Welcome to Edition No. 24 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Highlights from Friday’s updates:
GA4 Finally Adds These Important Features
Kids These Days Don’t Use Google (As Much)
TikTok, YouTube and Screen Time
Reminder: I’m on vacation this week and there will be no Friday edition of the newsletter.
Contents
I. Tip: Find Your Most Popular Content via GA4
II. Analysis: The 15MB HTML Crawl Controversy, Explained
Tip: Find Your Most Popular Content via GA4
Depending on how you want to define it, I’m going to show you how to find your most popular content in Google Analtyics 4.
Start by going to Reports > Pages and Screens and scroll to the bottom of the page.
You should see something like this:
“Pages” refer to website page_view events triggered and “screens” refer to mobile app (not mobile browser) screen_view events triggered.
If you have both an app and a website, the data is combined in this table.
e.g. Views are page_views + screen_views. If you have a news app that mirrors your website, views to the same story across your app + your website will be added together in this stat.
You should see (about) nine different columns. Scroll to the right to see more than what’s visible in the screenshot.
While you can decide for yourself how to sort the columns, these three are my favorites. Simply click the column header to filter any one of these in descending order.
Views
What are they? This is how many times the page_view and screen_view events were triggered. In other words, this is the number of times the page was visited in the selected time period.
Why do they matter? This is all about eyeballs. If your top measure of popularity is how many times someone saw a piece of content, analyze by views.
Conversions
What are they? The number of times an event you marked as a conversion was triggered on a particular page/screen. (Remember, conversions in GA4 are the equivalent of goals in UA.)
If you haven’t set up conversions in your GA4 dashboard, it’s super easy once you have the Event in place.
Why do they matter? Your Conversion Events should be those that are most important to your bottom line. Purchases, sign-ups, etc.
If you have a “money page” with just a few hundred views, but dozens of conversions, that content is worth much more than something seen thousands of times with single-digit conversions of the same value.
Average Engagement Time
What are they? How long someone was “active” on your site/app. That is, the amount of time your website/app was on the foreground of their screen, averaged across all users for that particular piece of content.
Why do they matter? This is a great indication of whether people are finding what they want when they come to your content.
The longer someone is spending on a page/screen, the more likely it is that they found your content useful.
Bonus tip: Sort these columns in descending order to see your least popular content.
Keep in mind:
💡 This list will include all pages and screens. If you’re only interested in articles/posts, try filtering them using the data table’s search box. Enter “/blog” or something similar that might be consistent across all URLs.
💡 Depending on the time range, older articles will usually have more views than newer ones. And engagement time will be lower for short pieces of content vs. something that’s long-form. As the master of your domain, these are things you know best and of which you must be aware as you analyze.
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: The 15MB HTML Crawl Controversy, Explained
A few weeks back, Google updated its Googlebot documentation with information that scared a lot of SEOs.
(For the uninitiated, Googlebot is the name of the “spider” that crawls web pages and helps determine how to rank websites in Google’s SERP.)
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