Introducing Content Grouping in the Behavior Flow

Many of you have shared with us that it’s difficult to identify traffic patterns from Behavior Flows that include a large number of pages. That’s why we're pleased to announce that we’re adding support for Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow. 

Content Groupings let you group pages and content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site. The Behavior Flow view provides a graphical representation of how visitors flow through your site by traffic source (or any other dimension) so you can see their journeys, as well as where they dropped off. Now, you can select Content Groupings in the Behavior Flow to see how visitors flow through Content Groupings that you have defined.  This can help you answer questions like “Where do users who read my sports pages go next? Do they view more sports articles or do they switch to another section? Or, do they simply drop off?”

The more time you spend setting up your Content Groupings, the more information you will be able to discover from viewing them in the Behavior Flow. Watch the video to learn more about setting up Content Groupings.

Visit our Help Center to learn how to get started with Content Groupings, or read this article about using the Behavior Flow once you have set up your Content Groupings.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Matthew Anderson, Google Analytics Team

Wrangle Your Site Categories And Product Types With Content Grouping

Viewing your site content in logical groups is important for sites and businesses of all types. It lets you understand how different categories of products are working together and the buckets that generate the most revenue. Or, if you run a news site understand which categories are the hottest and most in demand. Some of you have been analyzing these things in the past via Advanced Segments but we want to make this even easier and more useful across the product. That’s why we’re excited to launch Content Grouping.

Content Grouping allows sites to group their pages through tracking code, a UI-based rules editor, and/or UI-based extraction rules. Once implemented, Content Groupings become a dimension of the content reports and allow users to visualize their data based on each group in addition to the other primary dimensions.

We’ve been hard at work refining Content Grouping based on tester feedback to create a simplified experience that has been unified with the familiar Channel Grouping interface. Content Grouping supports three methods for creating groups: 1) Tracking Code, 2) Rules, 3) Extraction. You can use a single method or a combination of all of them. 

This will help you wrangle those long lists of tens, hundreds or thousands of URLs, most of which have a tiny portion of the pageviews (or entrances, exits, etc) each one being individually not interesting, but together telling a meaningful story. We would like to help you grasp and represent this data in a grouped format, helping you understand the overall areas that the website owner has (e.g. “product pages”, “search pages”, “watch pages”).

Content Grouping lets you group content into a logical structure that reflects how you think about your site. You can view aggregated metrics by group name, and then drill in to individual URLs, page titles, or screen names. For example, you can see the aggregated number of pageviews for all pages in /Men/Shirts rather than for each URL or page title, and then drill in to see statistics for individual pages.

Watch the below video to learn more:

Be sure and visit our Help Center to learn how to get started with Content Grouping today.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Russell Ketchum, Google Analytics Team

Optimizing AdSense Revenue Using Google Analytics

Recently Google Analytics launched two important new capabilities for its AdSense integration: AdSense Exits reports and AdSense Revenue as an experiment objective. They both come as a great additions to websites that use AdSense for monetization. In this post I will go over the the AdSense Analytics integration and how it can be used to optimize AdSense revenue.

Integrating AdSense and Google Analytics

Before going further into the wonders of the Analytics AdSense marriage, you should first be sure that your accounts are linked properly. Here is how to do it. First follow the steps in the screenshot below after logging into Google Analytics (Admin => AdSense Linking => Link Accounts): 

AdSense and Analytics Integration (click for full size)

You will be sent to your AdSense account in order to confirm the linking and then you will be sent back to Google Analytics to choose which profiles should include this data. If you have any problems or additional questions, take a look at the AdSense Help Center. After the integration is complete the following metrics will be available on your Google Analytics account:

• AdSense revenue: revenue generated by AdSense ads.
• Ads clicked: the number of times AdSense ads were clicked.
• AdSense CTR (click-through rate): the percentage of page impressions that resulted in a click on an ad.
• AdSense eCPM: AdSense revenue per 1,000 page impressions.
• AdSense ads viewed: number of ads viewed.
• AdSense Page Impressions: the number of pageviews during which an ad was displayed.

AdSense Reports On Google Analytics

Currently, there are 3 out-of-the-box AdSense reports available on Analytics: Pages, Referrers and Exits. You can find them here (direct link to report).

1. AdSense Pages

This report provides information about which pages contributed most to AdSense revenue. It will show each of the pages on the website and how well they performed in terms of AdSense. For each page in the website that contains an AdSense unit we will be able to analyze the following metrics: AdSense revenue, AdSense ads clicked, AdSense CTR, AdSense eCPM, AdSense ads viewed and AdSense page impressions. 

This report provides an interesting view of which page performed best, and it can be used to optimize website content. For example, if you find that posts about celebrities generate more revenue than posts about soccer, you might consider writing more about celebrities (if your main objective is to make money on AdSense.)

2. AdSense Referrers

This report provides information about the performance of domains that referred visitors who generated AdSense revenue. This information is extremely valuable; however, I suggest using a different report, since it provides more in-depth information: “All Traffic”. 

The AdSense Referrers only displays information about websites that generated AdSense Revenue, it does not provide information on other types of traffic sources and campaigns. For this reason, I believe the All Traffic report presents a more complete view. To find the report, go to this page (direct link to report) and click on the AdSense tab just above the chart.

3. AdSense Exits

AdSense Exit report shows the number of sessions that ended due to a user clicking on an AdSense ad. This is an interesting metric as it can show which pages have a "high conversion rate", i.e. the ratio of visits to a page and those that left the website clicking on an AdSense unit through it. If your monetization is made through AdSense this report will give just that: AdSense conversion rate per page.

Optimizing AdSense revenue using Google Analytics

Below is an example of how to use the integration from my Analytics for Publishers eBook. Most websites work with templates and each template may have different AdSense placements; this means that an important analysis would be to compare performance by template (or by category) rather than by page. 

In order to analyze template performance, we will need to create one segment per template. If you want to learn more about creating Segments, check this Help Center article. For example, let’s suppose your website has the following page templates:

• Analytics pages with URLs structured as example.com/analytics/...
• Testing pages with URLs structured as example.com/testing/...
• Targeting pages with URLs structured as example.com/targeting/...

In this case you would create three segments using the dimension Page, each containing its unique pattern: /analytics/ for analytics pages, /testing/ for testing pages, and /targeting/ for targeting pages. Below is an example of how the segment would look for the analytics pages: 

Analyzing template performance using segments (click for full size) 

After creating the segments for all three templates, you will be able to choose all of them in the top-left corner of the screen (just above the chart, see bubble #1 above) to see a comparison between them. Below is a screenshot showing how such a comparison would look like: 

Table comparison metrics for different visitor segments (click for full size)

In the table above we are able to compare pages by all metrics available. For example, we can see that while the Analytics section has higher revenue, this is related to the number of impressions, which is also significantly higher. When we analyze further, we see that the Testing and Targeting sections have a good potential, with the same CTR but significantly higher AdSense eCPM. Based on these metrics we can understand which templates and content types are the most effective. 

As mentioned above, once you find out which pages are performing well and which pages are not, you can use Content Experiments to optimize them. Here is a Content Experiments guide.

Closing Thoughts

Here are a few takeaways for you to start optimizing today!

1. Understand which content type and subject generates the highest revenue and create content based on this data.
2. Understand which page templates bring the best results by using advanced segments.
3. Analyze AdSense performance to learn which segments have a good CTR; this might bring insight into which audience to target.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Google Analytics team

A dissenting view on the Yahoo - New York Times merger

The reactions to the New York Times - Yahoo merger announcement this morning were predictably brutal. "The best corporate merger since AOL-TimeWarner," TechCrunch wrote. On the radio this morning, one of the commentators talked about "the blind leading the crippled," and joked that they should both merge with General Motors so we could "get all the deadwood together in one place." The impromptu picketing of Yahoo headquarters by angry Flickr users probably didn't help.

I have a different take on the deal, though. After years of failed "new media" ventures based more on hope than synergy, I think this one might actually make business sense. Here's why:

No more paid content fantasies. The Times had been headed down the road toward making its content paid-only for anyone reading more than a few articles a month. In my opinion, this was a huge roll of the dice that could have destroyed the company's long-term prospects. The Times online edition is the most popular newspaper site in the US, and has been very gradually closing the gap with CNN, the US online news leader. Moving to a paid model would have cut the Times audience very substantially, leaving some other news operation to seize the number one position. As we know from other areas of the web, there are very strong network effects online. Once the Times surrendered the online traffic lead, I think its role as the newspaper of record in the US would have gradually been lost.

No more Yahoo search fantasies. Yahoo has had a terrible time deciding what sort of company it wants to be. For a long time it was supposed to be a "new media" company, which apparently meant it had the business practices of a film studio without the cool movie premieres. Many people in Silicon Valley still think of Yahoo as the failed Google wannabe, which is kind of like criticizing Sweden for failing to be Germany.

Unfortunately, Yahoo has been feeding that comparison lately with radio ads touting the benefits of Yahoo search. One was a scenario about a woman who was able to use search to find where a movie was playing, but not the actual showing times of the movies. Let's do a reality check, gang. Have you ever looked up a movie online? Do you know how hard it is to confirm where a movie is playing without also finding the showtimes? The effect of the ad is to position Yahoo as the search engine for stupid people.

And besides, it put the focus back on search, where Yahoo is destined to be an also-ran forever. The company shouldn't drop that business (it generates a lot of cash), but it's not the future engine of Yahoo's growth.

So, what is Yahoo's future? I think its biggest strength, what we used to call in business school its "core competence," is its ability to pair brand ads with content. Yahoo is world class in its ability to work with major brand advertisers to match their online ads with words and pictures that attract the people they want to target. It's not as sexy a business as search advertising (because the revenues and growth rates are not as good), but it's a real business and Yahoo does it better than anyone else I know of.

Yahoo's challenge, in my opinion, has been that not all of its content is top quality, so some of its sites are not as attractive to advertisers as they should be. In places where Yahoo has great content, such as Yahoo Finance, the engine seems to work very nicely. In other areas, Yahoo's content is very me-too, and so are the results.

The synergy. The New York Times' challenge is that it has great content but can't make the online audience large enough to pay for its huge editorial staff (the Times currently reaches 1.25 percent of global Internet users each day, according to Alexa). Yahoo's challenge is that it has huge reach (27% daily reach of global Internet users) but inconsistent quality. Pair the Times' outstanding content with Yahoo's reach and advertising expertise, and maybe you could make the world's most powerful online publisher.

Anyway, that's what the merger's going to test.

Next steps: Clear the decks. To make the merger work, both companies are going to need to focus on what they do best, which means paring away the other businesses they've added in the past as diversification experiments. In the NYT's case, that means letting go of a lot of other media properties the company has picked up over the years. There's going to be just one national news leader, not three, and it doesn't make sense to keep on paying full editorial staffs at several different places, many of them duplicating each others' work.

And at Yahoo, that means stepping back from being an internet conglomerate. Search is important as an on-ramp to quickly get eyeballs to the content of the new Yahoo, but it's not the long-term goal in itself. A friend at Yahoo told me the other day that a third of the company would probably quit if Yahoo decided to focus on publishing. My thought: that might be better than gradually bleeding the best and the brightest throughout the company as they lose faith in Yahoo's overall direction.

A human resources executive at Apple once listened to employees complaining about a reorganization, and then said, "when the caravan starts moving, the dogs all bark." It was a heartless comment, but he had a point. In that spirit, the picketing by Flickr users is probably a sign of healthy change.

Or it would be if any of this post were true. But it's April 1, and I'm indulging in a little bit of tech industry fantasy. In this case, though, I'd call it a dream.

Memories of past April Firsts:

The tech industry bailout (link)
iPhones worn as body piercings (link)
Spitr: Twitter meets telepathy (link)
Sprint and Google, a match made in Kansas (link)