Google Analytics is an amazing tool for anyone with a website. There’s a bunch of useful data that can help you track and plan ahead for your business once you install it. But it’s so robust that it’s easy to become overwhelmed by Google Analytics. Where are you supposed to start?
If you’re a blogger, there are five key pieces I recommend you look at and get comfortable with first before going into an even deeper dive of Google Analytics’ features.
An important thing to note, first: the data in Google Analytics is determined based on the date range you provide. It typically defaults to the previous 7 days, but you’ll want to change it for the time frame you’re interested in. I recommend looking at the previous month or previous 30 days. You can change your date range in the upper right corner of any Google Analytics page.
Pageviews
Where to Find It: Behavior > Overview
First, you want to get a handle on your pageviews. If you’re entirely overwhelmed by Google Analytics, start with this one stat. It tells you how many times a page on your site was viewed. It doesn’t matter who viewed it or how many other pages they went to. If I visit your site today and visit 3 different pages, that’s 3 pageviews.
This is helpful because it tells you in general how much traffic you’re getting to your site. It’s a good number to have in your head, because things like ad networks, affiliate marketing companies, and website hosting companies will use monthly pageviews as a benchmark. You can’t join until you hit x many pageviews, you’ll want this hosting plan if you have x many pageviews, etc.
Users
Where to Find It: Behavior > Overview
Similar to pageviews, users tell you how many people have been on your site during the set time period. So, if I go to your website twice and view 3 pages each time, that’s 6 pageviews, but only 1 user. This is important because it gives you a little bit of a clearer picture on your traffic. Sure, you’re getting 1,000 pageviews per month, but is it all from 1,000 individual people who viewed one page and then left? If so, you’ve got a retention problem.
An important thing to note about users: the count is based on the IP address accessing your site, not the actual person. So, if I visit your site on my computer and then later access it on my phone, that’s two users, even though it’s one person.
Popular Pages
Where to Find It: Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Next up is popular pages. This will show you where people are going when they visit your site. Keep in mind that the lingo is a little bit different between WordPress and Google Analytics. Posts and pages are two different things in WordPress, but in Google Analytics, a blog post is consider a page. So popular pages is looking at your most popular posts and pages combined.
It will automatically show you your 10 most popular pages based on how many pageviews it had in the given time period, but you can also sort it by other factors like the average time on page, the bounce rate, etc.
P.S. Don’t forget to download the ultimate blogging spreadsheet!
Bounce Rate
Where to Find It: Behavior > Overview
Speaking of bounce rate, that’s an important stat to keep in mind. Remember when I said it’s important to compare your pageviews to the number of users accessing your site? Bounce rate is a similar statistic! It’s the percentage users who viewed only one page and then left your website.
So what’s an ideal bounce rate? It depends entirely on the type of website you have. Businesses want to get as low of a bounce rate as possible, but if you’ve got a bounce rate less than about 20%, there’s probably something wrong with your Google Analytics installation. For blogs, on the other hand, most of our traffic comes from sources like Pinterest where someone finds a blog post, reads it, and then moves on to something else, so our bounce rates are quite a bit higher. A good goal would be to get your bounce rate between 70% and 80%.
To decrease your bounce rate (because remember, a lower bounce rate is better than a higher one), make sure you’re linking within your blog post and on your sidebar (if you have one) to other content on your website.
Users by Source
Where to Find It: Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium
And finally, check out where people are coming from. Google Analytics has an awesome resource known as Users by Source, where it tells you where the users on your site came from to get on your website. You might see things like “google / organic,” which means they searched for a term on Google and found your blog in the organic, non-paid results. Or you might see “(direct) / (none),” which means they typed or pasted your URL directly into their web browser. Other common ones are “pinterest.com / referral,” “facebook.com / referral,” etc.
This is important to keep in mind because it can tell you where to put your marketing efforts. If you’ve heard that Pinterest can be a really good traffic source for bloggers, but it’s listed as your #10 most popular source, you know you should give it a little bit more attention to try to boost your traffic through Pinterest. It will also tell you what you should keep doing because it’s working.
Don’t be overwhelmed by Google Analytics! Start small with a few key pieces of information and you’ll be way more comfortable in no time.
Oh, and don’t forget to download the ultimate blogging spreadsheet so you can begin tracking your stats monthly!
P.S. Now that you’re a little less overwhelmed by Google Analytics, check out the Google Analytics Glossary to figure out what the heck all of those other stats mean!
