Thursday 30 July 2009

Blogspot Google Analytics - Why You Need to Track Your Visitors

Tracking your visitors is critical to your Blogger blogs success. You need to know how people are finding your blog, how many people are viewing each post, how many of your readers convert into customers (or ad clicks,) and how to use this gathered information to improve your traffic and conversion rates.

Google has a free tool called Google Analytics that will allow you to track almost anything that your readers and visitors do while on your Google Blogger blog. This free tool from Google is the industry standard when it comes to tracking. Don't bother with the simple traffic counters as they will not give you all the information you need. Here are some of the things you will want to keep track of:

1) Total Traffic To Your Blog

You want to keep track of how many visitors you have and what they are viewing. By keeping track of the total visits to your blog you will be able to gauge what is working and what is not. This is very important to those that are advertising or collecting names, as you already know each visitor has a value.

2) Track Conversion Rates

With Google Analytics you can keep track of specific goals. For example your blog may be setup to collect names and email addresses. Google Analytics will allow you to track what percentage of your readers give you their name and email address. You will also be able to track how your visitors found your blog (keyword, search engine, referring site or advertisement,) what page they landed on and then pinpoint the specific page that convinced them to give you their name and email (aka: a conversion.)

With this information you will be able to improve your sign-up rates in several ways. If you discover that a specific keyword sending traffic to your website has a 90% conversion rate you can work on improving your search engine rankings for that keyword. If you notice that 50% of your potential registrations leave while reading your "Terms of Service" page, you can modify that page to decrease the loss of registrations. If you see that 30% of the visitors you get from YouTube decide to convert you can focus more effort on your video marketing campaigns. There are literally hundreds of other metrics you can use to improve your conversion rates as well, but without tracking your visitors you would never discover them!

3) Track The Physical Location Of Your Visitors

If you advertise online (specifically with Google Ads) Google Analytics will be immensely valuable to you. Google can log where your visitors are physically located. First by country then drilled down from there. You may discover that 90% of your traffic is for some reason coming from a specific city in California. Based on this metric you could create a targeted advertisements for that specific location. Not only would you save money on your ad campaigns, your ads would be far more targeted to the location. On top of that, if you ever plan on hosting an event, you will know which cities will be easiest to market to.

Data is collected over time. Even if you don't know how to read it, make sense of it or improve your website from it, it is absolutely critical that you start tracking your sites visitors immediately. You will eventually need to access this priceless data.

If you need help setting up, installing or configuring Google Analytics for your Blogger blog join us at TakeOnTheNet and we will show you the step by step process. You will find dozens of other Blogger Search Engine Optimization techniques as well!

0 comments:

Post a Comment

 
Design by Free WordPress Themes | Bloggerized by Lasantha - Premium Blogger Themes | cheap international calls