This is the third Thursday in my series on the overwhelming amounts of Social Media monitoring and measurement tools out there. Awoque had the pleasure to spend some forty minutes on stage with Google at Handelskammardagarna. Here is a post on their tool Google Analytics. Analytics does not do what MBuzz or Facebook Insights do. While those two are great at covering Twitter and Facebook, Google analytics excels at website statistics.
As with any Google product, setting up is not too complicated. You need a Google account (which most of us have today), and access to your website’s code. This is where many people might start getting nervous. Fear not. As with all Google’s products, they want you to use it so bad they have made it as easy as it could possibly be. You get the code and instructions on where in the code where you are supposed to paste it. Then allow Analytics about 24 hours to start gathering data and you will be ready to go.
When you log into Analytics, you will find a list of the sites you track. Click on one will bring you directly to the statistics that might be the only thing you care about: how many visitors your site has had. It’s a simple graph. Up is good, down is not so good.
What happened on the 20th/21st of September?
After that you can dive right into a plethora of tools, all powerful but still simple to use. An important and interesting thing you should check out is the behavioral tab. This could be your most valuable asset while planning the strategy for your blog. The behavior tab shows your visitors actions on your site, how long they’re staying and what they click on. There is a lot of information to be found, but I would like to highlight:
- the Bounce Rate (what percentage of people actually never clicks on anything on your site?)
- Average Time On Site (how long do people actually stay?) areas.
- Bounce rate is interesting because if people are actually not clicking on content, you should probably try to rewrite, create your material.
- Also, make sure that the message you want to give is actually right there on the front page, because people will not go looking for it!
83% of visitors stay for less than 10 seconds. Is it worth it to write a three page post?
This site is obviously not a place where people spend a lot of time, but the question is why? Figuring out what’s wrong with a site (if it’s not intended to be a short stop for the average web surfer) is usually not easy, but trying different kinds of content might give you an idea on how to encourage people to stay for a few minutes longer than before.
Of course information you can get out of analytics does not stop there. If you are interested, you can learn what people searched for to get to you. If someone sent them a link or if they simply typed in the address. Analytics will actually tell you what browser people are using, and even if your visitors use mobile devices or regular computers!
Do you want to know more about how Analytics work and how it might help you and your company improve your visits and engagement? Don’t hesitate to contact me!
