How-to Look at Your Blog Traffic with Google Analytics

Please Comment

 

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.

Better Blogging Requires that you Check and Adjust - Look at your blog traffic

Better Blogging Requires that you Check and Adjust

Overview of the Series

Connecting with your Audience – Creating blog traffic has four distinct phases –

  1. Things you do before you start posting in your blog – covered in a post about Phase 1,
  2. Things you do while you are writing a post (SEO and HOC) – covered in a post about Phase 2,
  3. 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.
  4. 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  Parts of it will probably be out of date before it is even published.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 mostGoogle Analytics - Hope Page 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. 

Google Analytics - Audience Overview

Google Analytics – Audience Overview

 

 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.

 

 

Google Analytics - Overview Detail

Google Analytics – Overview Detail

Scrolling down More

Here you see a menu with a number of options that you can click on.

Overview Menu

Overview Menu

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.

 

Google Analytics - Language

 

 

Traffic Sources

One of the more important charts for bloggers is the Traffic Sources.  You should spend some time here.

Google Analytics - Traffic Sources

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

  1. At this point in time, SEO effort is mostly wasted.  Visitors are NOT finding my blog through organic search. 
  2. My HOME Page is critical.  More people see it than any other page over time.
  3. Facebook is my primary source.
  4. Advertising throws the simple looks at my traffic off.
  5. 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!

Dr Hale

 

 

↓ ↓ If this post gave you some ideas – Go ahead & comment below.  ↓ ↓

 

Hale Pringle

Hale Pringle Ed. D.

 

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!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
About Hale Pringle

Dr. Hale is an Internet Entrepreneur and Network
Marketing expert. His greatest pleasure is
helping people and he does just that, drawing
upon the immense resources that he has gathered
over the years in his unquenchable thirst for
knowledge.

Dr. Hale lives in beautiful, sunny Florida with
his wife, two dogs and a cat. His four children
are grown and are scattered around the state.

An eternal optimist you will hear him say
regularly: “Is this a Great Day?” The answer is
always, “Hale Yes!”

If you need help with your online marketing or a
network marketing opportunity Dr. Hale is the go
to man. “Hale Yes!”

Comments

  1. 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 – XenoestrogensMy Profile

    • 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

  2. Oh gosh, more stuff I need, will be back to study this 🙂
    Best Wishes
    Cher
    UBC
    Cher recently posted..Healing ArthritisMy Profile

  3. thank you once again for

Trackbacks

  1. […] I looked at my Google Analytics and wrote about Looking at Your Google Analytics- I confirmed that FOR ME.   I do NOT get traffic from Google organic search.  I get it from […]

Speak Your Mind

*

CommentLuv badge

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.