Understanding Google Analytics

Some may say that you should really pay attention to the content overview and this is true; to an extent.  You have to remember here that the trends in search may be inflating certain pages or articles on your site.  You may want to examine the trend further out than one month to, perhaps, act as a metric for determining your ad placements on a particular page or article.  This may also be a good indicator, if you are running a content driven website, of which types of articles you should be publishing.

Traffic sources are a fantastic indicator as to how your readers are finding you.  Google breaks this down into four classifications: direct, search engine, organic, and other.

• Direct: This is when a user plugs your URL directly into their browser to find your site.  This data also includes users that visit your site from their bookmarks or links provided to them in an email.
• Search Engine: These are visitors that find your site from a search engine.
• Referral: Sometimes visitors make their way to your site from other sites and you should spend some time thinking about this.  If you are developing content and are gaining referral visitors you need to spend some time examine these sources.  You can click on the Referrals URL to gain further insight into the sites that are referring your visitors.  If certain sites are giving you tons of referrals for particular articles or content then you know that is your money content.  You need to remember that this is a moving target though.  As you develop, your content may be syndicated elsewhere and open up further streams of visitors so don’t sell yourself short by writing narrow content.

The analytics also allows you to view the keywords that visitors used to find your content in search engines or what Google would classify as organic traffic.  This may help you in deciding how to title articles or pages in the future.  Teaming this up with the metrics detailing your organic traffic can be a good indicator of your SEO as if people are not finding articles easily with keywords or contextual content then you need to identify your weaknesses and start using some more effective SEO tactics.

If revenue is your goal, then you should use this data to aid in deciding which pages should cost more for advertising and use these metrics as your supporting data.  The caveat to this though, is that if you aren’t gaining pure traffic, you will not be able to charge a premium for your top content.  You can therefore use this data to help you decide which type of content you need to publish regularly until you gain returning visitors instead of mostly new visitors.  New visitors are nice, and key at first, but the returning visitors are the ones that will contribute to your content, either by posting comments if you allow them or joining your forums should you provide them.

Most of what you will find elsewhere in the metrics that Google will collect is supporting data for the dashboard.  However, one place you definitely need to spend some time is the Browsers Capability section under Visitors.  This is especially true if you are the site designer as one of your first goals is to make sure that your site is tested across multiple browsers.  This data needs to be digested along with the average resolution data that the analytics provides you.  If you designed your site to be more than 1000 pixels wide and the majority of the visitors to your site are using a resolution of 1024 x 768 you need to redesign.