Ever since I’ve been blogging, I’ve always shouted about how important it is that you connect your blog to Google Analytics. Far too often bloggers are relying on WordPress or Blogger analytics which isn’t accurate when it comes to analytics. Sure, Google isn’t perfect either, but it’s definitely the closest to true figures that you’re going to get.
A big mistake I was making when I first started blogging was that I was counting my own pageviews. So whilst I thought I was getting thousands of views every month, I was probably only making a few hundred. Sucks, right? So I swiftly connected my blog to Google Analytics, discounted my own IP address and starting collecting the true numbers. And then I fell into the trap of everything else you can discover in GA, from top content, types of visitors, and what they’re doing on my site. Have a read to see why you should be using GA, and some starting metrics to take a look at.
How to connect your blog to Google Analytics
Setting up on Google Analytics is pretty simple. Make a Google Account, and set up Analytics here. You’ll need to fill in a few details about your website, and you’ll be given a tracking code to place within your websites HTML – this can be the confusing part!
Essentially, this tracking code needs to be on every part of your site. To do this, you can put it within the header or footer section of your HTML. Contact your host if you’re not sure, they should be able to do this. If not, there’s a lot of handy articles online.
Filtering internal traffic
To avoid tracking your own activity on your website, you’ll want to filter internal traffic. To do this, you’ll need to find your IP address (google ‘What’s my IP address?’), and add it under Filters under Admin in Google Analytics. See how I’ve set mine up below.
3 Google Analytics Metrics to look at
Once you’re set up in GA, there are hundreds of things you can find out. I took part in a few free online courses to learn more about Analytics, but here are a few things you can get started with:
Where is your blog traffic coming from?
Find out what sources are driving your traffic using the Aquisition tool. You can see whether traffis is driven from Organic Search or Social under the ‘All Traffic’ and ‘Channels Tab’.
In the screenshot below, I can see that Organic Search is my top driver, with Social second. I can have a deeper look at what Social platforms are driving my traffic from clicking on this..
Here I can see Twitter drives the most traffic, so I know my self-promoting tweets work. Likewise, Pinterest drives 20% of my social traffic, so perhaps that’s something to focus more time and energy into in the future…
What is your top-performing content?
As a blogger, you’re going to want to know what content performs well so you can create more of it. Understand your user’s Behaviour using the ‘Behaviours’ tab, then look at your pages under ‘Site Content’. Using this you’ll be able to see the most viewed pages on your site.
From the screenshot below I can see that my top blog post is my review of Primark’s beauty range, generating over 10% of all page views in this time limit. I can also see that users spent over 4 minutes on this page on average – pretty impressive!
On deeper analysis, you can use this handy metric to find what pieces of content perform best – is it beauty or fashion-focused? Reviews or think pieces? This little bit of insight can drive what content you produce and ultimately lead to more page views in the long run.
Who’s reading your blog?
We all have an idea of who our blogs are targetted at, but is that demographic actually the end-user? Find out more about your audience under the ‘Audience tab’.
Under Demographics you can look at the age range and gender of our visitors. So I know the majority of mine are aged 25-34, and female, which matches my content.
I can also see how many of my visitors are returning under ‘Behaviour’ and ‘New vs. Returning’.
Despite having 14k sessions in this time zone, only 23% of them were returning visitors. We all want loyal and returning users when it comes to running a blog, so this is an important metric to keep and eye on and try to improve.
And there we have it! Have I convinced you to get set up with Google Analytics? Let me know your thoughts and I’ll write another post soon on the wonders you can find about your blog.
Lucy x
