google analytics tips Every blog owner has been there: you log in to check your traffic and there’s been a spike or dip of epic proportions. A piddling number of visitors (or an inexplicable throng) have been to your page and you did nothing to bring it about.

The first couple of times this happened to me I thought “˜ah well, thus is the fickle nature of online readers’ and got on with things. I was using BlogPatrol at the time (steer clear of it) and began to get suspicious when the spikes/dips got bigger and more random. The final straw came when I checked my traffic for February 08 and found that it was vastly different to what I remembered. How can your February visitor numbers change after February is over?

There is a lot of unreliable traffic tracking software out there ““ actually I’d say you shouldn’t trust most of it.

Enter Google Analytics. Who better to track your site than a big reliable name, and the very people who will be crawling your page to determine your PageRank?!

The layout of Analytics can be a little daunting but once you master it you’ll never look back.

Here are six of the best resources, with some of the handiest Google Analytics tips out there, starting from the simplest and moving on to trickier stuff.

How To Use Google Analytics For Beginners by Mahalo

The perfect, no-nonsense step-by-step guide, aimed at absolute novices. That is, you’ll get tips on actually setting up a Google account and inserting the Analytics tracking code into your page, as well as advice about navigating the Analytics dashboard.

Mahalo’s guide will be particularly useful for new WordPress users as it tells you exactly how and where to insert your code ““ that’s bound to be the hard part for a lot of newbies.

Steps 3, 4 and 5 are “˜Get an Overview of Your Site Performance’, “˜See How Your Site is Performing Daily and Hourly’ and “˜See Where Your Traffic is Coming From’, and helpful screenshots are provided.

Google Analytics For Beginners ““ How To Make The Most Of Your Traffic Reports by Flyte

This one doesn’t cover setup and it offers more of a personal touch ““ discover how to generate reports that are some of the “˜most useful’, in the author’s opinion. It’s pretty spot on: you’ll learn how to generate:

A Visitors Overview report. See how much traffic you have, how many page views (as opposed to unique visitors), the average time spent on your site and your bounce rate (the percentage of people who only visit one page on your site before they “˜bounce’ somewhere else). See it all in one handy graph!

A Traffic Sources Overview in graph form. See whether your visitors are coming from Referring Sites, whether they’re finding you on search engines or whether they’re referring themselves.

A Referring Sites Overview in table form. See a list of the specific sites your visitors are coming from. For example. I use this to see how many people are coming to my blog from my MakeUseOf author page!

Keywords Overview in table form. What keywords did your visitors enter into Google (and other search engines) in order to find you? Great for learning which keywords are useful to you.

Flyte’s guide is written clearly and provides plenty of images ““ a really useful resource.

8 Useful Google Analyics Tips by Jatex’s Weblog

A little more advanced. This one is really neat ““ they provide simple code that lets you tinker with Analytics to get what you need.

For example, Tip 1 gives a line of generic code you can insert whenever you put an external link on your site. Say your blog has a link to a YouTube video- insert this code and Analytics will start tracking how many people are disappearing to go and view it!

Also learn how to:

Exclude internal visitors from your reports using a filter
Track full referred URL’s (because sometimes referring sites will append their general URL instead of a specific one ie. www.makeuseof.com instead of www.makeuseof.com/google -analytics-tips-you-should-know-about)
Track eCommerce transactions and
Track exact Adwords keywords!

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Sandra Lawrence

Publisher, blogger, freelance writer, political commentator for 'The Seminal' and announcer on Australian radio station 3MBS. Check out my blog at www.yourfashionoasis.blogspot.com +

Hide 14 Comments

SAJITHA March 25, 2009

Thank you. It is an excellent collection
venkat March 25, 2009

Very useful for beginers as well as advanced bloggers.
Richard March 26, 2009

Have you heard of http://mixpanel.com ? They do some interesting analytics that google can’t do.

Excellant blog post.
InternetStrategist@GrowMap March 26, 2009

While Google Analytics provides data as soon as you add the code to your pages it really needs to be custom configured and better understood.

Analytics data can be misleading so any business that is making decisions based on what they think it is telling them needs either a deeper understanding or expert advice before they make decisions that can change their revenue.

There is a free ecourse that provides a good overview of Google Analytics. I reviewed what it contains in the post linked from this comment.
Search Engine Analytics May 11, 2009

Yahoo’s Web analytics tool upgrade takes a non-Google approach.Did you know that Yahoo has upgraded its Web analytics tool with a new version that adds functions and makes it available to search and display advertisers working with the company. While some coverage has implied that the new product is a sign that Yahoo is attempting to compete with Google in this sector, analysts say the company is actually trying to focus its analytics efforts with a different approach.
Arianahiff May 13, 2009

I love it! That is way cool man! The steps werenâ€™t that complicated too, which is great.
andimazlan May 30, 2009

Thanks for these valuable resources. Going to read it since I havn’t use analytics yet.
Yogesh Malik July 23, 2009

Helped me a lot in setting up my analytics account.
Rob August 13, 2009

Excellent list of tutorials!