MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over

Google Analytics for Bloggers Part 3: An Intro

Jan 21, 2009 Digital Marketing & Metrics, Web Analytics

If you missed any of this series check out:

• Google Analytics for Bloggers Part 1: Why Analytics
• Google Analytics for Bloggers Part 2: Set-Up

After you have set yourself up with Google Analytics you will need to familiarize yourself with the various sections.  Feel free to do that now

Dashboard:

Time Frame: Automatically reviews past month, but you can select whichever dates you want to review. Note: You can choose today but it won’t be complete and usually not accurate to the moment.

Visits: Number of times your site was visited during the time frame given. Click to see daily numbers.

Pageviews: Total number of pages visited by all visitors. For example if I visit a site and visit the home page and two other internal pages I have 3 pageviews. If Joe visits the same site and stays on the page he lands on – he has one page view. If these were the only visitors Pageviews would be 4.

Pages/Visit: This gives an average of how many pages your guests are viewing by dividing Pageviews by Visits. I believe this is more important than total Pageviews as it gives an idea of how involved your readers are.

Bounce Rate: This represents the number of visitors who visit a site without moving beyond the initial page they started on. This can be a confusing point of data for a blog that can have many posts on the directory page. So should a visitor land on your home page, they can read multiple posts in a quick period of time, not click anywhere and be considered a “bounce”. There is also a timeout value – where a visit will be seen as a bounce if site remains idle too long. Avinash Kaushik gives this rule of thumb “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying”. However, this is certainly a better measure for E-com sites then for blogs.

Avg. Time Spent on Site: I see this as more pertinant than bounce rate. This gives you an idea how long your guests are engaged on your site 2 seconds or 2 minutes makes a big difference. If you have a high bounce rate and a low average time – then it is likely time to worry about how you are connecting with your visitors.

% New Visits: This the percentage who are first time visitors. The remainder are obviously return visitors!

From the dashboard you can visit 4 Sections:

Visitors:

From this section you find important information such as-

• Where your visitors are from (pretty map!)
• If they are a new visitor or returning (note this can misconceiving since not all visitors will use the same computer, and IPs can change)
• Total number of visits and unique visitors (again can be off if a reader comes to your site from home some times and work other times)
• Pages per visit (do they visit more than one page while on your blog)
• Time on site
• Bounce rate – people “bounce” if they drop in and then out of the site quickly – usually when they realize your site wasn’t what they were looking for.

Traffic Sources

This will tell you how visitors came to find your site

• Direct – typed in your URL, from browser bookmark
• Referring Sites – Visited by clicking a link from another web page
• Search – Used Google, MSN, Yahoo or other Search engine and found your site and what keywords they used to find you (some will be odd…believe me!)

Content

Here is where you will see what content people are looking at. For bloggers you will find the directory ( / ) will get the most traffic. This of course is your main page which changes as you add new content.

This section will give you information on:

• Top Content – top posts and the number of visits/pageviews/time spent and the % exits from that particular post.
• Navigation Summary – Including Entrance and Exit Pages, content drill down by directory.
• Site Overlay – If you want to see visually where your guest are clicking the most you can use the site overlay. This opens your blog page and shows percentage of click through on each link during the time chosen.

Goals

This is where you can set up conversion goals such as downloads, or link goals.  This is a great way to measure your success. More on this in Google Analytics for Bloggers Part 4: Measure Your Success.

Once you have an idea of the different sections you can set up your dashboard by adding and removing modules. Which modules you choose will be based on what metrics you feel are most important to use a blogger. I find that the information I look at the most outside of the standard visitors graph at the top are:

• Keywords
• Map Overlay
• Content Overview
• Traffic Overview

To set up your dashboard you can simply click “Add to Dashboard” within any of the sections you want to add (that aren’t already there!)

You will see this at the top of each section-

You can also move around the modules by dragging and dropping, until you have them in the order you prefer.

Now it is time to use Google Analytics to Grow Your Blog and Measure Your Success (Part 4 – Coming Soon!).

As always  – connect on Twitter and Google Friend Connetc (right hand side)

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Tags: google analytics, how to, roi, Web Analytics