In my last blog post, we discussed how to best analyse A/B test data in Google Analytics. In this one, I want to talk about Content Groupings and how you can use them to optimise your website.

Content Groupings in Google Analytics help you organise webpages into a logical structure. Instead of analysing pages individually, you can look at their aggregated performance data and draw better insights.

For example, let’s say you have 34 pages under the category ‘Women’s Footwear’, and you want to view the performance of this whole set. You can achieve this by creating a Content Group titled ‘Women’s Footwear’, instead of having to manually work with filters every time you want to see the numbers.

Is it groups or groupings? The terms are slightly confusing. While Content Groups are a collection of pages, Content Grouping is a collection of groups.

I’ll not get into how to set up Content Groupings—here are some helpful set-up guides for that:

1. How to set up Content Grouping directly in Google Analytics

2. How to set up Content Grouping using Google Tag Manager

4 Tips on Setting Up Content Groupings in Google Analytics

1. Test your groupings in a ‘test view’ in GA before applying to your main view, to make sure they are set up correctly.
2. You can set up to 5 Content Groupings: create one top-level grouping and then other detailed-view groupings for in-depth analysis.

For example, you can group product pages into women’s, men’s or kids’ OR category pages into bikes, clothing, and accessories.

For an eCommerce site a top-level grouping might be:

• Homepage
• Category Pages
• Product Pages
• Basket
• Checkout
• Order Confirmation
• Content Pages

For a lead generation website, you can group by services.

3. Remember, when you add new content to the website, check whether you need to update your Content Grouping rules. Otherwise, all items without any applicable rules will go into the ‘(not set)’ group.
4. Create advanced segments using the content groups. You can then analyse the performance of users who visited certain pages (see image below) using your key metrics.

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4 Kinds of Reports Using Content Groupings for Better Website Optimisation

1. All Pages Report (Behaviour –> Site Content –> All Pages)

You can check which section of the website receives the most page views, entrances, exit rates, etc. and determine what content group performs best on your website and which needs to be improved.

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2. Landing Page report

This is a very valuable report. Not only can you see what type of page serves as the starting point for most user journeys, but you can also see what pages contribute to the overall conversion rate. This gives you insights on which journey starting point needs optimising. By knowing where most users arrive (in most cases not the homepage) you can ensure they see your key selling points at the first interaction.

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3. Behaviour flow (Behaviour -> Behaviour Flow)

With this report you can look at the start of the user journey by traffic type or other dimensions. Choose the dimensions from the drop-down list at the top left corner of the page (see below).

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4. Custom reports

You can run a multidimensional report and analyse landing pages together with traffic medium data, device or user type.

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Do new and returning visitors arrive on your website in the same way? Does the user journey change depending on the device they’re using?

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Happy analysing

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