Wrangling Google Analytics

Now that we've got a few weeks of data, let's look at what Analytics is telling us about our site and our visitors.  Hop over to the Analytics home page, click on the View Report link by your site (if you have more than one) and you should get a dashboard view of what's been happening on your site.  This gives you the high-level view of what's going on.  Let's drill down a few items.

Click on "Traffic Sources" in the left-hand sidebar.  This view splits up your visitors into three major chunks: those that typed your blog's URL in their address bar (direct traffic), those that followed a link on another site (referred traffic, this includes links in web-based email programs such as Gmail) and those who found your blog via a search engine.  Click on the links for any of those titles to be taken to a graph showing that segment of your visitors over time.

In general, that's how Analytics works: as you drill down you get much the same information but for smaller and smaller segments of your visitors.

Now, click on "Keywords" under "Traffic Sources" in the left-hand sidebar to see how folks arrived at your blog.  Occasionally, you end up with a weird entry or three... A previous session of this class had one visitor searching for Linda Ronstadt on July 1st.  You can ignore those oddballs until they start getting into your top 10% of keyword searches.

Now take a look at the top few keyword searches for your blog.  Did these readers have a good time?  Did they find compelling content?  You can tell by looking at the Bounce Rate and the Pages/Visit statistics.  Someone "bounces" when they click through to your site and then leave.  However it says nothing about how much time they spent reading the page they arrived on – they would have to follow a link elsewhere in your blog to register some time on the site with Analytics.  Look at your top few search terms and see if those readers are enjoying your content.  A low bounce rate or high pages/visit indicates that they are.

Click on "Content" followed by "Top Content" in the left-hand sidebar.  This gives a list of the most popular pages in your blog.  Often your blog's home page ("/") will be the top scorer by a wide margin.  To see details for a given page, click the link.  Once on the Content Detail page, you can select "Entrance Keywords" from the "Analyze" drop down (just under the graph) to see what search keywords brought readers to that page.  Again, pay attention to the bounce rate on your popular pages to see if people enjoy what they see.

As you can tell from this very brief overview, Analytics offers a wealth of information about your blog.  If you wanted to advertise your blog, Analytics an provide data to tell you if that ad campaign is working or not.  Lots more information can be found in the Google Analytics help pages.