doesn’t need to mean waiting for or making your own inspiration. Instead, make your life a little easier by giving your readers exactly what they want.
How do you do that, exactly? You can use your site’s data to help you make content decisions for your blog. By digging into Google Analytics or WordPress Analytics, you can see what posts and pages have been most successful in attracting visitors from various sources.
This month, we’ve learned about setting up goals in Google Analytics as well as what metrics to follow to measure your blog’s performance. Now we’ll start digging in to see how we can turn this data from basic information to interesting insights.
Landing Pages
We’ll be looking at the Landing Pages view in Google Analytics to determine what pages visitors are entering your site on, how they’re behaving once they arrive on your site, and a little more about what visitors you’re attracting with your posts.
First, you’ll need to log in to Google Analytics. I changed the date range to include every day since our blog launched:
Next, navigate to the Landing Page view under Behavior > Site Content:
From this view, we can see which pages and posts drove the most visitors, which were most popular for new vs. returning visitors, and if visitors continue to other posts after landing on a page:
Acquisition
Sessions. Which pages drove the most sessions (visits) to your site? If you use categories in your URL structure, what categories are the most popular? From our top 10 traffic-driving posts, you can see that our content and social media posts are generally drive the most visits.
% New Sessions & New Users. Which pages drove the most new visitors? What was different about those posts? What was the title? How was it promoted? What day of the week did you publish it on? This column can help you determine the best topics to grow your audience. When you have a new blog, the % new sessions will be close to 100% for all pages. However, after a couple months, you can start to see what posts, tags, and categories are most alluring to new visitors.
Behavior
Bounce Rate & Pages / Session. A “bounce” is a visitor that comes to your blog and leaves after viewing a single page. A low bounce rate means that visitors are clicking through to additional posts and pages. Another way of thinking about this is that you are engaging your visitors and your posts are enticing them to keep reading your blog – certainly a good thing!
A high bounce rate can mean one of two things: visitors did not find what they were looking for when they landed on that page, or that they read your post, were satisfied, and then moved on. You’ll likely find that more recent posts have a higher bounce rate as visitors will generally read your latest post and then move on to the next blog.
Average Session Duration. Average Session Duration is a great indicator of how engaged visitors are with your site. If the average session duration for a post is <1 minute, readers likely aren’t fully engaged with your post. You can see which posts drew readers in the longest in this column.
Now that you are armed with the knowledge of what posts your readers enjoy, now you can brainstorm for your next post a bit more effectively. Do you have other methods for determining what to write about? Let us know in the comments!
Want more? Next week, Dana will walk you through how to most effectively promote your posts based on Google Analytics data. At the end of the month, Phill will show you how to learn more about your readers based on Google Analytics data.
