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
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
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 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
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