Working out which pages people are looking at
One of the tips we mention when reviewing website content – and especially in revising your homepage – is to look at your Google Analytics to see which pages are the most popular on your site. The idea is if you have, for example, four pages that gather 90% of visits to your site, these can be the four items that compromise the quick links on your homepage.
The steps are straightforward:
- Log into Google Analytics
- Click on your website to access its analytics
- Click on Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
- Set a time frame and apply it
- Note the top pages on your site aside from the homepage and see if they make good candidates for the quick links on the homepage.
Which popular pages not to highlight
Sometimes the most popular pages are not necessarily ones you need to enshrine as a quick link on your homepage. For instance, in the first month of the Fall semester professors’ and instructors’ profile pages on a departmental site might appear in the top five pages in a Google Analytics report. When they stride out to give their first lecture of the term, 250 students rapidly Google their Carleton profile to find out in what the faculty member specialized at grad school, what papers and books they have written, and to find out where they shop for clothes. The faculty member doesn’t need to be highlighted with their own quick link.
Working out when pages are most popular
Bear in mind that you might need to change the quick links at different times of year. Popular content is seasonal. For example, if you are in an academic department you might want to place a quick link about examination information on the homepage from February to April every year; then in May and June you might find information about Convocation is all the rage. So it is worth setting the date ranges in Google Analytics to search out which pages are most popular during the different phases of your department’s year.
Let’s take a look at a real-life example in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology’s Google Analytics account.
We compared May 2021’s stats with those for June 2021. In the list of most popular pages we found this:
A good reminder to SocAnth (and all academic units) that towards the start of June they might want to replace a quick link temporarily with a link to their Graduation Celebration page – because in June the Convocation page gets a lot of traffic.
Working out which pages get fewer visits
While you are in Google Analytics, you should also take some time to see which pages and posts on your site aren’t getting much love from the outside world. Why? Because then you can remove pages that aren’t attracting a lot of visits.
Finding the top pages users visit on your site is easy, but what about those less popular pages? Some sites have news stories from 2009 (which means it won’t be long till Carleton has new stories that are older than its undergraduates!)
Why do we need to get rid of pages at all?
- Some pages/posts are just too old – for example, events from 10 years ago, news posts that are out of date, or stories that relate to people or courses that are no longer around on campus
- Some posts and pages have very similar names. How are users – and Google – supposed to know which is more important in this context?
- Sometimes pages and posts have different names but the same content. If you have duplicated content and someone changes one page, the other is now carrying out of date content that a visitor might find
Surely it is the simplest thing in the world to weed out the least popular pages and schedule them for deletion?
Sometimes it is obvious. In this example, we can see a news post from 2009 on the Web Services site:
Working out just what the heck some of these pages are
However, sometimes is it less obvious. Like sub-atomic particles that exist at the far reaches of the known universe, pages at the bottom of the popularity table sometimes take on strange new forms. Bizarre and unpopular pages might look like this:
- https://carleton.ca/webservices/?s=cats+wearing+bow+ties 1
It’s the 675th most popular page on our site. It has received one visit all year – by the person who performed the search, (and no, you can’t prove it was me) so maybe it should be deleted. But in fact, if you try to find that page in the back of the website it isn’t there. What is going on?
Google Analytics records every page generated – that means not only created by you, but also by searches people conduct within the website. How can we tell if a page is the result of a search? It is very straightforward: a page that has /?s= in it is a search result (the s= simply standards for search=followed by whatever was searched for.)
Other pages that do not exist in the back end include pages with addresses that include /category or /tags. Examples:
https://carleton.ca/webservices/category/accessibility/
https://carleton.ca/webservices/tag/tags/
There are other judgment calls to make. Some pages are not popular but are still necessary. For instance, many Contact pages on Carleton websites request that people send them questions if they have them. But because the rest of the website is working well there may be little need to ask questions. Yes, that page gets few hits, but that is a good thing.
So you see: it’s not a popularity contest.
Except when it is.