How To Measure Your Success: Google Analytics Explained

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Analytics are definitely your best friend when it comes to measure the performances of your website and to check if your visitors are really reading what you’d want them to read. In addition, analytics help you to tweak your website in order to reach a certain goal more easily, whether it is a sale or simply the subscription to your RSS feed.

The best in class in this field is certainly Google Analytics and a good knowledge of this tool lets you achieve better performances for your website.

The starting point for your analytics tour is on your left sidebar. There you can find all the main areas of interest and as soon as you start playing with them you’ll immediately realize you are in front of a very, very powerful tool.

The Dashboard

It provides you with a summary of what’s going on on your site. By default it gives you an overview of the last month, sometimes it is useful, other times it’s not much relevant. In fact, sometimes you would rather analyze what happened in a shorter time range, such as the last week or just even yesterday, than a month.

To achieve this, you can just specify the range of interest. Keep in mind that you can also watch the current day, by just inserting “today” as the final date of the interval.

In my case, I usually use to watch the last one or two days in order to see how my latest blog posts are performing, but the dashboard is not usually enough for this purpose.

(the traffic drop is due to the time when I took the snapshots…., don’t worry!)

Visitors

That’s not usually a section I watch too much. It provides an insightful analysis on the segmentation of your users, based on their location, browser used, OS and so on. It’s very interesting to know where your audience comes from but it’s not that interesting to me knowing that my readers use Firefox rather than Opera. In the map below it’s funny to see how low is the percentage of my users coming from Italy despite I’m italian…

Traffic Sources

This is a key area of your analytics. It helps you to understand where your visitors are coming from and to check whether your marketing efforts are leading the expected results or not. Sometimes it’s also very useful if someone quoted you somewhere or named/reviewed your product/service.

You can see an overview or a breakdown of your traffic into main categories:

- direct: in this case people opened your website/blog by directly inserting a link in the browser toolbar

- referring: other sites are linking your content and people are coming from there

- search engines: visitors found you through search engines

- keywords: what do people write on the search engine’s edit box in order to find your content?

- ads: if you have some ongoing campaigns, many (in some cases most) people come from there (but in this case you are paying for them!)

For example, here are the keywords people used most and that led them to discover my site on Google in the past two days. “Cool Facebook Status” ????

Content

The content section lets you analyze how your content is performing. How popular is becoming the blog post I wrote yesterday? What are the main sources of traffic? The content section is very helpful for this. In the example below, I’m watching how my post on the Top 30 Twitter VoIP Leaders is performing and what the main sources of traffic have been in the last three days.

Please look at the very low bounce rate. This post has been very sticky for visitors since only 19.16% of them left my blog after coming accross that. The remaining 80.84% jumped to another page of my blog and kept browsing other articles (that is, more pageviews). Read below for more info about the concept of “bounce rate”.

That being said,  you can easily click on “Entrance sources” on the right bottom of the page and check where the visitors of a specific web page are coming from (always during the three days under analysis)

Thanks Tom Keating for some good traffic in the last three days

Bounce Rate

That’s a very important parameter to see how sticky your content is (see the comment above). When new visitors come accross your website, there are two alternatives: 1) they just quickly scan your content to see if he finds something interesting then leave or 2) they click on other links to read more and browse other sections of your website/blog. The former visitors “bounced” while the latter brought to your site more than one pageview. The more visitors behave like the latter, the lower is your bounce rate (better).

Conversions

When people arrive to my website, I would like them to subscribe to my RSS feed. If it happens, I reached a goal. Well, Google Analytics lets you set your goals and measure how your website “helps” to achieve this result. It’s very useful to test different contents and see the one which performs better. For e-commerce websites and landing pages, this is very critical, since in most cases more convertions mean more money / more new customers.

Pageviews

While unique visitors is a very important parameter, if your blog/website makes use of Google Adsense, the more pageviews you get, the more you are likely to make money with that. For that reason, decreasing the bounce rate is very important and there are multiple factors which can lead to significative results. I would recommend to take a look at how I succeeded in doubling my pageviews in two weeks (almost three times in three weeks now…).

Those above are just the basics parameters/options you need to keep track of and use in order to understand how your website/blog is performing. More advanced views are available with Google Analytics but it’s important that you firstly become familiar with the basics then, if you are curious, a deeper understanding of this powerful tool is just some clicks away.

If you liked this post, you MUST read how I doubled my blog’s pageviews in two weeks.

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Tagged as: Google Analytics, luca filigheddu, RSS, tutorial, Web search engine