3 Google Analytics Features To Consider For Your Blog

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Google Analytics is a must have for everyone who has a website or blog. If you are someone who hates looking at stats and your head spins when seeing it, Google Analytics is a necessary evil! You really need to have it tracking traffic, visitors and other vital stats for your site. It is free and it has some of the best features that will cost you a fortune to get something similar to it in the market.

Let’s have a look at 3 Google Analytics features to further emphasize my point.

A. Bounce Rates

Bounce rates are essentially a measure of page quality. If you have a high bounce rate, it means that visitors who came in from the search engines or a landing page arrived at your page only to skim through your content and leave within 10-30 seconds of viewing it. Let’s look at it from 2 points of view:

1. Internet Marketer

From an internet marketer’s point of view, a high bounce rate is BAD. It either means:

• the visitor came in and didn’t find what he/she wants
• poor landing page/sales page
• no/poor call to action

2. Blogger

From a blogger’s point of view it only means that

• Your content ain’t good enough or
• They simply didn’t find what they want.
• Content with links that load on the same page

Solution

For a blogger, the number one way is to write quality content to reduce bounce rates. If visitors enter your website from search engines make sure that your content addresses those keywords. Like I’ve mentioned before in a previous article, after publishing it watch its stats from Google Analytics and then optimize it accordingly with better keywords or rewrite certain parts.

Introduce some form of call to action. If you are a marketer, you should realize that the headings and the first paragraph MUST capture your visitors’ attention. Then, encourage them to subscribe and follow up with your product. There is a good article that teaches you how to write sales pages effectively here.

B. Average Time On Site

Visitors stats can be broken into a number of things including bounce rates. But let’s look at the average time on your site.

I’ve noticed that my average time on site has increased a lot over the past month since putting more effort into writing content. I’ve also noticed that sometimes you have to tailor your content to what your readers might wanna read about although there are a still other confounding factors to think about like visitors from search engine traffic/referrals/twitter etc.

Generally you want to increase the average time on site by putting certain measures in place which I personally use.

• First is obvious, quality content.
• Internal linking/deep linking to other related content on your blog. This allows people to view even more content.
• Links that open into a new page. This ensures that your visitors don’t lose your original content page.

C. Visitor Loyalty

I have been using Google Analytics for a while but I really didn’t put much attention to visitor loyalty until now. Visitor loyalty is a measurement of how many returning visitors come back to your site. You want to have an idea that your blog is creating a community.

My current ratio of new to returning visitors remains at 70:30 which I think is not bad.

You generally do not want too many returning visitors and skew more towards new visitors (You can voice your own opinion here if you disagree).

If you are thinking of improving visitor loyalty here are some tips for you to consider.

• Tell them what’s going on through their email subscription.
• Allow subscription feeds so that readers will know when your content is updated
• Have a consistent posting schedule.
• Reward them for participating for example answering their comments
• Publish a series of content in succession. Visitors would want to follow through your series of content..
• Publish a weekly update of content like how I did with my weekly blog pulse updates
• Address their questions effectively when commenting.
• Start a forum i.e Mingle Forum.
• Visit their blog/site and reciprocate. Don’t forget this!

Part 2 of this post will be coming out soon so stay tune!

Tagged as: google analytics, google analytics features, google analytics tips