Welcome! On this blog you'll find posts on nonprofit online communications, being a millennial in the work world, and more. “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Using Google Analytics to measure blog post popularity.
Mary, one of great people who help bring us the Live United Blog of the Greater Twin Cities United Way, asks how you can use Google Analytics to compare the popularity of blog posts on a WordPress blog using Google Analytics. With this entry I’m going to show you how to find which individual post pages are being visited most frequently, and then we’ll look at using filters, and setting up a custom report for blog entries so that you can view them more easily in your Google Analytics dashboard.
Mary and I are both using independently hosted WordPress blogs to publish our sites. Independent hosting allows us to use Google Analytics. For more on setting up GA for your WordPress blog, check out this post.
“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Using the content report to see which posts are winning the popularity contest on your site.
To see how often any individual entry page on your site is being viewed, and how that page’s visits stack up relative to the rest of your posts, navigate to the Content Report tab in your GA dashboard. Log in and navigate to the dashboard for the site that you’d like to look at, then in the navigation on the left hand side of the page, select “Content” and then in the menu that pops up below, select “Top Content.”
On the Top Content page, you’ll see a graph depicting the number of pageviews on your site, a number of stats that tell you about your average overall content performance, and finally a table that shows you the performance of each page on your site. Now, it’s important to note that some of the attention paid to individual posts will forever be lumped into the traffic that goes straight to your blog’s homepage.
In other words, if I read Mary’s blog, and I go straight to liveunitedblog.org and read only the posts that are on that page, Mary will never know that I paid particular attention to Dave Ellis’ blog on domestic violence because Google Analytics will register my view as a view to the index page on her site (which, by the way, shows up listed as “/” in your Top Content report. It will likely be at the top of your list.)
However, she can monitor traffic that goes to individual post pages. So, those posts that are viewed more because they contain search terms that people are interested in, or because someone has tweeted about it or forwarded it to a friend, for example, will over time have more instances where someone lands on the individual post’s page.
That post’s popularity will be reflected in the Top Content report by the number of pageviews the post gets, and to some extent how long viewers spend reading the post. Now the Top Content report by default puts all pages on your site, regardless of the type of page it is (like an “about” page, for instance), into the default report. This may pose a challenge if you’d like to view quickly and easily only those pages that are posts.
Using filters and setting up a custom report to zero in on your posts
Here’s how you can filter for posts within the Top Content report, and then save those filters in a Custom Report for quick viewing in the future. First, on the Top Content page, you’ll notice that in the footer of the table, there’s a field that says “Filter Page”. What this search field allows you to do is tell GA to display or exclude pages with URL’s that contain the terms that you put in the field.
Now, Mary’s blog, like mine, assigns URL’s or web addresses to blog posts based on when the post was published. So if you wanted to have a quick view of all posts from the year 2010 — you could do this by entering “2010″ in the filter page field. The default action selected should be “contains”, which is what we’d like to filter for, so leave that as-is.
Hit “Go”, and you will see all posts that were posted in 2010. If you have your blog set up to tag outgoing links, you may still have some filtering to do. To remove links to outside sites, add a new condition to your search by selecting “Advanced Filter”, and selecting “Page”. Set the filter action to “exclude” this time, enter the word “outgoing” and then hit “Apply Filter”.
To save this filter set up for future use, navigate up to the top of the page and select “Add to Dashboard”. If you navigate to your dashboard now, you’ll see the new report that you created as the last block of information displayed on the page.
So that’s how you can view the popularity of individual posts on your WordPress site. However, if your blog has an RSS feed (which WordPress does by default) — you’re still not seeing the whole picture.
In a future post we’ll take a look at how you can use the EventTracking feature or alternatively a product called FeedBurner, another free Google goody, to track the activity of users who are viewing your content via their RSS feed, or, in the case of FeedBurner, via email subscription.
[...] Cary Lenore Walski, too, looks at Google Analytics [...]