One of the metrics that I’ve discovered in Google Analytics recently allows measuring the effectiveness of different sections of your site. You probably heard people using the “content effectiveness”. Some people refer to this measure when talking about a report, which shows you the volumes of visits to each group of pages on your website (content groups in Webtrends).
Here’s an example of this type of a “content effectiveness” report
| Content Group | Visits |
|---|---|
| Products | 1000 |
| Categories | 150 |
| Product Reviews | 5200 |
From looking at the table above you might think that it is important to invest in Product reviews and that Categories are not performing well. Does these numbers really tell you how effective your content is or is it just an indicator of where most of your visitors go?
The information that is missing in that report is the number of URLs. In order to calculate the effectiveness of your content you need to divide the number of visits by the number of URLs within this content group or site directory.
Content Effectiveness = Visits to a content group / URLs within this content group
The same table with this additional column and the Content Effectiveness metric added would look like this.
| Content Group | Visits | URLs | Content Effectiveness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Products | 1000 | 400 | 2.5 |
| Categories | 150 | 5 | 30 |
| Product Reviews | 5200 | 3000 | 1.73 |
So now you can tell that the Categories are actually giving you 30 visits per URL, whereas products only 2.5. This might be due to the fact that you are driving most of your paid traffic to the category level pages but it might also mean that your product level pages are not optimised.
This is probably one of the most powerful metrics that you can use to find out what pages you should focus on and which pages are not worth your time.