We all know Google Analytics provides a great insight into a site’s behavior based on data collected over time but what most of us don’t do is really explore this data and use the information provided to improve our site.
Google Analytics is indeed a useful tool for any webmaster who wants to really understand his site behavior and really get to know his site quite well. Google Analytics not only provide useful information that could be used to improve a site but also make recommendations based on this information.
I have heard people complain that web analytic tools are not often accurate, yes agree that when you track a site data with different analytic tools you are bound to get different numbers because of the following factors – data collection method, filtering and cookies etc.
For such reasons it will be idea to say no analytics tool can provide an ABSOLUTE and ACCURATE data. The variations in data caused as a result of the above mentioned factors will make it impossible to have an absolute data, I simple see analytics report as a measure of trend to know when am doing well or not, where am supposed to improve or not.
Based on this, Google Analytics is my favorite web analytics tool. Not only does it provide deep insight into a site’s behavior such as traffic reports, demographics, conversions etc. It also provides Intelligence events reports.
In an earlier article published on this blog titled “Why bloggers should use Google Analytics Intelligence Events”, I explained what Google Analytics Intelligence Events is all about and why bloggers/webmasters need to use Google Analytics Intelligence Events.
There is so much you can accomplish with Google Analytics other than using it for traffic report alone. I will share some of them here with you and hope you can mine the data from your Google analytics and use it to improve your website.
Recently Google shared two new Analytics dashboards for Adsense publishers, the Engagement & Loyalty Dashboard and Traffic Growth Dashboard.
The Engagement & Loyalty Dashboard provides an insight into your site engagement such as device engagement report revealing engagements based on devices your audience use to surf your site, it also provides screen resolution engagement report and most importantly your most engaging traffic source report.
When you know the source of your most engaging visitors and what brings them to your site, you can tailor more of such contents and target even such source(s) more for even better engagements.
The Traffic Growth Dashboard also provides you with useful insight into your traffic sources, mobile traffic breakdown, mobile traffic behavior, referring domains and referring social sources.
When you know the best referring domain or top referring social sources, you can engage more on such sources to even improve your site more.
If you waste all your day sharing posts on Facebook and engaging actively on it while you are actually getting more visits from Twitter, wouldn’t it make more sense to engage on Twitter more to drive even more traffic?
Make more money with Google Analytics
Do you know that Google Analytics can help you make more money with your blog? Linking your Adsense to Google Analytics is very necessary for this.
Google analytics can provide you with the top pages on your sites that make you the most money on Adsense. When you know the goose that lays the golden eggs what do you do with it? You feed it better to lay more golden eggs of course. Having such information can be very important in making more money with your site; you can give such pages more facelift, promote them more and improve traffic and engagements on them to make even more adsense money.
It even gets better; Google Analytics can also provide you the best adsense referrers. When you know the sites that refers people that engage on your adsense what do you do with such information? You improve your engagement on such sites and drive even more engaging visitors to your site.
Make Better Contents with Google Analytics
Google Analytics can help you understand which contents on your site receive the best attentions and which doesn’t. When you know what type of contents get the best page views or what contents people spend most time on your site reading you can create more of such contents and improve your site generally.
In the other hand if you know what contents people don’t waste their time to close, you can review them and improve engagements on them.
Google Analytics can help you easily sort such data and use the information to improve your site.
Make your Site faster with Google Analytics
Google Analytics can also provide you with useful suggestions to make your site or even specific pages faster. Google considers site speed as a search engine ranking factor and such must be taken seriously.
Different pages on your site may have different page load time due to images or scripts on them; even if your homepage is fast your inner pages may be slow.
Use the Google Analytics Site Speed feature to check all the page load times of all your site pages and see how you can improve them for higher search engine ranking and fast browsing loading.
Conclusion
There are so many useful things we can do with Google Analytics, if you are a webmaster or blogger and you do not dig into your Analytics report to see ways you could improve your site you may have been surcharging yourself.
Google Analytics is a mine of data you can use to improve your website, take your time and learn your website based on the data collected and analyzed for you by Google. Use this information to improve your site’s speed, quality of content, engagements, and most importantly earnings.
What do you think of this article? Have you been mining useful information from your Google Analytics? How have you used Google Analytics to improve your website? In what aspects have Google Analytics helped you in improving your site?
Use the comments below to share your insight and experience with me. I will be very glad to help you in any way I can explain any concept or question you may have regarding this article. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Three tips to improve the efficiency of your content
Top WordPress Plugins to Boost Your Site’s Traffic
Using social media as a marketing strategy
7 Ways to Promote Your Blog
Email Marketing 101 for Bloggers
Hey!
Thanks for writing this. I think not many people are using Google Analytics to the max. While it doesn’t provide advance information, it does provide significant info for beginners and intermediate.
Great article and top notch writing.
Keep it up!
Thanks Reginald for dropping by and leaving a comment on this article and yes a lot of webmasters and bloggers are not exploring the huge made available by Google Analytics in improving their site, recently someone asked me how he could know what is working and what is not on his blog and i simply referred him to Google analytics.
Hi Nwosu,
Google analytics is my first choice to track my blog’s visits and for other stats. If we’re familiar with Google Analytics and know all the features then definitely we will use it rather than other tools.
Thanks for this complete information.
~Gagan Masoun
Hi Desmond,
You are correct by stating that no analytic tool can give ABSOLUTE and ACCURATE data.
However, tools like Google analytic can be used to improve decision making for marketers. The ability to put this tool into proper usage is often lacking in many people.
Its good that Google is really doing everything possible to ensure that webmasters utilize this tool effectively.
The Engagement & Loyalty Dashboard feature has been very effective for important decision making!
This comment was shared in kingged.com – the content aggregator website where this post was shared for Internet marketers.
Sunday – Contributor to kingged.com
http://kingged.com/google-analytics-mining-information/
Nwosu, we must use data wisely to seek benefits from it. Smart post!
Thanks Masoun for your awesome contribution, and yes Google Analytics is also my favorite analytics tool.
Well, I wasn’t aware that one can add Google Adsense with Google Analytics and can see valuable details to improve the earning. Certainly a must do step for all bloggers.
Are you mining the information? Definitely not. It’s almost impossible to make the most of Google Analytics and its features. It’s a great mammoth boon for passionate bloggers and webmasters.
One of the disadvantage of Google Analytics is that the keyword queries are marked as not provided (encrypted).
Here’s a quick fix for this. Link Google Analytics with Google webmasters. You will get all keywords, but 2 days late. It is definitely useful. The three more features of Google analytics will be unlocked by this.
Hi Nwosu!
Yes, that’s right.Personally, I think that google Analytics can also provide you with useful suggestions to make your site or even specific pages faster. Keep Such sharing ideas in the Future. Thank you for your good information.