Google Analytics Explained

Google Analytics is one of the best tools you can use to monitor your blog. The great thing about Google Analytics is that you can find out what the readers are really searching on your site. You can use this information to optimize your blog, and give the reader what their searching for.

I could go on for hours about Google Analytics, I just has to many options! So, I've just wrote something simple that explains some crucial features that are available on Google Analytics.

1. The Dashboard

This is the first page you encounter when opening Google Analytics. It's pretty basic and simple. First you see the graph that gives you information about the evolution of traffic that's coming in. You can choose to set it on a long period of time, or you can set it on a specific day.

I'm just going to explain what the key words mean, but they are really self explanatory:

- Visits: This just indicates how much people have visited your site during a specific period of time.

- Pageviews or page impression: This is how much requests that have been made to view your site.

- Pageviews/Visit: The average pageview of one visitor.

- The Bounce Rate:

A bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs.

So what this really means is that the visitor of your blog just weren't interested in your blog.

- Avg Time on site: Basically, it's the that time a visitors spend on your blog.

- New Visits: Percentage of new visitors that visited your site.


2. The Visitors

In this section you've got a whole bunch of really interesting comparisons. You can view the loyalty of your readers, the length of their visit and much, much more. When you're a your visitors loyalty you can if you're already growing a fanbase or not.


3. Traffic Sources

One of the most important aspects in Google Analytics is certainly your traffic sources. You can look at your Top Traffic Sources, these are the sources where you get the most traffic from. Examine them and be sure not to loose them!

the three most important traffic sources are

- Direct Traffic: This is maybe one of the best traffic sources you can have. Direct traffic means that someone went directly to your blog, without clicking on any link or typing something in a search engine. If you got this kind of traffic sources, then you're really going well with your blog. The visitors really like you're content, and go directly to your blog. Isn't that the best thing you can have as a blogger?

- Referring Sites: This will be the main source of your visitors. Referring sites are sites that refer to you, I couldn't explain it better. :D
It basically generates visitors that come from other sites like StumbleUpon, Blogger, BlogCatalog ...

- Last but not least, Search Engines: These are maybe the most trickiest to get. the Search Engine link gives you a view on how many people have visited your site through search engines like Google, Yahoo, ....

You can always click on the different elements to get more information.


4. Content

This option shows again the number of pageviews, unique views and bounce rate which I talked about previously. This could really be the key on understanding your visitors.
What is better then to know what you're visitors are clicking on. With this kind valuable information you could adjust your blog, to optimize and attract more visitors.

5. In conclusion

Google Analytics is 'the' best website/blog analyzer that's available on the web, and a must have for every webmaster or blogger. If you haven't tried it, go check it out here.