Reading Google Analytics
I signed this blog up for tracking using Google Analytics and was able to see how my visitors get to my blog. WordPress has its own dashboard stats but it’s not really helpful for in-depth analysis.
For the past month, here are the paltry stats of my blog:
You should take note of the average time visitors spend on your site. The 2.5 minutes you see in my stats means people find what they are looking for in my site to spend at least 2 minutes of their time.
Higher is better and to achieve this, you might want to avoid joining traffic exchange sites such as Entrecard, Blog Explosion, etc. It may pad your site with lots of visits but most likely, they’re just social network visitors that will not contribute to your SEO. This results to high bounce rate (75% and up) which Google doesn’t want. Of course having a very informative posts also help people stay on your site for a bit longer.
Where’s your traffic coming from?
Knowing what your traffic sources are makes you understand how your blog is doing and what areas you could improve or to focus on. Here’s mine:
I was surprised that more than half of my traffic is brought by search engines. This is pretty good for a PR3 site and means that most of what I post can be seen in the first few pages of Google’s result. Paying advertisers like this!
I can also see that 17% comes from referrings sites. I guess I have to build more links from other sites to encourage regular visitors. But you don’t want visitors from referring sites to be greater than those coming from search engines.
Lastly, I would like to thank my regular visitors who may have bookmarked my site to contribute to the 13.7% of direct traffic.
I know this post is a bit geeky but I hope you can find it helpful if you really want to improve your blog.
You might also be interested in:
- How long it took for Google to crawl my new domain
- Infolinks as substitute to Google AdSense?
- Got my PageRank bumped by Google
- Appealing didn’t work so goodbye Google AdSense
Filed under: Blogging Experience
Try mo sitemeter
calvin: yup yung isang site ko nasa sitemeter din but i only use it for the counter widget. as what Gem said, analytics is quite comprehensive. hindi lang mga ito ang makikita mo sa analytics.
I tried sitemeter but I still find Google Analytics better and comprehensive – most of all it is free.
Ganda ng traffic mo. I’ve noticed the SEO here lately hehehe. Yung direct traffic, isa na ako doon
Been working on SEO myself. On the fake traffic, I would disagree to using term (like others think). I think SEO and social media (blogexplosion, EC, SU, Digg) are two separate entities. Social media is a way to relate with other bloggers – a great way to gain loyal readers and frequent comments. SEO is where everyone, can access information, including non-bloggers.
calvin: hehe thanks for the direct traffic gem. thanks din for clarifying SEO and Social media. pero in relation to social media, you have to admit that a healthy percentage of visitors coming from traffic exchange sites are only expecting a return visit. Although there are some din naman who will turn out to be regular participants to your blog.
I believe ganun ata talaga, social media can turn a number of people into regular visitors. Sort of regular buddies on the web.
Tulad ko? Hahaha