Presented live on Tuesday, October 20, 2020
Attend our live tutorialsThere’s a one-stop way to see things like the volume of traffic your blog categories are actually attracting so you can prove the value of your content efforts at a more segmented level…
That way is called “content grouping.”
And according to Jill Quick – today’s Tutorial Tuesdays expert instructor – content grouping is one of the most underused tools in Google Analytics (GA).
Which is a tragedy.
Because it’s so amazing for bloggers and content creators.
In this Tutorial:
Content Grouping in Google Analytics
- Where to find content grouping
- How to set up content grouping
- How to use content grouping
- How to apply content grouping to historical data
Basically, the oh-so-great Jill Quick will show you everything you need to know about content grouping to get GA to tell you more useful things faster.
There’s a one-stop way to see things like the volume of traffic your blog categories are actually attracting so you can prove the value of your content efforts at a more segmented level…
That way is called “content grouping.”
And according to Jill Quick – today’s Tutorial Tuesdays expert instructor – content grouping is one of the most underused tools in Google Analytics (GA).
Which is a tragedy.
Because it’s so amazing for bloggers and content creators.
In this Tutorial:
Content Grouping in Google Analytics
- Where to find content grouping
- How to set up content grouping
- How to use content grouping
- How to apply content grouping to historical data
Basically, the oh-so-great Jill Quick will show you everything you need to know about content grouping to get GA to tell you more useful things faster.
Transcript
Introduction [00:00]
Joanna Wiebe: In today’s session, a 20 minute tutorial with Jill Quick on content grouping.
Jill Quick: Hello. Welcom, optimal vibes coming from me and lovely Greater London in what is turning out to be a shocker of a year in 2020 but I’m going to cheer you all up, hopefully with as Jo pointed out in her, again, fantastic use of GIFs.
Joanna Wiebe: There were a lot of GIFs today
What to Expect in This Tutorial [00:38]
Jill Quick: I love the gift game. And content groupings and so yeah content groupings. What are they? Why you should love them. Why they maybe do some things that you didn’t know they could do with them. I’m going to turn all that around and the next 20 minutes.
So, and I can see the chat in the corner now. Quick question to all of you, which I’m hoping you’re all going to move towards my way of thinking. Instead of logging into Google Analytics and thinking, I wonder how my beautifully written copy is going across the entire website and all the stuff that I’m working on.
Wouldn’t it be really nice if you could answer questions like, how many people are visiting the blog , as in all of the blogs, or all of your case study pages, or all your product pages, or maybe a brand page. That would be really useful to just have the answer like that. But unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.
So let’s set the scene. You could manually count up all of those URLs and we’re going to show you some scary pages as to how this actually looks. But to be honest, counting these up manually is a complete pain in the bottom. And we want to avoid witchcraft in Excel. So if I have some confetti. I would throw it in the air because content groupings are where you can really power up your analysis.
Why Should You Use Content Groupings in Google Analytics? [01:54]
So setting the scene for all of you wonderful copywriters out there. It is a sunny day you’ve logged into Google Analytics. The sun is behind you and you think I’m going to go over to my behavior or pages report, and I’m going to see what’s happening. But that frown you have turns into a bit of a sad face because on the right hand side. When you see how many rows of data you have for your wonderful website. Oh, my good lord is 52,505 pages for this particular website.
And okay, that is a that is a lot of work, but your boss is still saying, so how is the blog doing, plural, like the whole lot. How are the case studies going? And you’re going, sweet Mary, Jesus, Joseph. I don’t know how I’m going to be doing this. Now all you wanted to do was shuffle through this report and see what’s going to happen. And this is where content groupings can really help you.
Now I’m showing you some of this with the Google demo account. Ange is going to post out that link in a second. But really, the concept of content groupings. Imagine your website is a physical
place, like it’s a physical room. And all of the website pages that you are writing, all physical pages, and as you open the front door and you go into your room, the room is completely littered everywhere on the floor. It’s a mess. There’s pieces of paper everywhere. And you’re thinking, I just want to understand like my case study pages, my blog pages, that kind of thing.
Imagine if you had something like this thing that’s going on on TikTok, and Instagram, where people click and like everything gets clean and I’m like, mine doesn’t work when I’m at home.
Imagine having that room with all of those pages and you click your fingers, and all of those pages get sucked up into their own special little account.
Somebody just noted that, yes, my account has been suspended. Use @coloringin, that has not been suspended. Funny story at the end as to how that happened and how anyway.
And when we go into our content groupings, it will do that magic Mary Poppins wonderfulness thing so that you can pull together all of that information. So this is the Google demo account again 50,000 pages.
How to Find Content Grouping in Google Analytics? [04:07]
If I go to site >> content >> all pages >> content grouping, If you have them created it will show up. If you don’t have anything here, people don’t worry, it just means you haven’t got it created yet.
But if I click on this link, there’ll be a drop down, the demo account has three content groupings. You are allowed five content groupings per reporting view, which is more than enough to get you started.
Now the use case here for the Google demo account is brand, so they can look at all of their content pages, specifically by, is it Google? Is it Android? Is it YouTube? They can look by product and they can look by categories.
So if I click on the product, instead of looking at a gazillion pages, I can go wow apparel has 23% of all of the page views this month. Hooray. And if I click on that little link. It’s going to open up all of the URLs that belong in that particular filing content cabinet, grouping dream wonderfulness, so that you can go in and actually understand what is happening.
Which I think is pretty cool. Now because Google Analytics is a computer program, it’s not retroactive. So when you create these, they don’t go back in time and regroup all of your content. But you can hang around till the end, I have got a workaround that can be applied to historical data. So do stick around to the end of that.
How to Set Up Content Grouping in Google Analytics [05:34]
Now, when it comes to what you can create so hopefully you’re all sold on the idea of Yes, Jill, this would be incredibly useful to log in and actually categorize all of my content. You have to tell Google what the rules are.
Suggested Content Grouping Categories
- Website Navigation
- Products
- Brands
- Content by Stage of Awareness
- Content by Type
So my kind of go to process on how I do this because you can have five per content groupings. My first one is always website navigation, so I can have a number of groups to say if the page is forward slash, that’s the homepage. If it starts with blog, it’s the blog. These are the service pages, the information pages, the about us page, that kind of thing.
So I can have a high level view of my actual website as a structure. And then depending on what you want to see, what is good for you, because everybody’s different. You do you in this world. But if it would be useful for you to understand how your products are working, or how your brands are working, or maybe content by stages of awareness. If you know that that particular content that you’ve written, has been written for a particular stage in the customer journey, then this is where you would come to structure them.
Getting Started [06:49]
Now, the way that I do it, post it notes. It might not seem like a thing, but post-it notes.Throw your website up on your computer, get your post-it notes and literally work through and think, How could my website be better grouped, so I can understand what’s happening with my content?
And I’ll go, right there’s one for home page. I need the home page. We’ve got a load of case studies, so I want to group the case studies. I’ve got loads of apparel, I want to group the apparel. And you just work through with your post it notes. So if you’re used to user Experience card sorting kind of activities. It’s a little bit like that. And the nice thing about post-it notes is if you get something wrong, you can just throw it away and start again. But you get your kind of high level view with your post it notes.
Understanding Your URLs [07:33]
And then to make life easier, I will use something like Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl and I will crawl my website for the sole purpose that I can export this document in an Excel document or a Google Sheet, in this instance. And then I just apply a little filter to say, Please show me all of my URLs in alphabetical order.
And that’s going to show me the website structure because let’s face it, we all love our websites like we do. We know our websites very well. If somebody says they don’t like my website. It’s like saying I have an ugly baby. I take it quite personally because we spend so much time actually making our websites work.
But you might forget some of the pages that you have on your website. So by crawling the website using a tool like Screaming Frog, which is free for the first 500 URLs. So if you haven’t got a massive website this is pretty cheap to do. And if you pay for Screaming Frog. I think it’s like $120. It’s not a big deal.
But you’ll export it as an Excel document and then I go back to my post-it notes and go, oh, yes, I want to have categories by product and I can look at this URL structure and go right if the URL contains the word accessories, then it goes in the accessories pot. If the page contains the word Google, it’s going to be in the Google pot, and rinse and repeat.
Now when you’ve done this, it’s a case of understanding how to tell Google what this particular rule set is. Now the most common one is the rules. If the page contains “about us” or if it starts with blog. It’s a blog. If you have a page that is or website rather that is pretty big, like the Google merchandise store, ecommerce people, you’ll probably feel the pain for this.
You might need to use something called regular expression which is just going to basically a bit of spooky code to go, if the page contains projects dresses, then it’s as a dress. Tracking code. I never see anybody using tracking code, but it does what it says on the tin. You pop a bit of code on the website and it does it for you.
So this is what it looks like when you’re in your view settings. So, provided you have the correct admin access to go into your view settings. And if you saw my last Tutorial Tuesday’s where we talked about test views.
Testing Out Content Groupings [09:50]
You should always do things in your test view because if you break it and it doesn’t matter because it’s the test view. So it’s a little bit like when you’re creating a web page and your staging environment. And then when you’re ready to go live, you go live. You can do the same in Analytics. You have a test view to say, just going to play around with a few things. And when you are ready for it to be published, you then roll it over.
So go into your test view, go into content grouping and then you’re going to see something that looks like this. We click on the little red button and then we’re going to go through the rulebook. Now the hard work comes from the post-it note workings out and then understanding your URL structure.
Now, in terms of time, if you have a relatively small website, you’re probably talking maybe two hours, something like that. If you’ve got a rather large website. We’re talking enterprise grade, you’re going to spend the day doing this but I promise you it is going to be worth it. Because once you create them, you can wash your hands and it’s done. You only have to review your content groupings. If you dramatically changed your URL website structure.
So, here you have to tell Google in the ruleset what you want to call the folder about us and how are we going to define what goes into this particular content group and you’ll start with your rules which you can use from Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl and say, if the page and then you don’t do do definition.
So, “exactly matches content.” And also, in this instance, I’ve said all the page starts with digital marketing trainers. Click done and then from now and forever. Everything’s going to be categorized in that particular grouping.
Now for me, this takes like 15 minutes or something like that. It does not take long to build this. The hard work happens with the grouping of it. Now when it comes to content groupings. Here’s another use case that I just don’t see people using it and it’s just so, so good.
Secondary Dimensions and Segments [11:57]
As well as having your content groupings and you’re all pages report, you can use them as secondary dimensions and segments. I’m going to show you some use cases as to why that is really impressive.
Imagine having a look at your acquisition report. So, how people find your website. And then I’m having a look at the medium. So the big broad buckets, traffic that comes from SEO, traffic that comes from Facebook or social media, that kind of thing.
And instead of just adding a secondary dimension to say and what landing page did they land on? Which is a common use case in this report. You’re going to get the same problem as the behavior all pages report. You’re going to have 52,000 rows of data because it’s going to record the page of that user and their session at the time that they arrived on your website.
Or you can add a secondary dimension and in this instance, we’ve got the brand. I can get a good high level viewpoint as to the marketing channels that are coming to my website. What content as a group are they looking at.
So as a snapshot here I can see the SEO is really good at driving brands like any products or pages that have to do with Google. It’s driving a lot there, Referral Android. I can dig into this. I want to understand what’s happening. Is that the content we want it to be driving from these particular marketing channels?
And then when we’re thinking about segmentation. I know that this is a common part of the Copyhacker process because I am an honorary member of Copy School. It is amazing. And you should all be doing it.
Joanna will always talk about the stage of awareness. She’ll be talking about understanding your users. And you can use your data from Google Analytics, but you need the qualitative and quantitative together. I love analytics, like, obviously. However, the numbers don’t tell me the full picture, but it can be a really good starting point for a hypothesis.
So in this example, I could say, I wonder what our users are in terms of the audience for particular sections of my website. So let’s say I wanted to understand the users that are reading our apparel, bags, accessories and drinkware. Or I could just say the users that just go to any blog.
Build that segment and then apply that segment to your audience to understand where are they from? How old are they? What are they? Cities they’re coming from? What marketing channels are bringing them to me? That is really good information when you’re starting your Copyhacker journey to understand more about who is coming to your website and how you should be writing to them. Obviously not gospel. You still have to talk to your customers, but it’s a fabulous way to start the process.
Applying Content Groupings to Historical Data [14:36]
Now the kind of trick that I’m going to share with you now is that with Google Analytics, as I keep banging the same drum, it’s not retroactive. So you’ll apply your content groupings, you have a little bit of a dance. And then you’re like, oh balls, it hasn’t gone through the historical data.
I had this exact problem because there’s so many accounts that I audit and people that I train with and I’m sad for them because I’m like, if I only had content grouping. And then I was chatting at a conference where Jerry white from Rise at Seven. And he said, You do know you can apply it to Data Studio as a calculated field. And I was like, say what now? You can apply content grouping to historical data.
I was like, shut the door. I cannot believe this. So this is a use case for a client of mine. I’ve got really he knows. I’ve just realized I’m constantly touching my nose is just like, This is what happens when you do things in public, isn’t it. Yeah.
This was a client and I like to call this the content Stegosaurus of death, or I was doing training for an entire content team for a very well known global brand, hence redacting all of their information, so I don’t get sued.
And this, this was a massive company, the whole content team’s there, from Europe. And I was like, who does this stegosaurus belong to which brand does this belong to, because I created a
calculated field using the exact same rules that I applied to my content groupings. So this work that you do travels over to Data Studio.
So I did the rule. If it starts with water, it’s a water brand. If it starts with flamingo, it’s the flamingo drink, and so on and so forth. And this girl put a hand and commented, Yeah, that’s me. I’m like, Girl, what were you doing because the other brand, the hero Brown is somewhere stuck in the bottom.
And you are just flying. What was happening? She’s like, I was doing loads of content mostly on Instagram, writing loads of articles pushing on the website. But when it came to renewing our budget at the end of the year, I couldn’t say to my boss all of my water pages are getting lots of sessions and new sessions and page views and doing stuff. When we showed them this, they were immediately like, oh yes. So that’s working.
Can we not have an extinct dinosaur. Can we bring it back to the table? She got a budget back. Now. for the rest of the team, It was like, what she’s doing. Go talk to her because she was flying. If only she had that data at that time. So it’s really, really useful. Now you’re probably thinking, okay, Jill, I understand the content grouping. I get the rules. I understand calculated fields.
What? There’s a lady called Kiya Street who has written a fabulous blog post at Sierra Interactive She’s gone and saved you a whole day to do this. I’m pretty sure if I asked my eight year old and he’s pretty good when it comes to logic, he would be able to do this.
On that blog post, you’ll find a link and on the secret link is a Google Sheet and all you have to do is fill out the row on the left and go. If the page starts with about, please call it about. If it starts with contact, it’s contact. And then row C, it does the magic, magic witchcraft. All you have to do is copy row C and add it into Data Studio. She’s got a whole load of stuff on that blog post on how to actually build it.
But it’s done. Like, once you’ve gone through her blog post, you are done. I was spending at least a day working out the calculated fields. And then, again, it’s one of those things where somebody shows you something. So I’m sharing it all with you. It’s my gift to you. And do hat tip Kia.
This is a fabulous document. It means that you can apply it to your historical data which is very, very, very, very valuable. So, running it on time now. Shameless plug for myself, if you think, well, that’s really interesting, Jill. And I could kind of do with knowing a little bit more about Google Analytics. I have a whole Google Analytics course which the Copyhackers team have also enjoyed and devoured. Ange went through it at phenomenal speed.
It’s basically 10 years of my brain boiled down with a gazillion templates and explainers to help you get there. Module seven in particular, I go through content groupings and how to create them. I go through a live demo account. And I think I put the link in for where it is on Udemy. You can pretty much get it for a steal Udemy to be honest, there’s no excuse, really, to not be using content grouping. And with this, I will pause for a wee memento.
Joanna Wiebe: Jill, thank you so much.
Jill Quick: Thank you for having me again.
Joanna Wiebe: Yes, it’s amazing. Thank you, hopefully we get to bring you back in the future too.
Jill Quick: Yes! Thinking of ideas.
Joanna Wiebe: Excellent. Yay. And thanks everybody for attending today. We will see you in our next tutorial Tuesday’s next week. Thanks. Thanks, Jill. Thanks, Ange. Bye.
