The Power of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring the success and impact of a website. “Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back” (“Google Insights”, 2013).  Google Analytics is also a free tool, making it extremely practical for blogs and businesses of all sizes to implement.

One of Google Analytics’ major benefits is its ability to easily create custom reports.  This feature allows the user to determine what reporting statistics are most valuable and worth monitoring over time.  For example, a blogger might find more value in tracking where inbound traffic is coming from or how often users are coming back.  On the other hand, an e-commerce business would be more interested in bounce rates, sales conversions, and the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. 

Now, let us explore the basics of Google Analytics and some of the most interesting metrics for bloggers to keep track of.  First off, Google Analytics uses a dashboard to organize all of the available reports. 

The default dashboard shows the metrics for site usage at the top.  These metrics include:

•        Visits: The number of visits to your site during a given time period.
•     Page views: The number of pages these visitors viewed.
•     Pages/Visit: The average visit in terms of page views.
•         Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who only visited one page on your site before they “bounced” somewhere else.
•     Avg. Time on Site: The average amount of time a visitor spends at your site.
•      % ofNew Visits: The percentage of new visitors to your site as compared to allvisitors. Some businesses might want lots of new traffic, while others mightwant generate repeat visits, driving down this percentage."

Kaushik is an advocate for creating custom dashboards for specific purposes.  If you are the only one monitoring your blog, then you might only need one dashboard.  However, if you have a team of people accessing this information, you might want to create separate dashboards that break down the information into appropriate funnels for each of your audiences.  The most important thing to remember is to adhere to the following framework: “Always,always, always let the Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes framework be yourguide. After you've created a dashboard, check to see that you have all threeelements. If you don't, you are not showing the end-to-end picture. Withoutthis you fail in your duty (and the data recipients will make poor decisions)."

So, with the understanding that Google Analytics allows you to create custom dashboards for the most impactful reporting, it is time to explore which reports a blogger should include.

Traffic Sources Report

The traffic sources report is extremely valuable for a blogger.  This report shows a wealth of data and can help make sense of how engaged people are (average visit duration), how many people are accessing your site (visits), which pages are the most popular (page visits), and how many new people you are reaching (% of new visits). This information is the foundation needed to understand the very basics of your web analytics.  This data provides a succinct snapshot of your overall site activity in either real-time or over a set time period.  The site usage report should be the first thing you check when monitoring your site.

Sources Overview Report

This report is important because it shows visually where your traffic is coming from.  This allows you to see if your traffic is driven by search engines, referrals, direct traffic, or campaigns.  For a blogger, this information is invaluable because it allows you to have a deeper understanding of where your readers are finding out about your content.  Kaushik says, “Like everything in life, you want a balanced portfolio” meaning that ideally your traffic is coming from a variety of sources in a somewhat even split.  This report will also allow you to drill down into the search feature to see what terms are driving traffic to your site.  This can help in creating key word tags and also “understand the macro balance betweenOrganic and Paid [search]."

Engagement

The engagement report is found under the Behavior tab. This report is extremely valuable for a blogger because it shows how long your visitors were on your site and it also explores page depth, or “the number of pages viewed in a session."  For a blogger, this information is valuable because it shows if readers are tuning in for your latest post or if they are hanging around and exploring other content. It can also help shine a light on what content is the most interesting or engaging, and perhaps help focus future content.

Overall, these three reports offer a blogger great insight into who is visiting the blog, where they are coming from, what content they find engaging, and how long they stay.  Another nice feature that Google Analytics offers is the ability to create custom alerts so you don’t have to constantly check in to see your activity.  These alerts can be set up for anything you deem important.  Kaushik gives the example, “With smart alertsset, you don't have to remember to check the data every eighteen seconds. Anemail, or a text message, will poke you into action…one of my favorite customalerts [is that] I would like an alert when goal conversion rate for any day isgreater than 25%. My normal is around 18%, so if it jumps up by that much I canget an alert and I can do deeper analysis to figure out what might have causedthe spike."

A blogger could set up a daily alert to check for overall activity and a custom alert for when there are more than 100 visitors per day.  If you see a spike in visitors, you can examine where they are coming from and what content they are there for.  This data will help with future posts and can also show you where you should be targeting for future readers.  Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you grow your blog by providing valuable consumer insights and a roadmap for success through measured analytics.