Tackling the basics of Web Analytics: Measuring content consumption
This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
In this series I have been looking at some of the basics of setting up a web analytics programme. Often when organisations come unstuck with getting their web analytics programme working effectively it’s because of issues around planning and processes rather than the technology itself. Last time I looked at campaign tracking and this week it’s the turn of understanding content consumption.
Typically when web analytics systems are deployed “out of the box” the reporting of what content is being looked at is at the page level. We are all familiar with reports such as the “Top Pages” report which shows which were the most popular pages on the website, but the problem with these types of reports is that they rarely change and from looking at these reports it’s difficult to understand overall patterns of content consumption. The data is too granular. Often it’s more useful to know what types of content are being consumed the most (or the least) rather than which individual pages.
The solution to this problem is to assign pages into “Content Groups”. A content group will represent pages that have something in common. For example, all news items might belong to a content group called “News” and there may also be sub-groups or a hierarchy such as “News: Domestic, News: International” for example. Once all the pages are assigned to the various content groups, it’s possible to take a look at how many people looked at a group of content, how long they looked at it, where they came from to reach that content and where they went to afterwards. For sites that are content reach and maybe don’t have much transactional activity, this is more useful and more important.
Content grouping is fine in theory but how does it work in practice? Different web analytics systems tackle content grouping in different ways and some have more flexibility than others. If you are looking at different systems, this might be relevant to your decision making. Content grouping in some systems is dependent on the URL and folder structure and is usually fixed in the reporting interface. Google Analytics has an example of this approach where it is possible to use the Content Drilldown report to look at content consumption at each level in the folder structure. This approach can work well for sites where the content is organised with a neat folder structure but for many sites this isn’t the case and a different approach is required.
An alterative approach to content grouping is to assign pages to groups in the data collection tag. This approach is more flexible. Content groups can be defined independently from the folder structure of the website and in some cases a different hierarchy can be developed as well. Pages can then be assigned to content groups by customising the page tag. But flexibility comes at a cost and that cost is in development and maintenance.
First of all at the point of implementation, a plan is needed of what the content group structure is going to look like and how it is going to be implemented. For a large site with lots of content, this can be quite a significant exercise and require a good deal of planning. It’s also something that needs to be considered for site refreshes or rebuilds. The implementation approach will depend on the technology behind the site such as the content management system being used but ideally there will be some rules based approach which will help with the ease of implementation. At the end of the day there may be trade offs that need to be made between what the content groupings might look like in an ideal world and those that can be achieved in practice.
After implementation there is also the matter of maintenance. Most sites are dynamic in the sense that content is regularly being updated and changed. Pages are added, changed or deleted. In order to maintain the integrity of the data processes will need to be put in place to ensure that as pages or sections of content are added that the content grouping is managed at the same time. So, it needs to be worked out who is going to own the process, who’s going to manage it and who’s going to be responsible for doing it.
As with campaign tracking (which I looked at last time) the success of measuring content consumption on the website is not just down to what technology you’ve got but also down the planning skills and the maintenance resources that you put behind it.