Google Analytics is a very powerful tool. It is very easy to install the Google Analytics tracking code in WordPress. But for a new blogger, it can be a nightmare with so many options. In this article, we are going to see a guide to getting started in the use of Google Analytics for our WordPress website.
we need to start with some questions about Google Analytics.
These are the ones we are going to answer with the data in this guide:
The best way to learn more about our audience is to ask them with a survey. The second best way is to look in the “Public” menu of the standard reports in the Analytics sidebar.
From the reports in this section, you can find out the location of our visitors. The technology they are using to access the site, and a long list of other information of interest.
For example, do we have a mobile-friendly website? Should we have it? Look under Public > Mobile to see how much of the traffic is accessing our website from a mobile device or tablet. If we look at Devices, it even tells us what kind of device they're using.
Have you ever wondered at what time should I publish an entry? Look in Geographic Information > Location, and we will see which country/region most of our users come from. Based on determining the time you want to publish, we find important information in this section.
There are two reports I love to find this. They are located in the Acquisition section.
The first is “all traffic” and the second is its close cousin “all referrals”.
All traffic tells us how someone discovered our site. It includes everything, such as someone typing our domain name into their browser to enter via search results or from other websites.
All Referrals is a more specific report, which only includes visits from people who have entered a link to our website, or from another referring website. Exclude search traffic and direct visitors.
If we guest post on other blogs, you can use all the referrals to see if that guest post has sent you traffic. If you use social media, we can also see if people are accessing it this way.
If we really want to dig into social media to see the report, the Social section shows us all the social networks that are sending us traffic. This includes social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Building on the previous question, once we know how people are finding us we can reach more people. There are two ways to do this: do more of the things that work, or reevaluate the things that don't.
If you are going to spend hours on Pinterest, but it only sends you a couple of visits a month, then we need to assess whether the time we are spending on the site is necessary. If you are going to spend only a few minutes on Facebook, but send us a lot more, it may be interesting to spend more time.
What articles do my readers like?
To answer this question I recommend looking at the All Pages report, found in Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
All Pages tell us which articles/pages are the most visited on our site. It also gives us the average time on page, bounce rate, and exit rates in the standard report.
Here is how to interpret each of these metrics:
While all three are useful metrics, average page time is the most important when it comes to guessing the effectiveness of our articles.
As a general rule of thumb, the average person reads at a rate of 130 words per minute. We can use this as a benchmark to help us decide if people are reading the entire post or skipping it after a while. It's an imperfect measure, but time on a page is an average that should give you a general idea.
These visit stats and bounce rates (as well as factors like social media shares) give us a good idea of what's working and what's not.
Site speed should always be important to a blogger as we don't want our readers to wait too long for the site to load. You can always test this with speed tools, but there's nothing like real-world data.
Under Behavior > Site Speed > Page Times, you can see how long pages are taking to load, as well as how our site compares as a whole based on real-world data.
In the menu, just below this report, in “Speed Suggestions” you can implement these to make your site faster. I recommend doing this or finding someone to make these changes.
A little homage to one of my favorite standard reports “Real-Time” is missing. Here it tells us what is happening on our website at this very second, what they are reading, and how they got here…
If we suddenly come across a viral post, because someone has shared it on a popular social media website, we would see it in this report. Maybe it will be shared on Twitter, we can go to the page and contribute to the discussion. Maybe it's a mention in a major newspaper, you can email the journalist to say thanks and build rapport.
Having information in real-time is worth gold and we can use this information to our advantage, and everything is available in the report in the Real-Time section.
You can start with these standard reports, but don't be afraid to expand and look at the other options. By reviewing these, you can calculate how well our blog is performing. Once we get this under control, the numbers will make more and more sense.
You have to understand that Google Analytics is very powerful. What we've just seen here is a small scope of what it can do. The more you play with it, the better we will realize. You can use secondary information, conversion information, and much more. It should be noted that analysis can be addictive, so manage your time wisely. I hope this article helps all WordPress or any CMS beginners on how to use Google Analytics for your site.
