SEO Shop Up – How Content Grouping Can Help You

Hey Friend,

Things might not always be as they seem. Just remember last time you saw an awesome piece of cake in anticipation of the best taste you’ve ever had… Just one look at its icing made your mouth water… But when you actually tried that desired piece, it was ‘meh’. #sosad

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That’s what often happens with numbers in Google Analytics: they might not show you the real picture if you don’t know at which angle to look at them. And in this SEO Shop Up issue, I’ll show you this very angle.

The answer is content grouping.

Why do you need to configure content grouping in your Google Analytics? For example, it will help you separate your blog traffic from the traffic to your money pages. Because if you look at the aggregated data, you might see a false picture.

Say, your blog is driving +60% of traffic YoY. But your money pages are experiencing a decrease of -30%. On an aggregated view, you’ll see a 30% increase in the overall traffic while in reality, it’s high time to look into the money pages performance closely.

Here’s how you set up Content grouping in GA:

Google Analytics Admin > View > Content Grouping:

Content Grouping

Choose the grouping option which works best for you. My favourite is the one by URL (the rules support RegEX!).

For online stores you can also create groups for different categories. For example, when I was working with a company selling Magento extensions, I separated Magento 1 and Magento 2 extensions to make sure all the visibility of the M1 extensions would be transferred to the M2 extensions when Magento announced sunsetting of M1. 

Here’s how a general breakdown by categories can look like in your online store reports:

Content grouping - Product categories

Note that the grouping is not retrospective, so you’ll see the data only after the grouping is applied. The rest will be (not set).  But you can use custom segments or custom reports to see a historical performance by category. 

Content grouping is one of the easiest things to do.  Yet it’s often missed. Hope this email was a good reminder for you!

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Let’s summarize:
If you look at the aggregated traffic numbers, there are so many ways how individual false wins can skew them. It’s important to slice the data to see the right picture,  and setting up content grouping is a great way to do it.