Google Analytics: Metrics and Reports for Bloggers

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for any business, organization, or person with a web presence. It’s a free tool set up to spit out a large quantity of data about your site, its visitors, and those visitors’ interactions with the site. However, unless you have clear goals and know what metrics to look for and what reports are valuable, Google Analytics is nothing more that data for data’s sake.

I installed Google Analytics on this blog about a week back, and while I don’t have much traffic to report (2 visitors and 3 visits), I can already see the metrics and reports that could prove useful to any blogger. Before I get into which metrics and reports a blogger should pay attention to, I’d like to explore the goals of a blog.

A Short Note About Goals
As I mentioned in a previous post, before we can put web metrics and analysis to use we have to have goals. It’s a common mantra I hear at web conferences: Goals before tools! While many may approach blogging as a hobby without any monetary or business goals, that doesn’t mean that goals can’t be set. While every blogger might have different reasons for blogging their primary objective tends to be the same: get ever increasing number of people to read what you’ve written.

Goals can grow from this primary objective. They might include creating engaging content, increasing repeat visitors, increasing frequency of visitors, increased traffic to the blog from external sources, and improving organic search engine traffic to the site. As you can see there are many possible goals a blogger might have, but notice that they grow from the primary objective of gaining (and maintaining) readership.

With a well-defined objective and goal set, you can use Google Analytics as a tool to not only evaluate the performance of your blog, but also to inform the future direction of it. In the remainder of this post I’ll discuss a few metrics and reports in Google Analytics that ought to help any blogger achieve their goals and reach the objective of increasing their readership.

Visitors Overview

The first set of metrics and report I suggest every blogger look at is the Visitors Overview report found under the Audience tab in Google Analytics (Google Analytics Help). The Visitors Overview report is just that, an overview of the visitor traffic to your site over the specified time period. In this report you’ll find a number of useful metrics for measuring the volume of traffic to the site. These include unique visitors, visits, pageviews, new and returning visitors, pages per visit, average visit duration, bounce rate, along with a host of demographic and technical user data.

This report provides at quick overview of what’s happening on your site (Google Analytics Help). You can tell at a glance how many people have visited your site, how many times it’s been visited, how long visitors are staying on the site, and how many of those visitors are new or returning. All of these metrics are valuable not because they actually give you the ability to increase traffic to your blog or to inform at strategy that would help achieve that objective, but rather they serve to provide a pulse check and baseline against which to compare previous traffic measurement.

By knowing how a blog is doing currently compared to how it has performed in the past can give a blogger some low level insight into the success of their blog.

Content Reports

A blog is all about the content, so it would make sense that Google Analytics content reports would play a role in measuring the success of a blog in achieving it’s goals. Specifically, the content reports can help you determine just how engaging your posts are down to the level of each individual post. The Site Content reports under the Content menu provide this sort of information (Google Analytics Help). Under the All Pages portion of this report you can find some repeat information like total pageviews and bounce rate, but you’ll also find a page by page breakdown of these metrics. For each page in the site, you are able to see the metrics mentioned above along with average time on page, entrances, and exit rate (Google Analytics Help).

Among the metrics provided in the Site Content report, the most important one for a blogger will likely be average time on page. This metric in particular can help you measure just how engaging your posts are. If you notice that people are spending a relatively short amount of time on each page, it could be a reason to change your content strategy.

In looking at Site Content report, you might also discover that certain types of posts perform better than others not only in terms of average time on page, but also number of unique pageviews and even entrances since that indicates a source of incoming traffic. By identifying trends in which content is successful, you can replicate that success by creating a content strategy that utilizes the elements that made those specific posts successful with readers.

Traffic Sources

While I could discuss several more Google Analytics reports that might be useful to achieving blogging goals and measuring success, I will only focus on one more in this post: the Traffic Sources report. Since the overall objective of blogging is to expand the blog’s readership, it makes sense to look at where your current readership is coming from. Knowing where your current readership it coming from might help identify blogs that are linking to your own that might be worthwhile to comment on, it might indicate strengths or weaknesses in search engine optimization (SEO), or it might highlight some other unique trend that could tell you more about your readers’ interests and habits.

The All Traffic report under the Sources menu of the Traffic Sources tab provides you with a list of sites and other sources that have directed traffic to your blog (Google Analytics Help). It will also show you what percent of new visitors come from a particular source and what the bounce rate for that source is (Google Analytics Help). Knowing the bounce rate can be specifically helpful because while you might have a high level of traffic coming from a specific source, it may be that that same source has a high bounce rate as well, meaning that those visitors are not finding what they were looking for (Google Analytics IQ). Having this knowledge can direct you to take further action where that’s with SEO or some other promotion strategy for your blog.

As I mentioned above, Google Analytics gives anybody with a web presences a massive amount of data about their site. The power of the tool is all in knowing how to put it to good use by always remembering that objectives and goals come before any set of metrics or report. If you keep this one thing in mind, you’ll be achieving your blogging goals with the help of Google Analytics in no time.

References

Google Analytics Help. (n.d.). Google analytics help center. Retrieved June 25, 2012 from http://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en
Google Analytics IQ. (n.d.). Google analytics IQ lessons. Retrieved June 20, 2012 from http://www.google.com/analytics/iq.html

The State of Web Analytics (in Higher Ed)

The practice of web analytics is constantly evolving in step with the evolution of the web itself. Avinash Kaushik outlines the development of the practice from the early dates of the web on through the semantic web in his book Web Analytics 2.0.

From the earliest days of the web, we were counting hits on individual sites. But hits don’t tell us much. Hits evolved into page views, and while Kaushik says these are still a reasonable measure of success, they are becoming obsolete. Kaushik says that we’re currently living in the era of visits and/or visitors. And this metric does mean something. A visit means that a real person visited your site and consumed some type of content.

While we may be using visits and/or visitors as a primary metric now in 2012. Kaushik suggest that we’re on the verge of a “transformative moment.” He foresees a move to outcome-based metrics. Not one metric can be described as outcome-based because just as key performance indicators outcome-based metrics can vary depending on the business.

Kaushik suggests e-commerce site focus on conversion rate and revenue trend metrics. He suggests that content sites look at depth of visit metrics. He even has a suggestion for Facebook, “don’t tell me the number of profiles you have; rather, tell me about your Visitor Loyalty metric.”

So here we are poised between a world focusing on visitors and visits and a world of outcome-based metrics. It sounds like a positive evolution, but what is the reality of it. I have a particular interest in understanding where higher education is on track with that evolution as it has always been somewhat behind trends in private industry (at least in regard to marketing and everything that goes along with it).

Fortunately, the results of a survey conducted by Higher Ed Experts were just released today in a white paper to their email list subscribers. The results of the survey confirmed that there is a lot of work to do if higher ed marketers are going to catch up to current trends in industry. Of the 344 respondents, very few indicated that their institution utilized a model that relied on outcome-based metrics. Instead the vast majority are stuck somewhere between steps 2 and 3 of Kaushik’s evolutionary timeline – between page views and visits/visitors.

The top five metrics monitored by respondents were page views (85%), visits (84%), unique visitors (80%), Facebook Page Likes (66%), length of visit (65%). None of these metrics fall into what might be considered outcome-based metrics.

The highest “conversion” metric rated was click stream and conversions for email campaigns (23%).

Respondents were also asked about some higher ed specific conversion metrics. Of the eight asked about, all but one were monitored by less than a third of respondents. The highest-ranking metric in this category was the monitoring of online inquiry for admissions (35%). Only 18% measured online donations and gifts.

Respondents were also asked to consider how they used the insights that gained from web analytics. Responses were not outcome based either. Rather than responses like “increase enrollment” or “increase online donations”, the most common responses were general and content related, like “to improve website” (72%) and “to inform web content strategy” (66%).

These uses for analytics insights are all well and good, but strategy and goals aren’t one in the same. We use strategy attain goals, just as we use web analytics to find out if we’re attaining those goals.

Goals First, Analysis Later: Setting a Web Analytics Measurement Framework

Before you can have tools, metrics, or analytics you must have goals and objectives. Without goals and objectives, web metrics are nothing more than a compilation of interesting data points. You may know how many people visited your site, where they were from, and what pages they looked at, but without goals the data is nothing more than anecdotal.

Avinash Kaushik writes on his blog that before he even looks at any web analytics tool he creates a web analytics measurement framework specific to that business, organization, or project.

This framework consists of five parts or steps, all of which become necessary to check any metrics or analytics information against. The framework puts everything into perspective.

Kaushik’s web analytics measurement framework consists of the following parts:

1. Business objective
2. Goals
3. Key performance indicators (KPIs)
4. Target
5. Segments

For a complete discussion of each of these see Kaushik’s Web Analytics 101 blog post from 2010.

Each piece of the framework builds on the next. Let’s look at an example. Say I work for the admission office at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. My framework might look something like this:

Business objective: Prospects in admission inquiry file
Goals: Increase number of signups for inquiry file via web form
KPIs: Number of signups via direct traffic on website, number of signups via email campaigns, number of signups via social media referrals
Target: 1,000 signups a month via direct traffic, 750 signups a month via email campaigns, 500 signups a month via social media referrals
Segments: Acquisitions: Organic search, email campaigns, Facebook, Twitter
                  Behaviors: Visits to conversions (signups via web form)

This is a simple example, but it shows the need to set goals before employing the use of web analytics just because we think we should or because everyone else is doing it. Using a web analytics measurement framework as Kaushik has outlined, any organization is able to put web analytics platform to good work.