Google Analytics

How do people find your blog? How do they navigate around it? Which posts are hot, and which are not? That's interesting to know, and that's why you could start using Google Analytics, as I do.

Google Analytics is a free tool, that gives you important and useful feedback on visitor behavior on your blog. The only thing you have to do is add some html/javascript code to your blog template, and set up your Google Analytics account, wait a few days, and watch the data roll in.

Start by setting up an account at Google Analytics. As a Blogger user you already have a Google account, and you use the same username and password to set up your Analytics account.
These steps are easy to follow, and will be done in just a few minutes.

Without any further setting-up, this easy setup will provide you already with interesting data. Let me show you some.

This picture shows part of the Google Analytics Desktop. 

Top left you see a graph that show the number of visitors to your blog, the number of page-views, and as a result the average number of page-views per visitor.
Top-right you can see that more than 40% of my visitor are regular ones. Bottom-right you can see where visitors come from. A lot of them seem to find my blog by means of google, but as you can see about 10% comes from Annie's Blogger University and from Ramani at Hackosphere. And bottom-left you can see where my visitors come from. All over the world, but mostly Europe, Asia and the US of A.

Now let's take a better look at sources and keywords on how people find my blog.

As you can see, google is by far the most important source for leading people to my blog. Ramani is a very good source to my blog: you can see that 227 visitors found Beautiful Beta through Hackosphere. And that number has gone up with 2% since the last period. The top 5 keywords that are used by people point out that most of them are looking for templates. This makes me realize that my blog's home page has no visible link to a templates page. You really have to scroll down to the labels widget, click 'templates', and then you can view 3 posts that have links to templates. So that is obviously a point to improve.
What D1 and D2 mean will be dealt with later.

Now let's take a look into the popularity of my content:

As you can see my home page receives the most hits, which is to be expected. Most popular posts are the Widget Installation and Downloads page and the new Blogger Beta Template page. So it would be a good idea to link to these posts from my sidebar. The information behind these simple screens is vast. Did you know that over 30% from the people who visited my downloadspage come from USA and Canada?

In a next tutorial I will tell more about defining Destination pages, setting up Conversion Funnels, and measuring Goals.