Valuable Google Analytics Measurements

Google Analytics is an incredible tool that helps track web metrics for websites. One of the best features is that it is free, which allows small and large companies alike to utilize the same types of measurements. This tool can be a goldmine for a company, given that the company knows what their goals are, how to use the tool, and how to analyze the data provided to make informed decisions on their site and brand activity.

For this class, I added a Google Analytics tag to my blog a few weeks ago to begin tracking visitor data and behavior. I will be honest that it was a rough start! I could not get the Google Analytics code to work with the current blog template I had applied, and after rotating between various templates over a two-day period I finally resorted to converting my blog back to the default Blogger template. Getting my tracking up and running was more important than making my blog background look cool! Once I confirmed the code was installed and tracking properly, I began sharing my blog URL with friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail with the intention of driving traffic and get data on visitors other than myself. While this blog is definitely in its infancy, I did see a flow of visitors arriving at my site and I was able to start diving into the Google Analytics tool and play around with pulling information.

The first part of the tool data that I began looking through was the Audience Overview section. This section showed me through graphs and summed up data that I had a total of 38 visits to my blog, 18 of which were unique visitors. It is important to know the difference between visits and visitors, since the GA tool measures both. Our lesson this week defines the two very well -“Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session. The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.” (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) The number of pages per visit was about 3.33, which I think is pretty good considering at the time of the analysis I only had four blog posts total on the blog! The visit duration was around 4:25 (minutes: seconds). Pages per visit and the average visit duration really show a picture that the visitors to my site found the content to be somewhat interesting in order to go through multiple pages or blog posts in a visit, and spend a few minutes reading through the content. Understanding these numbers can help me cater posts in the future to these interest levels, and gauge how the visitors are engaging with the content provided on my blog.

The next few measurements and data points I looked at through June 24, 2012, include demographic information, system information, and mobile information. The demographic information allows me to see the language of my visitors (all English), the country that my visitors are visiting from (all the United States), and even down to the city level (friends and family from the Dallas, TX area and San Francisco, CA area).  As detailed information that I can receive about who my visitors are, and where they come from, can help me better target them and others like them to drive more traffic to my blog. Under the System area, I am able to view the browsers that visitors used to access my blog (Safari 63%, Chrome 27%, and Firefox 9%), as well as the operating system (primarily iOS), and even the service provider (Verizon primarily)! The ability to be able to track down to the service provider of the internet used to browse my blog really made this tool unique to me. Something about that statistic, how specific it can get, really made me realize the potential this tool has to really provide detailed information about visitors. The mobile information provided allowed me to view the operating system, service provider and screen resolution of the mobile devices visitors used to view my blog. This information can definitely take optimizations of a blog to the next level. Since so much of social media is being consumed through mobile devices rather than web browsers, it is critical that a blog or company website be viewable and user friendly for mobile browsing. Knowing the type of devices being used to access the site, as well as the top screen resolutions could allow for prioritization of optimizing the mobile web design to these sizes and devices.

The last few analytics I took a deep look at were regarding the sources of the visits to my blog. These cold be viewed all together, or separated by direct traffic or referral traffic only. Much of my traffic was direct, meaning the friends and family members that I emailed my blog link to, or text the link to, directly entered the URL into their browser to access my blog. However, there were referrals from the Facebook link  I posted on my personal Facebook page, letting me know that some of the traffic to the blog was generated from that communication. This referral report also let me know that I received absolutely no traffic from Twitter, even though I tweeted my blog link and an invitation to view my blog to my followers and friends. This clearly is showing me that while I am pushing messages out to hundreds of people through Twitter, the communication is not working to drive the traffic necessary. So, I should either revise my communication strategy through that channel, or put more weight into other referral channels that are performing better.

What I chose to review from my Google Analytics dashboard was merely the tip of the iceberg of what this tool can really provide. If I had AdWords set up, and search campaigns going, this tool could provide an even deeper look at what these visitors find relevant and worthy of clicks to my blog. While I will not be launching a full blown campaign to promote my blog, I am excited to continue tweeting, emailing, and posting links on Facebook to continue to drive traffic to my blog and allow me to experience the different analyses available through the Google Analytics tool.

References:

Clotti, G. (n.d.). Top 5 Google Analytics reports for bloggers. DailyBlogTips. Retrieved June 24, 2012, from http://www.dailyblogtips.com/top-5-google-analytics-reports-for-bloggers/

Kaushik, A. (2010, December 6). 3 awesome, downloadable, custom web analytics reports. Occam’s Razor. Retrieved June 20, 2012, from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports/

P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU. (2012). Lesson 5: Google Analytics. Retrieved June 18, 2012, from the WVU eCampus website: https://ecampus.wvu.edu