What is Google Analytics?
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Have You Ever Wondered What is Google Analytics?
If you are doing business online either with websites or blogs or both, then Google Analytics is a must!
Only available since 2006, many newcomers to the internet world are not aware how powerful and easy the basic system is.
Google analytics measures and reports on many statistics about websites. It measures traffic and traffic sources plus conversions and sales and is the most widely used service online.
Google analytics can also track visitors from all referrers, including search engines (such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, YouTube) and social networks (such as FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest), direct visits and referring sites.
You have no excuse for not becoming familiar with google analytics as it is free, and is vital if you have an online business or blog.
Come for a walk with me as I tell you a little about how I use google analytics with my blog.
If you want to learn google analytics, there are lots of training materials online, especially from the google analytics site itself.
What I did with my blog was install google analytics before I knew anything about how it worked or whether it would be useful to me.
Who Uses Google Analytics?
You might think this is only for the nerds and gurus who can pay some SEO genius to tell them how their website is performing.
I would disagree. You can easily install it on your site in just a few minutes. Then you can just let it accumulate the data for you while you learn what it does and what data is most useful for you.
For months, I have just been looking at the monthly visitor numbers. I also took photos of each month, which is not necessary as your google analytics account keeps all the information from the first day you install it.
I have only recently been starting to teach myself how to analyse what is happening with certain of my posts.
Which ones are visited the most? Which posts do people stay the longest on? When I first worked out how to compare specific pages for total number of visitors, I was amazed at which of my posts was the most popular!
It has had twice as many visitors as its nearest rival!
Watch this Fab Short Video by Chris Lockwood Showing How to Install Google Analytics to Your Empower Network Blog
My real interest in understanding the data from Google Analytics was triggered by a post I received earlier this week How To Find and Fix ‘Almost Awesome’ Blog Posts.
Having watched which of my posts were scoring well in google search by doing regular searches for them a few days and weeks after I published them, I thought I had a pretty good idea which posts were bringing all my leads.
How wrong I was!
So after reading the CrazyEgg blog post and not understanding every instruction, I thought, OK it’s time I learned how to read my own results and work on my biggest business investment, my blog.
So that is what has lead to this blog post. I hope it will encourage you to start understanding and benefiting from the data on how your posts are performing.
See, I can write this post about Google Analytics even though I’m not an expert on analysing my results. Anything I want to learn is online – just google it! My first search was made with the terms “teach me google analytics”.
So go for it – it’s your business after all!
Click below.
Til Tomorrow
