Find out where your service content isn’t working using web analytics

A service is something that helps someone to do something. If a service has a website, finding the pages or screens that are prompting people to ask for help means you can plan what content to improve.

Improving your content, giving your users the information they need, when they need it, means users won’t contact you to ask questions. They won’t need to fill in that enquiry form, send you that email or contact you by phone. You will avoid failure demand

Showing how you’re improving content and reducing failure demand is a great way of showing the value of content design.

Here’s how you can do it in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

What you need to measure

Sometimes, web analytics can tell you how confusing your content is. You can find out which pages are prompting people to ask for help.

Here’s an example for a charity grant programme. People find out if they’re eligible and decide if they’re going to apply. Let’s focus on 3 pages:

  • Eligibility criteria,
  • Frequently asked questions,
  • Contact us (for help).

The pattern of traffic looks like this:

  • ‘Eligibility criteria’ is referring 10 pageviews to ‘contact us’,
  • ‘Frequently asked questions’ is referring 100 pageviews to ‘contact us’.

The ‘Frequently asked questions’ (FAQ) page is referring a lot more traffic to the ‘contact us’ page. Looks like that FAQ page is confusing people!

A flow diagram. 2 boxes, eligibility criteria and another, frequently asked questions, are linked by arrows to a third box, marked contact us. The arrow for eligibility criteria has 10 pageviews next to it. The arrow next to frequently asked questions has 100 pageviews next to it and is marked in a darker shade to make it stand out.

Show the value of content design

When you start measuring the pattern of traffic, you can find pain points and fix them. And the good thing is this method works for 3 pages or for 3,000 pages. 

Keep a log of when you improve content to make it easier to understand and reduce failure demand. Keep ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions of your content. 

Page referrals can be tracked over time. Showing how you’re reducing ‘contact us’ page referrals is a great way to show stakeholders the value of content design.

How to measure the pattern of traffic

If you’ve never done this before, don’t worry! We’ll show you every step.

You can either:

In GA4, pageviews are called events.

Pageview events are created when a tracked user looks at a page.

The ‘referrer’ dimension of each page view tells you where that user came from. It’s the page they were looking at before that pageview event was created.

The finished report looks like this: 

A google analytics report laid out in a table. The columns are: 1. event name 2. Page referrer 3. Page path and query string 4. Event count

1. Go to ‘Explore’ and choose ‘blank’

Google analytics menu. There are 4 options: 1.Home 2.Reports 3.Explore (this is highlighted) 4. Advertising. In the central area there is 1 option labelled 'blank' which is the one you should select.

2. Add dimensions and metrics

Part of the Google analytics report builder.  Under Dimensions there are 3 components: 1. event name 2. Page path + query string 3. Page referrer.  Under 'Metrics' there is 1 component, Event count.

3. Set up your rows

Part of the google analytics report builder.  Under Rows, there are 2 components: 1. Event name 2. Page referrer  Start row is set to 1. Show rows is set to 500. Nested rows is set to no.4. Set values and cell type

Under 'values' the component 'event count' is selected. The cell type drop down is set to 'bar chart'.

5. Add filters

The value for ‘Page path + query string’ may be different for your website. In this example it’s ‘/contact-us’.

2 filters are applied. 1. 'event name' set to 'exactly matches page_view' 2. Page path + query string set to 'begins with /contact-us'.

What trends are you noticing in your data?

Now that you’ve set up your report in GA4, what trends are you noticing? 

If there are service pages that consistently prompt users to contact you, you can: 

  • review the page with colleagues who handle these enquiries to work out how you can improve it,
  • use a simple highlighter test with users to see what they find clear and what they find confusing, 
  • audit the content and language to see if something could be simplified or explained in a clearer way.

Read more about content maintenance and let us know how you get on by emailing jack.garfinkel@contentdesign.london

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