Now if you’re a fellow blogger or work in Digital Marketing, then I’m sure you understand the importance of a good analytics tool. There are quite a few out there, and some blog platforms actually offer their own analytics. But if you’re looking for the daddy of analytics, then there really is only one tool you should be working with. And that’s Google Analytics.
But don’t panic. I know when you first start working with Google Analytics it can be hard to navigate. I mean there is a lot of data to understand, dashboards to get to grips with and goals to set. But trust me, once you’ve mastered the basics (which, spoiler, aren’t that hard to master), you’re good to get cracking on with finding out as many insights as your heart desires. From knowing how many visitors your site receives and what type of content they like. To knowing what websites send traffic to your site and what pages are the most popular. Everything you want to know about your audience is in Google Analytics.
So let’s dive in and start with the basics. I’m assuming that you’ve already connected Google Analytics to your site? If not, then this post will be able to help you do just that.
OK, so you’re now connected to Analytics, let’s start with the home screen. On this page you can see all the basic information about your site. You can find an overview of users, sessions, bounce rate and session duration for the past seven days. It’s here that you can also find real time information and be able to see how many readers are on your site right now.
All this information is useful if a little limited. So let’s dive into the left hand menu and dig deep into what you can find out about your readers.
AUDIENCE > OVERVIEW
So let’s start with AUDIENCE > OVERVIEW. Here you can get, funnily enough, a great overview of your audience. You can look at sessions, users, page views, pages per session, average session duration, bounce rate and percentage of new sessions for any time period. And what’s great about this section of Analytics is that you can compare against two different time periods. But you can also compare against two different metrics if you wanted to.
So you could compare your page views versus your average session duration for the past 30 days, and the previous 30 days. For me I like to compare the past 30 days worth of activity with the previous 30 days to see if there’s been an improvement. But essentially, you can compare pretty much whatever you want to on this part of the tool.
AUDIENCE > DEMOGRAPHICS > OVERVIEW
This part of the tool pretty much does what it says on the tin. It gives you an overview of your audience broken down to gender and age. Which is really useful when working with brands. There’s no point pitching to a brand who feel that their core customer is female and aged 35-45 if your core audience are males ages 18-24.
AUDEINCE > GEO > LOCATION
As you’ve probably guessed, this part of the tool will give you an insight into where in the world your readers are. Which is not only really important when pitching to brands. But it’s also pretty interesting too. So from the brand side, it’s reassuring to let the brands you work with know that your audience lives in the countries they operate in. Again, it would be no use to anyone if you pitched to a UK based brand and 100% of your audience lives in the USA. But bear in mind that having a diverse audience can definitely work in your favour, especially if you’re pitching to brands that operate internationally.
And from the interesting side, I’m just nosey and love to know this kind of information. For my site, although the UK is primarily where the majority of my audience comes from. I also have a good chunk of my audience living in the States, Germany, France and Spain.
AUDIENCE > MOBILE > OVERVIEW
Again, it might seem like an obvious one, but this section lets you know what device people use to view your blog on. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I’d imagine, that the majority of your readers, read your blog on their mobile. Am I right? If so, make sure it’s mobile-friendly. And actually test out the experience your user receives. All too often we make changes to our blogs and view them on desktop. But if the majority of your audience read your blog on their phones. Make sure the changes work well for mobile too.
So we now know all the useful things about our audience. Including how long they spend on our site, where they live, what device they use to view our sites and what the age and gender breakdown is. Let’s move onto the more interesting part of the tool, what drives them to your site.
ACQUISITION > OVERVIEW
So we want to know where our visitors are coming from? Well the answer is on the overview page of acquisition. Here you can see at a glance where your highest traffic drivers are – so that could be organic search, social media, or referral from another website. But you can also see how much of your traffic is direct traffic – so people directly typing your URL into a browser.
One of the great things about this part of the tool is that you can just click on any traffic course for more information. For example if you click on social, you’ll be able to see how much traffic comes from each social media platform you’re on.
This doesn’t work quite so well when you click on organic search as the search terms aren’t always provided. But don’t panic, I’ve got a post in a couple of weeks all about how to use Google Console to find out what search terms people are using to find your site.
So know where know where people are coming from to read your content. Let’s move onto finding out what they engage with the most on your site.
BEHAVIOUR > SITE CONTENT > ALL PAGES
Ok now we’re at the really interesting part of the Google Analytics tool. Not only with this tell you what your most popular posts are for any given time frame. But it can all let you know what the bounce rates was for that post. The average time spent on that page. And even the percentage of people who then exited your site after reading the post.
So let’s break it down a little into the two biggest things you can do with the information on this page.
FIND YOUR MOST POPULAR POSTS
I love looking at this. Mainly because I find it so interesting. Sometimes the posts I think will do really well, don’t. Or the posts I didn’t think would do that well, turn out to be some of my most popular. It’s always interesting to see what content your readers really enjoy. Especially as it can help you plan the type of content that you know your readers will love.
Now the flip side to this, is that you can also find out what your worst performing posts are. Just click on the down arrow next to Page Views to see your worst performing posts and pages. Now you can choose what you do with these. I tend to delete them, if I think the content just doesn’t fit with the blog anymore. Or I update them.
WHAT ARE YOUR READERS SEARCHING FOR ON YOUR SITE
So this is a little trick I learnt a while ago, but if you type /?=s into the search field, you can find out all the searches people do on your site. Again, this is incredibly useful to know as you can see what your audience are interested in.
So that’s it. You’ve reached the end of probably my longest blog post EVER. But I hope it’s been useful! This is just the basics though. Keep your eyes peeled as I’ll be back with a more intermediate look at Google Analytics and how you can use it to boost your blog.
Let me know in the comments below whether you use the tool, and what is it about the tool that you’d love to know.
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