Here’s a case study on how we helped the team at Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand increase traffic to their content. We used GA Universal Analytics data to identify the best improvement opportunities, and GA4 data to show how their content changes paid off.
The team at Archives New Zealand wanted to find opportunities to generate more traffic to content in their Discover our stories section. This section covers significant events in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand, with content and original documents for Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Declaration of Independence, and the NZ Women’s Suffrage petition.
Recommendations
We recommended that Archives focus on Google optimisation to get the highest traffic increases. Archives were already getting significant Google traffic to their Te Tiriti o Waitangi page, which was long and used complex language. We helped them use Google keyword data to meet user needs and provide the right signals to Google. See our guide on how to SEO your content if you’d like to learn more.
We recommended creating a new ‘Quick facts’ page, as this was a common Google search query and there was no significant competition for this search. We also recommended creating other new pages with titles and section headings that address key user needs found in search data.
They replaced the one long, complex page with multiple pages that answered key user needs for Te Tiriti such as ‘Treaty of Waitangi quick facts’, and ‘Treaty of Waitangi original documents’.
Increase in traffic
This new content has had a significant effect. From Jan to end-March 2024, compared with the same period in 2023 they’ve seen the following changes.
Visits from Google straight to Te Tiriti pages increased by 27%, and the optimisation paid off – Google is sending traffic straight to the new pages.
Visits from all traffic sources have increased by 54%, suggesting that the changes have made the content more popular all round.
GA4 Landing page report showing that sessions to Te Tiriti content have increased by 54%:
Increase in engagement
- Page views of Tiriti content went up by 143%
- Engagement time went up 69% to almost 3 minutes
- Scroll rate (scrolls to 90% of the page-depth) went up 93%.
The increase in page views is partly down to the fact that people need to click through from the Te Tiriti landing page to access content. This page is clearly doing its job – enticing people to click on the page links, and the big increase in engagement time and scroll rate show that people are engaging with the content.
We can use the new Path exploration report in GA4 to see what links people are clicking on from the revised Te Tiriti landing page (it’s brilliant!) below. Learn how to use this report with our Path exploration tutorial video.
It will be interesting to see whether this content continues to attract higher levels of traffic, as quality content can attract more and more Google traffic over the course of years.
If you need help to identify opportunities and show the value of your work, with ongoing GA4 support, GA4 training, and dashboards along with targeted analysis.