Measure Your Content Performance with Google Data Studio (template included)
Since the release of Google Data Studio this year, I am committed to migrating all my Marketing reports to the new Google product. The interface looks just awesome and it is pretty easy to combine different data sources from Analytics, Adwords, Sheets, or even your own database.
In this article, we will answer the most relevant questions about your content performance with a Google Data Studio report.
The goal is to create one single page that informs us about how our content is performing. In our report, we focus on answering the following questions:
- How are blog sessions trending?
- Which are the main blog sources?
- Which authors drive more traffic and leads?
- Which categories drive more traffic and leads?
- Which pages drive more traffic and leads?
- Which are the main blog referrals?
With these questions, we want to validate, if we are making progress towards our goals with our content marketing strategy. Our single page report should provide insights into our content performance and help us understand which authors and categories resonate the most with the readers.
In order to answer the questions about authors and categories, we need to first configure the content groupings in Google Analytics.
Configuring content groupings in Google Analytics
We have two options to configure our content groupings. We can group by tracking code, and we can group using rule definitions.
Grouping by tracking code (Authors)
When we group our content using this method, we need to update the blog’s code and push the ‘authorName’ variable to Google Analytics.
1.Create the content grouping ‘Authors’ and enable tracking code.
2. Update the Google Analytics Tag in Google Tag Manager
We need to add the content groups to our Google Analytics tag and create a new variable ‘{{authorName}}’.
Note: We MUST match the index number we chose in Google Analytics for the ‘Authors’ content grouping.
3. Update the blog’s code to push the ‘authorName’ variable to G.Analytics
We can send custom variables from our blog to Google Analytics using the Google Tag Manager Data Layer.
Note: We MUST push the variables values to the Data Layer before the Google Tag Manager script is loaded.
Create the Google Data Studio report
Now that we have all the information needed in Google Analytics, we can start building our content performance report with Google Data Studio.
One of the coolest things about Data Studio is that we can create our report once, and if we add the date filter, we can query by the date range selected.
We can structure our content performance report in five sections:
- Date filter
- Report title and data source
- Scorecards (single metrics like users, sessions, or pageviews)
- Trends and main sources
- Most performance authors, categories, and pages
Instead of going through the Google Data Studio interface and show you how to create the report, I shared this report template so you can make a copy, connect to your Google Analytics data source and play with the report based on your needs.
If you want to know which author, category or page is driving more leads or revenue, you can add the goal completions metric to each table.
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