Why is Traffic Up? Reading Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great, free tool for tracking visitors to your site. One can look at various sections of Google Analytics to learn who is visiting what and from where on your site. In this post, you can learn about some of the key areas of the Google Analytics and how I used Google Analytics to learn more about the upsurge in a website’s visitors.
Last month I wrote about changes I made to New Jersey Playrounds. Let’s revisit the statistics and see how the site is doing:
Wow, now that’s a move up! 20,598 this month compared to only 3,105 last month. Is this because it is summer and people want to get out into playgrounds? Or another reason?
Let’s look at visits from one year ago:
Ah, so that tells us that visits often go up in June. Is there anything new going on this June, besides the new code edits?
If you look at the section called content, you will see that the most visited page is no longer the home page. It is a page on fireworks in New Jersey. What does this tell you? If you post timely, useful information on your site (and you already have a good number of followers on social media sites like Facebook), you may get a surge of visitors.
But the fireworks page wasn’t posted until June 13th. So what about our code edits? Did they help as well? One can get a clue by doing a nifty comparison of dates. In Google Analytics, you can choose the dates you want to view. Click on the dates in the upper right hand corner and then check Compare to Past. Here is a view of dates from the end of May compared to the beginning of June:
I can’t know for sure, but after I made code edits, the site visits did rise.
Here are a few good places to look for clues about visitors:
1) Content Section – you can use view Content by Title if your permalinks are not yet easy to read keywords.
2) Traffic Sources – did you Tweet a post or put in on your Facebook business page? Find out if people visited from those sources.
3) Compare dates, Compare to Past – I’ve used this a lot in this post and the previous post on NJPlaygrounds.
Have you set up Google Analytics for your site? Has it helped you understand your traffic?
Leora, Nice Article and flow of informations which really helpful for initial start up bloggers who really look around good traffic related to the content and keep the blog as SEO optimised. A month before I started using google analytics for my site and really helps a lot to understand. Thanks and keep the good work.
It does take time to get used to Google Analytics. Thanks for the comment, and I hope you or others will ask questions so we can figure out together how to read the statistics.
Sure. Fine tuning as SEO optimized site is kind of journey and I believe never ending process.:) Certainly, we have to thank Google for providing simple and powerful tools Like G.webmaster, G.analytics which helps lot for bloggers and shows clear idea where we need to concentrate. Let us discuss.
Google makes those tools, but they also are the ones that change the rules! (I’m thinking of the new “panda” – for example).
All the statistics you have mentioned above look impressive. I do use analytics to analyze my site performance, the most useful information i would say on the analytics is the number of “Organic” visitors to your site. It gives you a clear picture of how your site is attracting new visitors via search engines. Since analytics gives you details mostly about your site visitors and traffic sources, i usually end up referring to my webmaster dashboard for more relevant information like keywords, InboundLinks, and how your Sitemaps are doing.
Praveen, have you written about SEO? It would be interesting if you could write up your comment as a post.
One of the wonderful things about working on NJ Playgrounds is the content is fabulous. So it’s just a matter of getting it higher up in the rankings. And repeat customers are good, too!
I do have a basic post about SEO – http://www.dailymorningcoffee.com/best-practices-for-seo/
I think there are several other topics of interest that could be written about. I will give it a thought, thanks for your push.
Yes, getting repeat customers is always good, have you thought about affiliate marketing? I am looking into the possibilities and options now, let me know if you find any leads.
I am an affiliate for BlueHost – I have the badge on my other blog (http://www.leoraw.com/blog/) – so far, that has only worked for when I have a new client sign up, I ask them to click on that link.
I’ll check out your SEO post. Keep writing on that topic – we could share notes.