Learning to use Google Analytics Basic Metrics to Increase Blog Traffic

I am a novice blogger and user of Google Analytics.  This week was a big learning experience for me, so try not to laugh too much at my exploits.  In this week’s assignment we were to install Google Analytics to our blogs and generate traffic so we would have Web metrics to analyze.  After I installed my Google Analytics (on the third try, good thing practice makes perfect) I browsed over to all of my classmates blog sites (see blog roll), leaving a comment here or there expecting they would be doing the same.  Later in the week I checked my analytics and surprise, I only had 7 visits!  As Tekula of Unstuck Digital says, I was “shouting into the echo chamber – no audience or traffic to speak of, we may as well be writing in marble notebooks and hiding them under our pillows”.  Learning experience number one, it is hard to analyze metrics without visitors.    

After strumming my fingers on the edge of the computer and furrowing my brow, I pointed my browser over to Facebook to see if I could generate a few more visits so that I would have a little more data to analyze.  I posted the link and then went back to Google Analytics to see if I could watch any of the magical visits happen in the real-time report.  Sure enough I could see 4, 5, and then 9 people active on my blog site, all referred from Facebook (I love my friends, thank you).  However, I was surprised that I could not see the visit from my direct link from my iPad mini using the Opera Mini browser, or my click on the link through Facebook.  What else I am not seeing in Google Analytics?  I also wondered to myself if Google Analytics knew it was me by being signed into my Google account on the iPad even though I was using a different browser?  Learning experience number two - be patient, Google Analytics does not show every metric in real-time.  However, if I was a blog promoting a product or special of some sort the real-time data could become especially useful to see what promotions are working most effectively with your audience. 

According to Tekula, if I was going to continue to grow my blog visitors the best metrics for me to evaluate include traffic data from search engines and traffic from referring websites, as well as the top pages and posts from your blog.  When looking at my Google Analytics account I can see that almost all of my visitors came from a referring site (Facebook), or directly typed in the address and that only one visitor found my page via search engine.  I would need to work on this if I wanted to keep growing my blog traffic.  As my visitors from search engines increase it will also be important to look at what keywords people are searching to find my blog so that I can tailor blog posts to what readers are interesting in reading.  Bhagat  says, “Keyword research is one of the most essential techniques in the search engine marketing.  This can help your blog to gain more organic traffic from search engines”.  Learning experience number three, growing organic search traffic takes time.  So I will be watching my traffic sources in the future, as well as looking at keywords to increase organic traffic.

Gunelius agrees with Tekula, another way to increase blog traffic is to look at which blog posts are getting the most page views.  “You can look for content that is currently getting a lot of page views or has been trending up and gaining morepage views over time”.  So I looked at my Google Analytics to determine which of my pages/posts were getting the most traffic and I realized I did not really have my blog set up very well to determine that information.  I had my post completely displayed on the main page so that all posts were shown in their entirety as you scrolled down the page.  If you do not have to click to see the post then you are not going to generate page views for the most popular posts. 

Luckily, I caught this before I posted the link to Facebook to generate more traffic.  So I was able to edit my posts to include a jump break where readers have to click “read more” to see the rest of the post.  This enabled me to see that my most popular post so far with 12 page views was “Know your objectives before spending with Google Adwords or Facebook Ads.”  This seemed reasonable to me since people are always wondering where to spend their advertising dollars and are looking for advice.  So maybe in the future I will write more about those topics.  If I really wanted to grow my audience I could use either or both of those advertising methods to increase my traffic and write about my experiences.  Learning experience number four, sometimes formatting is really important to generating analytics. 

Lastly, I wanted to look at how long visitors were staying on my blog.  According to Easley, “The goal is to find out ways to keep people on the site for longer than 3 minutes”.  So how did my blog measure up?  My average visit duration was two minutes and ten seconds, fifty seconds shy of the three minute mark.  Apparently I have a ways to go to more engaging visits.  Perhaps I need to write longer blog posts.  This metric will be one to watch in hopes that it begins to trend up the more experience I have blogging.  Just before finishing this assignment I had made it all the way from 7 visits up to 28!  Wow, that feels like a lot comparatively, but also feels like nothing.  It is great how looking at a few simple metrics can tell you so many things, even when you do not have a lot of data!  Here is to improved future blogging and lots more metrics to analyze!  What have been the most valuable lessons you have learned in beginning to blog?  

                        

References

Bhagat, D.  (2012, October 31).  10 basic blog tips to increase your traffic instantly [Web log].  Basic Blog Tips:  Helping you build a better blog.  Retrieved from http://basicblogtips.com/tips-to-increase-traffic-instantly.html 

Easley, K.  (2012, August 6).  How to increase average time spent on site [Web log].  We blog better:  blogging tips for a better blog.  Retrieved from http://weblogbetter.com/2012/08/06/how-to-increase-average-time-spent-on-site/ 

Gunelius, S.  (2013, February 9). 5 ways to use web analytics data to write better blog posts: Increase blog traffic by writing posts that people want to read [Web log].  About.com Computer Blogging.  Retrieved from http://weblogs.about.com/od/writingablog/tp/5-Ways-To-Use-Web-Analytics-Data-To-Write-Better-Blog-Posts.htm 

Tekula, M.  (n.d.).  The Blogger’s Guide to Google Analytics [Web log].  Unstuck digital.  Retrieved from http://unstuckdigital.com/bloggers-guide-to-google-analytics/