Many bloggers feel overwhelmed when dealing with statistics and thinking about coding. While analytics may feel like a nightmare, Google analytics is a simple platform that helps make measuring performance easier for bloggers.
It is one of the most efficient and useful tools to track your blog and seek valuable information to get insights that your competitors do not have access to. Hence, learning details from Google Analytics can help you get a competitive advantage and enhance your blog.
You need to begin with setting up a Google Analytics account. Creating an account is an easy process, especially when you already have a Gmail account. You need to enter details about your blog site that you want to monitor through the platform.
Post that you will have to add in the tracking code on your pages to know about the visitors on the blog. There are several options to add the code to your blog, select the one that suits you the best.
Once you long-in to your Google Analytics account will see data that shows how many people are currently visiting your blog. That is just the basic thing. You need to get into the details by leveraging the enormous amount of options that Google Analytics offers.
Decide on the purpose of your blog and set up goal tracking in Google Analytics. Knowing what to look for and analyzing those statistics periodically helps improve your blog’s performance, frame relevant strategies and assist in making future decisions related to the blog’s growth.
Just getting the data and not doing anything with it is pointless and you might be losing out on significant opportunities. Continue reading this blog if you are confused about what are the most important sections of Google Analytics that you regularly need to keep a tab on to monitor your blog’s performance.
1. Visitors Details
Getting to know about the kind of audience you have on your blog is essential and it will help in figuring out the kind of content you should develop and also to predict the behavior of the visitors.
- Know where your visitors are coming from in the ‘Map overlay’ section. Apart from telling you about the places from where your visitors are, it also helps you in knowing the time of the day when you should post your content to get maximum response.
- Know the device and the browser that most of your visitors are using to checkout your blog. This will help you in optimizing and designing your website accordingly.
- Check the number of people that have visited your blog. Seek the amount of unique visitors, i.e. the percentage of people who have come to your blog for the first time and know the percentage of people who are re-visiting your blog.
- Look at the count of people who left the blog after viewing only one page, this indicates the bounce rate. Try to keep it low by framing the right engagement strategies.
- Seek the pageviews to see the number of pages these visitors have collectively gone to when they visited your blog.
- You can divide the number of visits with the number of pageviews to know the average of how many pages a reader viewed during his visit.
- To figure out how much time a visitor has spent on the blog, divide the total amount of time by the amount of visits.
All this indicates the audience’s liking towards your content and their loyalty towards your blog.
2. Sources of Traffic
The Traffic Sources section on Google Analytics helps study the details on the sources of traffic, search engine traffic and critical high volume keywords.
- Look out for how your visitors found your blog. If the amount of direct traffic is high that means your blog’s popularity is growing and you are doing well. Direct traffic means that the people who have come to you blog via no other means.
- The referencing section will tell you about the third party platforms through which your remaining traffic is coming from. You want to know more about those sources so that you can write more content or develop marketing strategies that suit those channels accordingly.
- See the search engine page to know about the amount of traffic from various search engines. If you seek details on the particular search engine, you will also get to know the popular keyword results that got people to your blog.
- You want to know about your ranking in the Google search engine, focus on using the most popular search terms that are used. Target those keywords and include them in your content to make your writing rank higher.
3. Content review
When you are running a blog, your content is the heart and soul of it. While measuring the blog’s performance, you want to check out how well your content is doing by going to the ‘Content Overview’ dashboard.
- Know your most popular blog-posts. You have to look for the top content in the present time to plan for future content. Seek if a page is consistent, that means the content is evergreen.
- Check the navigation summary to know how your visitors browse your blog. The information about from which pages have the readers come to your blog, to where they have visited the next helps in knowing what value is the reader seeking for.
- Look at the entrance sources to check the referrers of who is sending traffic to your blog. See for the details of the referrer for your most popular blog post with better exit rates.
- Landing pages tell you the pages on your blog that the visitors first visited. In this you can also know the amount of people who bounced off post visiting that page.
- The exit pages tell you from which pages are your visitors leaving your blog from. Seek for pages with the highest number of people leaving from it. The pages not referring to the audience around the blog indicate that there is some problem with it. The less exit rate pages can help you figure out what the visitors like to be associated with.
It is essential to track your content thoroughly and act accordingly to help your blog grow.
There is no harm in periodically checking data and seeing the kind of content that visitors are liking or seeking the keywords that are driving the organic traffic to your blog. As a blogger, all this will help you in developing content to publish in future. If you hit all the nails correctly, you can start earning revenue from your blog too.
By focusing on the above mentioned Google Analytics reports and outlining a correct action plan, you will ensure that you retain your existing traffic by convincing the visitors to come back and will attract more traffic by getting new visitors to your blog too.
Author Bio
Ashutosh works as a Product Manager at Refrens.com – India’s most powerful platform for freelancer’s finances and growth. He has helped some renowned technology companies with their product. In this blog, Ashutosh shares his thoughts on important Google analytics items for your blog. You can follow Refrens.com on Twitter, LinkedIn.
