Analytics Pt 1: How Much Do You Know About Your Visitor Traffic?

Google Analytics is a great tool to keep track of your blog visitors. What makes Analytics so useful is the vast data which you can view in many different ways. You quickly learn there's a lot more to understanding traffic than how many visitors drop in or how many pages they view. Analytics trend analysis  can show the effectiveness of  your strategic design, monetization or promotion efforts. The key is 'drilling down' to the most meaningful level of reporting for your needs. And one of your primary need should be 'to 'give visitors what they want!' However, you need to balance that against your performance goals. My Blogspot blog gets mounds of  search engine hits on  'caret browsing in Firefox"', but that was a one time 'rant', off-topic post!

Bird's Eye View

Let's look at the ways we use Analytics to better understand and manage our visitors. Why not open your own report in a separate browser window and follow along as we look at BWS data? You do have an account already, don't you?

Overview of all accounts:

• Log into your account
  You'll see all of your blogs tracked by Analytics.
• The default overview is for a one month period ending today.
  You can adjust by selecting day, week or year.

The overview shows metrics for the selected time period: total visits, average time spent by visitors, overall bounce rate and goals.The last column is a dropdown to show the % increase or decrease --- in this example we selected 'bounce rate.

The bounce rate is 70.10%. Compared to the prior period, the rate went down 1.13%.Visits were about the same, but avg time on site increased by 10%. Suppose we had added related posts last month. Then we might think that was the reason visitors read multiple posts (spent more time onsite!)

View #2 Overview of all reporting components:

Let's select a blog for a closer look by pressing 'view report' next to the green checkmark. You'll see a sectioned page with multiple overviews --- mostly graphs, including overall site usage, visitor map, and content summaries.

The left sidebar, "Dashboard", has several expandable buttons. Press the one for Visitors. Again you have overviews of several components related to Visitors. You've heard of most :  A  numerical breakdown of visits, unique visitors, pageviews (total and avg), time on site, bounce rate and % new visits.

Two Profiles further segment data about your visitors. The "Visitor Profile" (language, location) and "Technical Profile" (browser, operating system, equipment used) have clickable links to graphs for characteristic.  If you click on segmentation links,  you might find some surprises. For our blog, 60% use Firefox, and 25% IE browsers. However, FF brings 50% of revenue, while IE brings 37.5 --- don't spurn IE too much, they may be bigger spenders ( .

Drill Down Views of Visitors

Back to the sidebar where the Visitor button is now expanded to show lots of factors. From here you can just go down the line and view graphs until your heart is content! Be sure to adjust the 'to'-'from' dates in the top right hand corner. You may want to have data cover just a 4 month period or the entire year. As an example, I used a one month period, and pressed 'new vs. returning'. This table shows about a 80 to 20% split.

You can use the dropdown menu in the third column to see how each type affects other success factors. Select them one by one and cycle through. In our case:

New visitors are the majority, and produced 300 times more Adsense revenue and 8  Adsense clicks. Many newer visitors come from search engine results and get served more ads on older posts.

Returning visitors spend more time on the site and bounce less than the other group. They see fewer ads and clicked none of our Adsense Ads.

3-D Views: Comparing Time Periods

Let's look at trends by comparing two time periods. Press the drop-down menu to change the dates. I've used 2 month periods from Mar-Apr and May-Jun. Be sure to click the "compare to past" box. Press Apply after you key the dates.

The graph shows an upward trend in visitors during the past period (green), but more of a flat rate in the current blue period. Looking back we had more visitors from StumbleUpon since three authors were busy there on the networking end of things.

Selecting other factors, I could tell from the graphs that avg time on site went up for the current period. Sort of what you expect if the visitors are more targeted.

Call to Action:

As you know the best learning is by experience, so do something!

1. Review your stats at least weekly and set some related goals during a more in-depth monthly review. Make sure your visits have been excluded from tracking.
2. Write a post about what your stats revealed and how you responded. Or return and leave a comment here.
3. Read more articles for deeper understanding.

• Mint Blogger has a good explanation of the  Google Analytics basics.

• ProBlogger's list of statistics you should monitor.

I hope this article with real life examples  encourages you to use the wealth of information Analytics captures for your blog. In the next part of the series we'll look more closely at views for Traffic, Content, etc. Be sure to subscribe!
Happy spying...