How To Use Google Analytics To Measure Your Blog's Success
Anyone who has logged into Google Analytics knows that it’s a beast. With so much information, how are you supposed to know what’s important? Below are the two things that I like to look at when I am trying to measure the blog’s success and look for things to improve.
The two most important areas to look at in Google Analytics:
1. Traffic sources - This section will tell you how people are coming to your blog, which gives you feedback on how well you are doing promoting your content. You can check what your top traffic sources are (likely your website, Google or Twitter) and the top keywords that people are using to find your blog in search.
• The referring traffic portion of the pie chart will show you all the traffic that comes from other websites (eg. your company’s site, Facebook, Twitter and any of your other social media endeavors). You can see exactly which referring source is driving the most traffic by clicking on “View Report” and then on “Referring Sites.” Spend the majority of your time promoting your blog content on the sites that are working the best already. You may also want to choose one of your social media platforms that is under-performing and work on increasing traffic from that site as well.
• The search traffic portion of the Google Analytics graph refers to all the visitors who found your blog organically on Google, Yahoo or Bing. If your blog is just starting out, it is likely that this will be a very small percentage of your traffic sources. As you implement SEO tactics and establish credibility with the search bots, you’ll watch that percentage grow.
2. Top content – This will tell you what blog posts are getting the most traffic and give you insight into what resonates with your readers. If you click on “Content Overview” you can see the top posts for any given time period. Make sure you set it to the time period that you want to measure. I usually check top content by month as well as for the overall in the history of the blog.
Once you have the list, I’d recommend taking a closer look at the ones that got the most traffic to figure out why. If you click on the title of the post, it will pull a report on just that post. Click on “Content Detail“ and then check “Entrance Sources.” This will tell you where people are coming from to find this particular post. If the number one source is Google you can then see which keywords people are using to find this post by going to “Entrance Keywords.”
You can then capitalize on your top posts by going back in and updating them. For instance, I wrote a post in August about Facebook contests for companies that continues to get traffic daily. It’s likely that a lot of this traffic is coming from people looking for info about the new regulations to Facebook contests, rather than a case study on how to run a successful contest. So, in order to capitalize on the traffic AND ensure our readers are getting the info they need, Katy wrote a post about the new rules for Facebook contests which I then linked to in an “update” to the original post.
With Google Analytics there are a whole lot of other fun things you can look at, but I have found the above two areas to be the most telling in shaping the way I measure success. How about you? Anything you find more useful to look at?
Continue reading here: How to raise your Klout score
Was this article helpful?
