There is much more to being a blogger than writing a new blog everyday or sharing it across social media. There's a lot more planning and organization involved in that.
It's making sure you're not just sharing your own posts but others as well. It's keeping an editorial calendar, keeping files on hand, media kits and constantly brainstorming. It's taking a thousand photos to get the right one, blog conferences and friends.
There is a lot more to blogging than just writing a draft. I've realized that recently and I kind of love it. I love how there is a whole other side to blogging that I'm coming in touch with.
One of the best and most important tools I've learned about blogging is the importance of analytics. It wasn't until a few months ago when I started to pay a little more attention to my blog analytics and how many page views and monthly visitors I was wracking up.
That stuff was always important to me but I just started to see how freaking cool it was!!
I think it's the coolest thing to be able to see who is looking at your posts, what time they read them and where their located. Seeing the "real time" users is sick--being able to know that at that very moment someone is reading your blog.
Maybe I'm just a complete tech junkie and nerd but I think tracking your analytics is pretty cool but essentially, it's one of the most vital parts of taking your blog to the next level.
Knowing how many people visit your blog each day, how long they stay active and how many pages they view is really important. It's important to your audience, to brands and companies you want to work with, and to you as an owner.
Having a better understanding of analytics will help you become a better blogger.
Analytics is confusing, don't get me wrong. I'm by no means an expert but after playing around with it, I've become a little more knowledgable and it makes things a little easier.
Google Analytics is the platform I use and most bloggers I've spoken with use this one as well. It's easy to hook up to your blog if you have Blogger and a Gmail account. I've been playing around with this baby really well for the past few weeks but have had it installed for months.
Google Analytics as a whole is really useful and beneficial, once you get the hang of it. There are definitely some highlights that I think are the most useful to bloggers who are just starting out or want to take their blog to the next level.
1. Audience Overview: This is probably the most basic part of Google Analytics and the part that is most simple to understand. Basically it shows your page views and other statistics for any given date. Initially it'll start off as a monthly view but you could alter it for any day.
Here it tells you your page views which is how many times your blog was viewed; users, which is how many physical people clicked on your blog, and sessions, which is the period of time a user was actively engaged in your blog.
Aside from those statistics, it's also reported how many pages were viewed during a session, how long the average session lasted, locations and the number of new and returning visitors.
I don't think I have my analytics installed correctly because it won't let me view the next categories such as age, gender, and basic demographics such as that.
2. Behavior: Behavior is useful for a variety of reasons; it shows you the flow of your readers (what pages they went to first, second, third) which is something I discovered while researching this blog post. Another great, useful part of 'behavior' is that you can see which pages and posts were most viewed during a certain period.
It also shows how long it takes your site to load (woah, eyeopener) which can help you in the long run.
3. Technology: (Under Audience) This is pretty straight forward and simple. It shows you which browsers and operating systems people are viewing your blog under. I think this is super cool #nerdalert
4. Acquisition: This might be the most important part of analytics in my opinion. This shows how readers get to your site, whether it was a direct search, social media or a referral. It also shows which keywords they used to find your site(the coolest part). This is the most important to me because it's something you can control (sort of).
It breaks these different platforms down to really give you an inside look as to where your most traffic is coming from, showing which areas are pretty good and where you need improvement.
Like I said before, there are a lot of parts that don't work for me, for some strange reason (I need to look into that). Those parts that don't work would be really useful because you'll know exactly who you're targeting and whose reading.
I'm going to do another post on how to apply all these useful analytic tips because this post will be super long and confusing if I put it all together.
These definitely aren't the only parts of Google Analytics but the parts I focus on and find the most useful. Like I said, I'll do another post on how to apply all of this information but I hoped this helped or you found it interesting!!
Do you fellow bloggers have any tips and tricks when it comes to analytics? Please tell me in the comments !!
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