Google Analytics for Blogs
With everything bloggers have to do to stay competitive, it’s often the most confusing tasks that get set aside. Important aspects of successful blogging, like the traffic and analytics part of the game get overlooked. For most bloggers, the content and monetization efforts take precedence. Yet, understanding your traffic and the important numbers behind your analytics can help you become a much better blogger.
Understanding the Numbers
All numbers are not created equal. Relative importance will depend entirely on your specific blog objectives and how you’ve determined most appropriate to measure success (or lack thereof). Unless you have a team of traffic specialists, focus your efforts.
Benchmarking and trending are important. Most bloggers I’ve worked with tend to “spot” check their blog analytics, whenever it crosses their mind or they have a big launch. If you do this, you’re missing important trend information that can help you spot problems and opportunities in your traffic sources and more.
Keep everything in perspective. You won’t get the whole picture from any one metric alone. Understanding your audience and your blogging effectiveness will require that you use a set of numbers, comparing and making intelligent inferences from the group of metrics you choose to focus on.
The numbers can be intimidating. Take it all in strides. Let your goals guide the numbers you focus on. Browse the others, get familiar, and build your knowledge slowly. There’s no need to get obsessive about it 
Be consistent. Be faithful and timely in your analytics review. Slow and steady wins the race. At least once a week, make a plan to really learn from the numbers. You’ll be a better blogger for it.
Important Traffic Numbers
Returning Visitors
Whether or not a user returns to your blog, can tell a lot about your marketing efforts and even more about on-page factors, like usability and relevant, quality content. You need to have a decent number of returning visitors, or those that are not registered as new.
New Visitors
You’re going to need a consistent flow of new, targeted traffic. You also need loyal readers. It takes both to be successful over the long-term. This is a good number to watch with a trend perspective.
Page views
This number has a lot to do with usability. Blogs are funny creatures, without effort your blog will likely have a low page views per visit number, because of their nature. You promote, people come, read a post, and move on. Good bloggers will be creative in getting readers to dig deeper into the content.
Time on Page and Site
These two sets of numbers will tell you general information on how long users are actually staying on a particular page or the site as a whole. Shorter times indicate readers are skimming and not digging deeper or finding an interest in what you have to offer as far as content. For most bloggers, you’ll want to engage your reader enough to ensure they spent adequate time on your content. It also can be an indication of the quality of your content and whether you’re targeting the right audience.
Time on Page and Site
These two sets of numbers will tell you general information on how long users are actually staying on a particular page or the site as a whole. Shorter times indicate readers are skimming and not digging deeper or finding an interest in what you have to offer as far as content. For most bloggers, you’ll want to engage your reader enough to ensure they spent adequate time on your content. It also can be an indication of the quality of your content and whether you’re targeting the right audience.
Number of Subscribers
Obviously this is an important number. The best way to view subscribers is not in their sheer number, but from the perspective of trends. Unsubscribes in a large number or trends that show a slowing in subscribers can both be cause for further research.
Referring Sites
You obviously need to know where your traffic is coming from, and where it’s not coming from. Referring sites information can clue you into missed opportunities, marketing activities that are not paying off, strategic opportunities with other bloggers who are sending you traffic, and much more.
Bounce rate per referring site
You could be getting a thousand hits from a social bookmarking site, and perhaps thats a good measure for your make money blog. For a business, if the bounce rate of those hits was over 50%. Another referring site sent 400 hits with a bounce rate of 20%. These are things you need to look at as a blogger. You’ll understand better what to make time for and what to leave aside in marketing — and beyond.
Average time spent, per referring site
Again, you’re looking at the kind of traffic a referring site is sending your way. What’s the point in getting traffic if it doesn’t serve a purpose. There are instances when any traffic is good traffic. In blogging and business activities, it’s not likely one of those situations.
Keywords
You’ll want to know what keywords sent you traffic. Not only will this information help guide your SEO and search marketing efforts, but it will also highlight opportunities for traffic. What your getting traffic for, how that traffic is behaving after they arrive, and much more can be learned from this information.
You’re pulling in a ton of traffic with an extremely high bounce rate.
This may indicate you’re not pulling up in a space of relevance or timing for those terms. Are they intentional rankings? If so, was your keyword research a little off? If not, is there an opportunity for more traffic you can exploit with targeted research?
You have a major unintentional jump in traffic from specific keywords.
Can you trace how it happened? Can you duplicate the results? Is there an opportunity to build more traffic from the derivatives of those keywords?
Content by Title
In Google Analytics, and most analytic programs, you can see information specific to your blog post pages. Great information to look at frequently. Naturally, you want to spot traffic opportunities in content, like those posts that had the most hits and time spent, with a low bounce rate. Is there a content area that consistently brings in useless traffic, because readers either bounce or leave soon after?
Next Page
Next page information can let you know the path a user takes once they land on a page of your blog. If you’re looking to direct them in one particular direction (purchase, more info, etc), this can help indicate your success in call to action. It’s also a telling number if your next page is always the search feature or sitemap, they obviously are not finding what they need. That needs to be looked at. This number is especially important when your blog has landing pages and doubles as a website.
Heat Map (Links Clicked)
This information can be very important in understanding the usability and behavior of your blog visitors. It’s a visual representation of where people are actually clicking on a particular page. Ultimately, are your readers clicking on what you want them to click?
Internal Searches
If you’re using Google Custom Search and Google Analytics, this information is great when looked at with other numbers. You’ll learn about what your visitors search for on your blog, are they finding what they need? Are they just clueless and not the best targeted traffic? Are there hot topics your readers want to read about?
Note: You will have to activate Site Search on your analytics, under the Website Profile settings by clicking “Edit” next to site on your main Analytics page.
Goal Conversions
Google Analytics has a handy-dandy tool in Goal Conversions. Your able to track the conversion rate of your readers from one point to another, final point. You can track the conversions of email subscriptions, downloaded files, purchase, and more. Google’s goal conversions is a great, basic tool to help you understand if what you’re doing for a particular call to action, is working. Even for the newbie blogger, it’s worth the effort to set up Goal Conversions for your email subscriptions and download actions on your blog.
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