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Most websites have some sort of content organization that group individual pages into directories and subdirectories (and/or subdomains). Although web analysts are not compelled to follow the exact same convention when structuring reports, most of us do it, making Directory Structure one of the most common schemes to organize content reports (an excellent in-depth reading to understand the different content organization options, which include Information Architecture and Business Objectives organization schemes, can be found on Web Analytics Demystified book, chapter 5).

This post deals with how to analyze one or more sections of your site.

Let’s consider Linkara, a Spanish social network for people interested in movies, books and music. They have at least 3 sections, one for each content vertical, structured in subdomains cine.linkara.com, libros.linkara.com and musica.linkara.com.

For simplicity of this post we’ll assume that traffic (both visits and page views) is the only factor considered to weight out the importance of a section (conversion is not considered in this analysis).

Graph 1

Graph 1 shows page views from all contents within the books section (obtained applying a regex filter within the Top Content report).

Graph 2

Graph 2 shows the entrances through contents in the books section.

Graph 3

Graph 3 shows visits in which at least 1 content of the book’s section was viewed (before Advanced Segments you couldn’t really get this information unless you went through a lot of trouble setting up profiles and filters to either group all contents within a section in a single content or map them to a single title).

How would you evaluate the contribution of the books content vertical to the overall site traffic? 

How do you measure the relative success of the section over time?

Although a clear trend pops from both graphs showing a traffic increase, we can not answer the above questions looking at this data. What are we missing?

CONTEXT!

In this case context comes in the form of overall traffic figures and allows us to build 3 metrics:

1. Books section’s page views over total page views or the contribution of the section to the total page views
   
2. Entrances through a page in books section over total entrances or the contribution of the section to traffic attraction
   
3. Visits in which at least 1 page in books section was viewed over total visits or the reach of the section over all visits (this can work for unique visitors too, but I prefer visits)

Graph 4

Now that we have context we can say that the growth in the books section is not only explained by an overall increase in traffic to Linkara (during the same period analyzed) but is also an increase in reach over the visits of Linkara and a greater contribution to site page views. In other words the books section is increasing its importance in generating page views and its relevance during visits. Also very important, book section is gaining attraction over organic traffic attraction (mainly organic in the case of Linkara).

Finally, can we analyze more than one section simultaneously?

A good option will probably be using a motion chart within a google doc. You can visualize absolute metrics like PVs, Entrances and Visits or contextualized like contribution to PVs and Entrances or Visits reach. In this case since you have both visual (size, color,position and several sections simultaneosulsy) and time context in the motion chart is probably better to use absolute figures.