Google Analytics: Metrics Worth Tracking

Under­stand­ing the impor­tance of sta­tis­tics for your blog is an impor­tant step in devel­op­ing your blog.  The best way to find suc­cess is by mea­sur­ing per­for­mance and striv­ing to improve it.

Now do not get me wrong, spend­ing hours every day look­ing at them will not help you.  That is too much time spent on num­bers and not enough for pro­mot­ing and writ­ing new con­tent.  Those ele­ments are still the most impor­tant part of blog­ging.  But learn­ing how to intel­li­gently improve your blog will help you strate­gi­cally tar­get your next moves towards success.

What Blog Sta­tis­tics Pro­gram Should I Use?

The first thing to under­stand is that there are dif­fer­ences in sta­tis­ti­cal ana­lyza­tion pro­grams.  These dif­fer­ences are in source of infor­ma­tion and qual­ity of statistics.

The source of infor­ma­tion refers to whether the sta­tis­tics are com­ing directly from your host­ing ser­vice, for exam­ple Host­ga­tor offers sta­tis­tics for every blog they host.  Another source of sta­tis­tics is through third party soft­ware like Google’s Ana­lyt­ics.  Although both sources have their pro’s and con’s we must weigh the options.

Host­ing Ser­vice Ana­lyt­ics — Using the ser­vice your host pro­vides is an easy way to track your sta­tis­tics and mea­sure your traf­fic on your blog.  For some this infor­ma­tion will be dif­fi­cult to find and once found the num­bers might be very con­fus­ing in their raw for­mats.  The one sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fit of host­ing ana­lyt­ics pro­grams is the qual­ity of sta­tis­tics.  Although in their raw form, the num­bers are most cor­rect directly through the host service.

The rea­son being that any third party met­ric track­ing sys­tem like Google’s Ana­lyt­ics or Siteme­ter may lose some of your num­bers through the process of extract­ing data to their third party site.  This occur­rence is not sig­nif­i­cant but some­thing to be aware of.

Google Ana­lyt­ics — Now I could put Siteme­ter or many other pro­grams in this posi­tion but in my opin­ion Google’s sys­tem is the eas­i­est to under­stand, pret­ti­est to view, and most rel­e­vant to my needs.

I rec­om­mend Google Ana­lyt­ics for easy track­ing, view­ing and ana­lyz­ing all of your blog’s sta­tis­tics.  The process of inputting their code into your blog is sim­ple (mat­ter of fact most themes have a place to put them built in, like The­sis theme) and using the site is very easy.

I per­son­ally like the vis­i­bil­ity of the sta­tis­tics.  If you can see the num­bers in graphs and charts they actu­ally start to mean some­thing to your blog.  So let’s get started with learn­ing some of the less known ways to use Google Ana­lyt­ics.

Met­rics: Google Analytics

Look­ing at the Dash­board is the eas­i­est way to see what is hap­pen­ing on your blog.  Met­rics are divided into 3 major cat­e­gories: Vis­i­tors, Traf­fic Sources, and Con­tent.  The Dash­board pro­vides a very nice line graph, pie chart, map over­lay, and some raw num­bers to make a quick analy­sis very easy on a daily basis.

About once a week or every other week you should con­duct a more thor­ough analy­sis of your blog.  Sta­tis­tics can tell you a lot about your blog.  It will show you what is work­ing and what needs improve­ment.  It may also help you man­age your time bet­ter.  So let’s dive in with some spe­cific metrics.

Vis­i­tors: Trend­ing

An impor­tant func­tion I use when ana­lyz­ing data for my blog­ging tips blogs is trend­ing.  This just means the gen­eral ten­dency or direc­tion in which your blog is going.  You might be inter­ested in that just a lit­tle bit.

To use this sta­tis­tic well focus in on a few less com­mon met­rics, Absolute Unique Vis­i­tors, Aver­age Pageviews, and Time on Site.  The other met­rics you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with, but these met­rics will help you guage your improvent and focus on 2 ele­ments nec­es­sary for blog­ging suc­cess.  New vis­tors and depth of vis­its.  Using these sta­tis­tics you can find how your blog is doing in pro­duc­ing unique views and how long peo­ple look at your blog.  If the time is short they prob­a­bly are not really read­ing your articles.

Vis­i­tors: Loy­alty

Work­ing with Trend­ing, Loy­alty helps you to get a good feel for what your vis­i­tors are actu­ally doing.  It is impor­tant to be open to see­ing things the way the vis­i­tor does.  Oth­er­wise improve­ments are dif­fi­cult to make.  Using loy­alty you can gauge that if the depth of visit is short, 1 pageview, then your nav­i­ga­tion needs to increase.  Or per­haps the key­words your arti­cles are being found on are not what the reader is expecting.

More Google Metrics

There are dozens of met­rics Google offers in their ser­vices.  Start to explore them and find out what you can learn about your read­ers and their habits on your blog.

Due to depth this topic needs to be dis­cussed prop­erly, a guide is being pro­duced to follow-up this topic with detailed infor­ma­tion about the dif­fer­ent met­rics.  It will explain what the met­rics mean and how you can improve your site through using them.

Look for­ward to this next guide to Google Ana­lyt­ics where we will dis­cuss step by step how to install and use each met­ric.  Using a sta­tis­tics pro­gram to gauge your blog’s suc­cess is impor­tant to also under­stand­ing your blog’s needs.  So explore Google Ana­lyt­ics, get to know the sta­tis­tics, ask ques­tions in the com­ments, and pre­pare for an in-depth analy­sis of each sta­tis­ti­cal met­ric on Google Ana­lyt­ics.

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