How-to Look at Your Blog Traffic with Google Analytics
Blogging – Sail the 7 C’s to Better Blogging: C #6 – Check and Adjust
Today’s post is on Google Analytics. Yesterday we looked at Site Stats in the JetPack Plugin.
In an earlier post, “Sail the 7 Cs of Blogging”, I gave an overview of seven different aspects of blogging.
HOW-TO – We are taking a quick look at our real Traffic – Something YOU SHOULD DO!
This post is part of a series of seven posts (it started as four and kinda grew ). Here we are taking a look at where we ARE so we can see if we IMPROVE.
Overview of the Series
- C#1 – Find your CORE (Your Niche and Your USP)
- C#2- Blog Consistently – widely recognized as THE most important element.
- C#3- Be Congruent
- C#4 – Content is King
- C#5 – Have at least one Call to Action
- C#6 – Check and Adjust – Actually look at what is going on. Looking is what this post is about. Yesterday we took a look at your blog traffic using JetPack Site Stats
- C#7 – Connect with your Audience – see the next paragraph
Connecting with your Audience – Creating blog traffic has four distinct phases –
- Things you do before you start posting in your blog – covered in a post about Phase 1,
- Things you do while you are writing a post (SEO and HOC) – covered in a post about Phase 2,
- Things you do after you write a post and press Publish Blog Traffic After Publish 1, What The Expert Bloggers Do, Notes From the Research and My Original Traffic System.
- Check and And Adjust – Look at what is actually happening to your traffic and adjust your thinking. I posted at look at my starting traffic a while back. This is an example of a way to look at your traffic.
Caveat – there are lots of opinions and lots of research on this topic. I’m giving you the best that I know. Parts of it will probably be out of date before it is even published.
Why Should You Look
I can hear my techno-toddler friends asking now “Why should I look at this? I don’t know enough about this stuff to make any sense of it! At this point I’ll suggest that it is worth everyone talking a look at your blog traffic for one reason. There will be things in there that surprise you. Those thing are vitally important. Knowing them will shape your future decisions. For example, I was surprised that second city by number of hits on my site was London. I suspect I know why, but it did surprise me.
NOTE: I spent a long time as a professional researcher. Data is questionnaires in a cardboard box or “available” in Google Analytics and never looked at. Information is data processed and presented so your can make decisions on it.
This is going to a be what is usually called a Quick and Dirty – I’m going to use my current blog as an example and I’m NOT going to go deep.
Look At Your Blog Traffic with Google Analytics
Virtually every theme (especially the premium themes) will have a way to hook Google Analytics into the theme. Sometimes they ask for the snippet of HTML code that Google Analytics provides you, but most of the time there is a way to just enter the number (e.g. AU-#########-#) that is associated with your site. There are tons of short training sites dedicated to showing your how to set up a Google Analytics account. It is very straight forward.
You need to set up Google Analytics as early in your blogging career as you can. The day will come when you want to look back and look at your blog traffic and see how it has changed over time.
Note: You can see the UA-#######-# code here. This is the one you need to enter into your WordPress theme.
A Quick Look at Your Blog Traffic
Yesterday we looked JetPack. It installs as a plugin and is right in your blog dashboard. Google Analytics is separate. You will need to open another browser window, log into Google Analytics and enter your Google Name and Password. You will see a screen that says Account Home. It lists the sites you have
analytic codes for. Drill down by clicking on the Plus (‘+’) signs beside the code that you want and you will be taken to an Overview Page.
You can hover the mouse over the dots on this graph and look at your traffic for the day. You can see the date and the number of visits
If You Are Advertising – Be Careful
NOTE: If you are advertising and sending visitors to Squeeze pages on your blog site, these numbers need to be looked at very carefully since they include the visits by people responding to the ads.
Scroll Down and You Will See Some Interesting Areas
Part of this is interesting since it forms a base line. Six months or a year from now when I look at the same screen, some decisions can be made based on the changes.
I was interested in the number of repeat visitors and the length of time on the site. I think three and a half minutes is pretty good as an average. It was interesting to note the little graph beside the bounce rate (bounce rate = % of people who leave immediately. I believe it is 10 seconds here.) The bounce rate jumped way up when I started advertising. This is to be expected. When people click on an article based on its name, there is a good chance that they will at least scan it. When they click on an ad, they can usually see very quickly if they want to take action or not.
Scrolling down More
Here you see a menu with a number of options that you can click on.
I’m not going to show you each of the tables that appear as I click these options, but I will list a couple of surprises. As I mentioned – London being my second most frequent city surprised me. Chrome being the most popular browser surprised me. It wasn’t far ahead of FireFox, but it was number one.
Language Stats
I am going to show the Language table just to make a teaching point.
The primary language is en-us. This code means English – the US version. en-gb means English – the Great Britain version. ed and a blank is English, but they can’t tell which version.
Traffic Sources
One of the more important charts for bloggers is the Traffic Sources. You should spend some time here.
I knew some of this before I looked at the chart, but I didn’t really KNOW it. It hadn’t sunk in. I am making decisions based on the information contained on this page. If you look you see that the VAST majority of the visitors to my site come from Facebook. Google organic search provided a vanishingly small amount of traffic. Of the few that did find my site through Google, the keyword “Hale Pringle” was far and away the most popular.
Just like with JetPack, we can see that the VAST MAJORITY of my traffic came from Facebook – only 7 came from Google Searches
There is one more important Screen, however it is important enough to rate it’s own post.
Tomorrow – Bounce Rate.
Look At Your Traffic – Lessons Learned – mostly the same as with JetPack
- At this point in time, SEO effort is mostly wasted. Visitors are NOT finding my blog through organic search.
- My HOME Page is critical. More people see it than any other page over time.
- Facebook is my primary source.
- Advertising throws the simple looks at my traffic off.
- I was surprised to see I had viewers all over the world. I suspect some of that is because I’m working with Ann Sieg’s Daily Marketing Coach program
Notes about using Google Analytics to Look at Your Blog Traffic
There is more data than is available with JetPack Site Stats. It is a little harder to get to, but it is sure worth it.
If you are advertising, you need to click on the details to get a better look at your traffic and get a better feel for what is happening.
You CAN pick time periods and view the data in those periods. This makes comparing the results after major changes possible.
I think you can see – You SHOULD Look At Your Blog Traffic
Until next time, you have a Great Day!
↓ ↓ If this post gave you some ideas – Go ahead & comment below. ↓ ↓
Hale Pringle – Hale Yes!
Skype hale.pringle
Email: HaleYes@HalePringle.com
P.S. If you are working to move your business online and it all seems overwhelming, I can help! Take a look at http://HalePringle.com, or sign up for the free coaching call. You can email me or give me a Skype call. I’ll give you the benefit of my years of experience and many thousands of dollars in training and searching the rabbit hole called Internet Marketing and Network Marketing. I can help you with Lead Generation, the feeling of overwhelm, blogging, and even career change. Add that to the finest mentoring on the Internet (Ann Sieg’s Team and Inner Circle) and you have a Winner!
Some useful reminders here. Now I have got my sites up and running my next step is to start using these tools to analyse my traffic and get more targeted. I have jetpack but haven’t really dived into google analystics as yet.
Dot Hurley recently posted..Infertility Gremlins – Xenoestrogens
Google Analytics is one of those things that most people “just never get around to.” I hope I made the point that just a few minutes of wandering around can tell you things about your readers. Some of them are important things.
Regards,
Dr. Hale
Oh gosh, more stuff I need, will be back to study this 🙂
Best Wishes
Cher
UBC
Cher recently posted..Healing Arthritis
I’ll be looking for you Cher,
Thanks for the comment.
Dr. Hale
thank you once again for