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30DC Preseason Lesson 9: Google Analytics
By Dee-Dee M | July 2, 2009
Like most things in life if you want to improve or get better you need to implement a system of measurement, monitoring and testing. We see this principle in many aspects of our lives.
It is what our education system is based on… test and exams are not implemented just to stress out the student… they measure and monitor the students progress in learning.
It is used when we want to lose weight. You weigh yourself at the beginning to measure where you are; set a weight of where you want to be; you make changes in your diet and exercise to test what helps lose the pounds; then you monitor your results by regularly weighing yourself. Once you have reached your ideal weight you continue to monitor and tweak to maintain your weight at it’s optimum.
The same thing applies when you create a website that you want to make money from… measure, test, monitor. This is where the free traffic tracking service from Google helps us during the Thirty Day Challenge.
In lesson 9 of preseason GuruBob shows us how to set up Google Analytics in preparation for testing our challenge niches in August.
Using Google Analytics – 13:26min video
Tracking type and nature of traffic coming to our website and gives useful insight into the types of keywords people are using in the search engines which bring them to your site. Tracking (monitoring) and making changes (testing) over time we will see improvements in traffic volume and quality (buying visitors).
Setup and Installation of Google Analytics
Go to google.com/analytics and use your Google account details to sign in
Add website profile for as many domains, subdomains, and sub-directories as you wish. For a new domain profile enter the domain URL, select timezone, and click finish.
Google will configure the site profile and provide you with a profile ID and code to copy and paste into your website immediately above the closing body tag </body> on all the webpages you want to monitor.
(During the 30DC we will be using Blogs as websites to test our niches. As blogs use plugins we will be using up a Google Analytics plugin which pastes the code into every page so we don’t have to and only requires us to add the Google Analytics profile ID to the plugin settings.)
Once the code has been installed test it by going to the Google Analytics site profile and click on “Check Staus” link at top of profile.
Veiwing Google Analytics Data
The Dashboard summarizes the data of your site profile for the last 30 days. the time period can be changed.
Visits:
- Top graph: shows number of visits by day
Site Usage:
- Site Usage: shows total visits for period
- Pageviews: shows total page views for period
- Pages viewed/visit: shows average page views per visitor
- Bounce Rate: shows percentage of visitors leave immediately
- Average Time on Site: average time spent on site per visitor
- % New Visits: shows non returning visits
Visitor Overveiw: Smaller visitor graph
Map Overlay: Shows which country your visitors are coming from
Traffic Sources Overview: Shows where yout traffic is being refferred from: Search Enges, Referring Sites (backlinks) and Direct Traffic
Content Overview: Shows top 5 pages being visited and how many visits per page
More specific info for each of these is available by clicking “view report” on each
The left side bar has links for Visitors, Traffic Sources, and Content.
Visitors:
- Benchmarking: baselines of your visit stats
- Map Overlay: which countries your traffic is coming from
- New vs Returning: caomparison between them
- Languages: what languages of visitors
- Visitor Trending: visitor trends
- Visitor Loyalty: repeat visits, recency, length of visit, depth of visit (page-views)
- Browser Capabilities: details of visitors browser, operating system, screen details, Flash versions, Java Support
- Network Properties: details of ISPs, Hosts and connection speeds
Traffic Sources:
- Direct Traffic: visit directly to site (browser bookmark)
- Referring Sites: backlinks from other sites
- Search Engines: visits from search engine result pages (SERP)
- All Traffic Sources: summary of above
- Adwords: visits from Adwords campaigns
- Keywords: Keyword phrases you rank for
- Campaigns: Adwords Campaigns
- Ad Versions: Adwords Split tests
Content:
- Top content: Page popularity
- Content by Title: Page Title Popularity
- Content Drilldown: Stats for each page
- Top Landing Pages: Most popular pages used to enter site
- Top Exit Pages: most popular pages and links used to leave site
- Site Overlay: Link to site
As you can clearly see Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about your site visitors that you can use to measure and improve your site’s effectiveness. This is why Google Analytics is a key tool to doing the 30 Day Challenge and testing our niche ideas and markets.
If you already have a website or blog that hasn’t got Google Analytics installed do it now so you can become familiar with the service before using it during the 30DC.
If you don’t have a website or blog at the moment don’t worry… you will be creating one as part of the 30 Day Challenge and will be shown how to use Google Analytics to assess your new online project.
Topics: Pre-season 2009 | No Comments »