3 Custom Google Analytics Engagement Reports for Travel Bloggers

Blog marketing is data driven. You should be analysing your web analytics a few times per week to assess your site’s strengths and focusing your energy on maximising your desired outcomes.

Google Analytics is awesome; the development team has been rolling out excellent features in the past few months. Unfortunately, for those new to the platform, it might be confusing. Here are some custom reports to assist you with analysing your data.

These reports are purely focused on analysing the engagement of your website visitors; this should be complementary with website goal analysis (contact form, PDF downloads, membership sign up etc).

REPORT 1: What Content Performs The Best?

The term ‘content is king’ is as prevalent as ever and with recent algorithm changes to Google, the search engine is better understanding personalise search intent. Google can tell the difference between a crappy blog post that was uninspiring and an amazing piece of informative visual content.

One of the best ways to measure the performance of a piece of content is to look at the user engagement of the post by new website entrances. The following custom report will outline what content (both my page title and URL) draws people in and their level of engagement.

The visitor metrics are

• Entrances outlines the number of website visitors that entered your website through this page
• % New visits is the ratio new visitors to returning visitors

The Engagement metrics are

• Bounce Rate is the number of visitors (as a percentage) that will hit your blog post and then leave straight away
• Average time on page measures the length of time in seconds a visitor stayed on a page
• Pages/visit is a metric that measures the engagement of a user over your entire website

What Should I Be Looking For?

Find the pages which have a low bounce rate, and high average time on page – these are your pages which are performing well. Ask yourself, what did I do different when writing the content of these pages?

Now find a high performing page and click on it, we’ll take a look at the sources and mediums which have sent traffic to this site.

Here’s an overview of traffic to my homepage and it appears that traffic from Facebook and Twitter have a very low bounce rate (high engagement) and Twitter traffic has a very high average time on page.

Third Level Deep

This custom report will allow you to dig onto the third level to obtain organic search traffic which will allow you to access the success of your best content pages right down to the keyword level!

Try this report out now, just click this link and then save it to a profile!

REPORT 2: Best Time To Publish A Post

This is a great report for working out when the best time to publish a post is. By analysing what hour of the day and day of week receive the most favourable engagement metrics would it not make sense to schedule your posts to be at that same time? This is such a simple optimisation strategy which can yield fantastic results!

We’re using the exact same metrics as in the first report but we have changed our dimension; in this case it’s hour. The settings are in 24 hour time, so “06” is 6am and “18” is 6pm.

This report has 2 tabs if you switch to the other tab you can view these visitor & engagement metrics over days of the week.

Unfortunately, the Day of Week is listed as a number from 0 to 6 with 0 being a Sunday and 6 being a Saturday. It is a little confusing but you will get the hang of it.

What Should I Be Looking For?

Similarly to what you did for the Time of Day, manually sort the metrics and record what day of the week is your audience most engaged.

Hopefully, now you might have a few exact hours and days of the week in which your audience are the most engaged and by scheduling your posts to publish at this time can maximise on this. Even if you only get an extra 30 seconds per person on page, or 0.8 pages per visit – for such little effort this is a great strategy.

Second Level – Traffic Source for a given Hour of Day OR Day of Week

Remember how in the first report we could click on a page title and it would take us into a set of data just for that page? The same can be done on this report, simply click on a time of day or day of week and you can view the traffic sources for this data set.

Try this report out now, just click this link and then save it to a profile!

REPORT 3: Most Engaged Countries & Cities

So you’ve found out the best performing content, what time of the week is best to publish but how about the most engaged geographical regions.

For the standard travel blogger, the world is your target audience however if you have a strong monetization strategy, this report is definitely worth checking out. Even if you don’t monetise your blog, this report will give you fantastic insight into your blog.

We’re using the exact same metrics as in the first report but we have changed our dimension to be Country.

This report has 2 tabs if you switch to the other tab you can view these visitor & engagement metrics over days of the week.

What Should I Be Looking For?

I hope you have the hang of this by now, we’re focusing on user engagement and how to maximise it. This is by far one the strongest long term blogging strategies.

In this example we can see that people from the US are bouncing significantly more than Australia.

Second Level – What Pages Are Being Visited By Each Country?

If we click down into the second level of this report we have effectively created a filter only viewing visitors from that specific country. We can now view what pages are being viewed by each country!

Try this report out now, just click this link and then save it to a profile!

Conclusion And Data Traps

Bloggers tend to have a tendency to focus on raw visitor numbers and other goals they have set up in the Analytics profiles. Google, more now than ever is focused on content and a great way to measure the quality of your content is to review the engagement statistics per page – this is what the first report outlines.

Creating and analysing a report that shows us how engaged our audience is per time of day and then aligning up our posts to be published at this time, is an easy method of maximising engagement. This is quick, easy and a must for all travel bloggers.

The final report lets us examine which countries and content are the most engaged. This report is less valuable if your target audience is global (which is mostly the case in the travel blogging niche), but can still give you some fantastic insight into what countries are viewing what pages.

The biggest trap with using the above reports is a lack of data – you can see that in my time of day report that 3am has the third lowest bounce rate, but only 8 visitors (for this time segment). 8 visitors is insignificant and it’s possible skewing the data from the truth.

Chris is a Digital Analyst & Strategist and backpacks the world with a laptop and passport. Here are 100 Words Of His You Must Read and the Web App he created to track the social media statistics of other travel bloggers.