Analytics

Benefits Of Google Analytics: Why Bloggers Should Use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is no less than Superman, so it wouldn’t be wrong to call it a Super-app. Well, why not? It is a compelling platform.

Google Analytics allows you to see what’s happening on your website, unleash new trends and patterns to enhance every day, and dive deep into retention, acquisition, and conversion analytics!

Let’s have a look at what benefits of Google Analytics has for bloggers:

Conversion Report

1. Goal Flow Report:

It helps you to understand which path has been the most effective in terms of your goals. It doesn’t matter if your goal is about sales, email signups, reach outs, number of pages, or what so ever. The report enables you to find ways to influence the actions taken by your audience. It can also help you to breakdown your goal behavior by showing you your source of traffic, landing page, or a variety of other dimensions.

Retention Reports

2. New vs. Returning Visitors Report:

It helps you understand whether you’re actually building a retained readership, or your audience is just passing by, and never coming back. In simple words, this report helps you to compare the behavior of your returning audience as well as your new visitors to your site.

If you are wondering why you need this report, it is simply because you need retention to really grow your audience.

By analyzing the breakdown of visitors, and by comparing performance month over month, you’ll see whether or not your core readership is growing.

Bonus point of this report is that by analyzing both the segments, it shall also help you to discover behaviors and actions leading to your engagement and retention as well.

3. Site Search Report:

Google Analytics’ Site Search Report is beneficial, as it tells you what kind of content visitors come to look for on your site, and whether or not they’re able to find that.

If you look at the search terms, you can also find content ideas and opportunities to cross-link. Improving your keyword structure will eventually enhance search results, retention, and engagement.

You also will be able to see search queries and the behaviors after search. Do your visitors leave, or do they read more content? Do they become engaged? And so on.

All these behaviors can be understood with this report.

4. Real-Time Reports:

Real-time data helps you to monitor traffic and acquisition sources when you publish a post or make changes to your site. Keeping an eye on traffic sources will enable you to react to content and promotional opportunities. It can further help you to identify issues with referrer spam and bad URLs pointing to your site.

Other than these reports, this Super-app offers Site Speed Report, Landing Pages Report, Search Console Report, Referrals Report, Backlinks Report, All Campaigns Report, Social Landing Pages Report, and many more.

To focus on the right metrics and to understand your audience – you’ll want to run through reports.

So, do you have any idea which reports you should be using for your blog?

Let us tell you about 6 reports to add on to your blog for having the benefits of Google Analytics.

1. Session Quality:

Why should you use it?

The quality of a blog or an article is known by the length of the time people spend on reading it. So, pay attention to your focus group and the social platform to vary the duration of your content.

2. Acquisition Traffic:

It will give you a broader insight into which segments your audience engages in. Convert that to a higher rate, so you can make more informed decisions about which channels and traffic sources to invest in. Also, find out which onsite activities lead to have more conversations.

3. Queries Report:

Focus on the breakdown of the sources to see from where your traffic is coming organically vs. other channels and see where you have an opportunity to drive more. Look for the keywords to drive traffic to your blog to see if they align with your brand and focus.

4. Content Drilldown:

Content drill down allows you to keep an eye on the blog category performance and also allocate resources.

5. Landing Page:

This report shows you your top-performing content for driving visits to your website.

6. Behavior Flow:

It allows you to have a preconceived idea of how users will interact with the site. It’s great for marketers, web designers, and company owners.

Benefits of Google Analytics Metrics for Bloggers:

1. Session Duration: It will allow you to make sure you’re looking at the amount of time your audience spent on your page.

2. Dwell Time: It is the amount of time someone spends on your site after arriving from a search engine results page. This shall allow you to know whether people are actually viewing your blog posts or not.

3. Scroll Depth: Records how far users scroll down each page of your website.

Google Analytics tips for bloggers

1. Know your blogging goals:

Every website is its own unique world with its purposes. So, take your time to create a sound plan. Make sure to outline what your holy grail is for the website!

Breakdown your strategies and tactics you want to use to reach those objectives keeping in mind whether you are executing those tactics as planned. Remember, your overall goals impact the metrics you’ll track.

2. Link Google Search Console and Google Analytics:

If you link Google Search Console data to Google Analytics, it will give you more unobstructed visibility into organic searches that are driving traffic to your blog.

3. Identify underperforming blog posts:

The biggest tip while using Google Analytics segments is to identify underperforming blog posts, which you can quickly optimize for easy wins.

4. Organize your blog URL structure:

You can filter out other pages and website contents by rapidly drilling down to the data needed. While using this tactic, you need to be careful about breaking your entire internal link structure. Hence, use a tool like Redirection to point your old blog post URLs to your new ones.

5. Create blog-specific filters:

Including geographies of interest filter out articles that you are not worried about. You don’t want those interactions with visitors who would want to skew your understanding of your blog’s performance.

6. Fix the 404 errors:

Who knows, you might have high-traffic URLs that are sending 404 error pages to your readers.

To fix this, go to: Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages > Select Title. Then, go to the search box and type “404.”

Now, you will find all the pages that are getting traffic but are returning 404.

7. Exclude your IP address:

Tip for measuring blog post results with Google Analytics is to make sure that your IP address is excluded. By excluding your IP address, it will ensure that your analytics are not including your visits to your website. So, this doesn’t skew your data while you’re tracking the results of traffic going to your blog.

8. Add UTM links:

Analyze which sources are funneling the signups and what topics/keywords are the most valuable.

Are you excited to use Google analytics?

So, how free do you think is Google Analytics?

There is a free and paid version of Google Analytics (which is called Analytics 360).

Small and medium-sized businesses will get all the features needed from the free version. Enterprise businesses need to upgrade — at least if they want an advanced funnel reporting-reporting more views, dimensions, and metrics per property, and unlimited and original data.

If you are thinking about that subscription fee? It is not cheap. Analytics 360 fee starts at $150,000 per year, and it increases after your site receives more than one billion monthly hits.

Know The Limits of Google Analytics

Understanding, you as a blogger, don’t only want to spend a bulk of time writing content that will engage with your readers, and improve key steps of your funnel, where Google Analytics might be a little complicated. That is why many companies came together for you to include several free specialized tools that you can use to overcome certain limitations of Google Analytics.

Depending on the difficulties you’re facing dive deeper into the following:

Conversion funnel analysis – Use tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Hotjar
Scroll and click analysis – Use products like Hotjar, CrazyEgg, and Lucky Orange
Social share analysis – Use Buzzsumo, Ahref or Sprout Social
Keyword and backlink analysis – Use Google Console, Yoast or SEMRush
Content analysis – Use Highlights or Atomic Reach.

These tools will help you in overcoming some of the limitations of Google Analytics for bloggers.

CONCLUSION

Google Analytics can be daunting at the beginning, even for veteran online business owners. But there is nothing to feel discouraged about it. It may seem a little terrible at first, but like any other tool, frequent usage will increase finesse and ability. Spend some time, even if it is only for a few minutes, logged into Google Analytics, and familiarizing yourself with the system.

If you can progress from the Google Analytics reports, Content Experiments, and Goal tracking features of this business tool, you can achieve all of the business successes you desired.

There are huge benefits of Google Analytics, so make sure to learn and utilize them to the highest!

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Yousuf Hossain

I am an entrepreneur who always invests time closely with people to successfully bring their business online. My main mission with this blog is to help people with offering them free guides and tutorials related to website design and marketing so that people can grow their online businesses following my guidance and path!