Google Analytics is a handy tool you can add to your blog absolutely free. It provides information to help you fine-tune your website and your business.
Take a look at some of the information Google Analytics offers and how you can use this information to your advantage.
A Google analytics report breaks down the information into a multiple sections. These sections include:
Site Usage Report which includes:
* Visits – Total number of visits to your site
* Page views – Total number of pages visitors looked at
* Pages/visit – Average number of pages viewed per visit
* Bounce rate – The percentage of users who left after viewing only one page on your site. Ideally, you want this to be under 50%
* Average time on site – How long a visitor stayed on your website
* New visits – The percentage of people who haven’t visited your site before.
Visitor Overview – this section breaks down the visitor information into more detail including the number of pages viewed overall and the average page view per visit.
This information can be invaluable. However, it takes a bit of analysis to find the noteworthy information. For example, if you notice that there are only three page views per visit that might concern you. It means people aren’t spending much time on your website.
However, if the majority of your visits are not new visitors, meaning people are coming back to your site for information, then the number of page views may not be a concern. It’s likely that the visitors are just reading your new content.
Traffic Source overview – This section tells where your traffic comes from. It lists how many visitors came from organic (or natural unpaid) search engine traffic versus how many came from direct traffic (typing your URL into their brower) versus from referring sites.
You can use this information to fine tune your traffic generation strategies. For example, if you find that 60% of your visitors are coming from Google Organic, that’s good. However, if only 15% are coming from referring sites, you may want to increase your link building strategy.
Likewise, if you find you have low Google organic numbers, you would then know it’s time to work on your keyword placement and optimizing your content and your site.
The traffic source overview also tells you what top keywords people used to find your content. This is of course extremely helpful when creating your content plan and learning what keywords people use and what they’re looking for on your website.
Content Overview – This section of the report lists the top content and the page views for each piece. This is ideal information for building and creating your content strategy. It’s more beneficial however, if you compare the information over time and look for trends.
Is your top article always a tips sheet? Is it always on the same basic topic?
Google Analytics compares your present week to the prior week. However it’s more advantageous to look at your content overview information over a longer period of time.
Google analytics provides valuable information for you to fine tune your keyword strategy. It helps you learn what content people prefer on your site. And it helps you learn where your visitors are coming from so you can adjust your traffic generation strategies as needed.
It’s not a crystal ball that can put you inside the minds of your prospects and visitors. However, the information Google Analytics provides is extremely useful to build your business and your business website.
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