Diving into the charts and graphs of Google Analytics is daunting to me. My brain is not wired in this manner. I am a person who prefers to consume information via the written and spoken word. Numbers, especially those with a graph or a chart, vex me. I cannot draw. I dislike Pictionary, and Sudoku can bring on a cold sweat. I did not do well on those awful standardized tests that had a spatial relations section. Therefore, I studied communications, thinking I could elude numbers for the rest of my life. How wrong I was!
You can imagine how an analytics tool with lots of lines and pie charts can strike fear in someone like me. But, I am here to tell you Google Analytics is not too scary. I gingerly navigated my way through Google Analytics to see how this blog is performing. I’ll admit, Google does a pretty good job offering resources, videos, and blog posts to help the novice maneuver through the reports. I took on my fears and I am better for it.
I see that my pleas to friends, family and coworkers were successful because to date I have 45 site visits and 205 pageviews. On November 15, 2012, I posted a blog link on Facebook and emailed some of my close friends to ask for their help. I learned that I do not have many friends with a desire to learn about analytics. I am happy to report that on November 15, my blog site had 20 new visits, with 78 pageviews, with an average visit duration of 3:29! This means that a few people actually read my entries, though I see that many endured the experience for all of ten seconds. Pageviews per Visit is a good indicator of stickiness or, put another way, whether the content is interesting and valuable enough to draw readers in deeper. For an established blogger who really has something to say, this is a key performance metric.
Unexpectedly, when I looked at the Audience Overview report (with a date range of November 1-25), I saw that I had a visitor from Zurich, Switzerland, who promptly bounced realizing they reached my site in error. I looked at all of the cities, and I can make some good assumptions about who was on my blog. A high school classmate in Irvine, California, works in IT and it was no surprise he capitulated and checked out the page.
Looking at the Traffic metric, I see that 55.55% came via a referral, primarily Facebook, and 44.44% came via direct traffic, most likely from the direct link I posted for the class. I can see that the blogroll posted by fellow classmate Kayla E. was effective in driving one person here. A start up blog relies heavily on referrals and inbound links, so this was much appreciated.
New and Returning Visitors are useful metrics because they give a blogger like me an indication if we were developing a fan base. Cultivating a loyal legion of readers is an important component to helping a blog grow and thrive through shares, links and referrals. In my case, I have had seven returning visitors and I will surmise that most if not all of these visitors are my classmates.
I really enjoyed perusing the Visitor Flow chart. I found a good online tutorial and was able to go in and manipulate this report as I viewed the video, which helped my understanding of what was actually being illustrated. Though I did get many people to check out my blog, more than 60% of my total traffic stopped at the first page. On November 15, the date that I saw the most activity, 50% of visitors dropped after reading one page. Hmmm. I guess my content was not very appealing! It is important to note that an established blogger might expect unique visitors to return frequently to read the latest post, and immediately leave. This type of action results in a high bounce rate, but should not be used to judge the quality of the content.
I also looked at Engagement, to see if I could make some assumptions about how long people were on my site and how they were interacting with it. While I was able to compare the visit duration of new and returning visitors, overall this doesn’t tell me very much. I think I understand what Kaushik (2012) meantwhen he expressed his concern that engagement is subjective and a “heart” metric. There is no standard for time duration, as it is highly dependent on the type of site and the content. One can presume that a blog draws a particularly engaged audience to begin with, so a healthy time on site and/or visitor duration generally means the content is working. In this unique academic environment, I have to take into consideration that people are just stopping by my blog. However, in a “real world” scenario, PageViews per Visitor or Recency and/or Return Visitors would be helpful indicators to help me decide if the content is doing its job, bringing people back and developing some kind of loyal following.
Of course, there are other determinants to a blog’s success beyond Google Analytics or similar tools. The number of RSS subscriptions, the frequency and quality of comments and the amount of sharing on social media channels can also give valuable insight into the relevancy of blog content and the loyalty threshold of the readers. In fact, Heidi Cohen suggests there are 65 metrics to track the success of your blog, and many of these have nothing to do with Google Analytics. Numbers can speak volumes, but sometimes you need to look beyond them. As a self-diagnosed Numerophobic, I liked that.
Are you a Wannabe Blogger? Do you want to see positive trends in those web analytics? Here is my advice. Work hard to create thought leadership, maintain credibility, and keep a reliable publishing schedule. Experts will tell you not to be too concerned with metrics too soon. First, concentrate on the purpose of your blog, and have clear, established goals. Next, focus on the content and deliver quality consistently. And finally, put a little marketing muscle behind it. There is nothing wrong with looking at some benchmark measurements to get started. But don't obsess on numbers over quality.
Reference:
Kaushik, A. (2007, October 1). Engagement is not a metric, it’s an excuse. [Web log]. Retrieved on November 25, 2012 from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/engagement-is-not-a-metric-its-an-excuse/
No comments:
Post a Comment