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by Scott Frangos

Do you use Google Analytics? You should. Not only is it free, but it is comprehensive and seeks to make sense out of the raw stats most hosting control panels provide. It’s one thing to learn how many visitors you’ve had, and quite another to learn the “bounce rate” (what percentage of visitors leave after visiting only the page they landed on first) for your blog and website. And, the reports are customizable, including the “dashboard” where you see a display of reports of your choosing. Let’s take a look at some ways to customize it to get reports for a blog. I’ll analyze the analytics in general terms so you can think like a good strategic BlogMaster — and, I’ll look forward to your thoughts and comments below.

…two key metrics for you to consider… Bounce Rate and Popular Content… What can I do to keep people at the site and not “bouncing” away?

When you first set-up your tracking in Google Analytics for your blog or CMS website (even “old school” static page HTML sites can use Analytics), you get a “Dashboard” for each site you configure. There are a lot of reports about what’s going on at your site. You can add a report to your Dashboard by simply navigating to the report you want, then clicking on “add to Dashboard” at the top of the screen. And, once on your Dashboard you can position a report by dragging it around by the title bar. This allows you to position related reports next to each other as I’ll discuss below.

At right are just 14 of the possible reports listed under “Visitors”. The key is to think of what reports give key information about your blog, and then, since the dashboard sets reports up next to each other in a two column format, ask which reports viewed next to each other will help me analyze my blog traffic.

Above (click to enlarge), at left, we can see most popular content by Title (Seems that AJAX is popular with our readers), and the “Depth of Visit” meaning how many visitors went to more than one page.

Above are the top keywords (again AJAX is popular here) people searched then clicked on to visit the blog at left, then the “Bounce Rate” which is very similar to the Depth of Visit we just looked at. Depth of visit, shows you what percent visit 2, 3, 4 and more pages, however. And, Bounce Rate, when you click “view report”, will show what content had higher or lower bounce rates — very important for BlogMasters. Know your Bounce Rate. For example, if visitors stay (don’t bounce off the landing page) for articles about AJAX and CSS, but do bounce off of articles about HTML… what would that tell me? Lose the HTML articles? No. It means that our current audience is not looking for HTML articles but is very interested in pursuing AJAX and CSS articles. As an Editor, this tells me to write more articles about those popular subjects. Thinking as a Publisher, it also means that I need to seek out a different audience base that might like the other articles found here.

Above we can learn first how many visitors were brand new, and how many were returning. I like to think of these as the “blood pressure” of the blog, where blood pressure readings are always given in two numbers. To be healthy, you want a good percentage of returning visitors (ours could be a bit higher), and you also want new visitors as a result of your marketing efforts. Then, since it is a “World” Wide Web, you need to keep an eye on the languages your visitors speak (uncovered by Google as a result of the domain IP of your visitors). This tells me that over 4% of our visitors speak either German (de) or Russian (ru). And, because their are translation plugins for WordPress… I can help them by providing automatic translation into their language. And why not advertise the blog to overseas targets? More on that in a forthcoming post.

Finally, here are two reports just made to be viewed next to each other — but you have to customize your dashboard to see them this way — Landing Pages compared to Exit Pages. Note that the top three Landing Pages are also the Top Exit pages. Hmmm. What can I do to keep people at the site and not “bouncing” away? Maybe link AJAX articles in a series and place the series navigation at top of the landing pages? There — now you’re thinking like a good BlogMaster. but what about the fact that the fourth landing page item (an article about using Headspace for SEO on your WordPress blog) is not the fourth top exit? This is good — it means that people landed on that article and continued further into our site.

In conclusion, for you BlogMasters (and WebMasters too, of course) there are two key metrics for you to consider… Bounce Rate and Popular Content (shown above as “Content by Title”). Remember that Bounce Rate is given by popular pages, and by language, so you need to have different strategies to address different types of bounces off of your site. In general — write more of what’s popular, and link related articles together. If you’re offering categories that don’t seem to be popular, either rewrite, or change your target marketing, or consider dropping those types of posts. I look forward to your comments.