Definitive Guide To Web Analytics For Bloggers

Web analytics can do wonders to understand the profile of readers we have on our blog, whatever the purpose of it. We can get to know in order to apply to our content strategy such interesting and useful aspects as the hours in which they read us more carefully, what differences exist between readers and readers, how they interact based on their age ranges, if they read us in home or on the bus, what extension of the articles is preferred by our audience or what level of loyalty we are getting article by article for our blog.

We are going to discuss these issues and many other equally interesting ones in this web analytics guide for blogs. If you think that there is some information that escapes you, or you are not clear about the answer to any of the readings that I have released in the first paragraph, then prepare a very warm tea or coffee that we start the month of web analytics, with this guide of web analytics for blogs.

0.- Blog dashboard template for Google Analytics

So that no one is left at a disadvantage, I have prepared a personalized control panel for this guide so that you can apply most of the analysis that I will do without having to know how Google Analytics works. Sounds good right? You just need to have a Google Analytics account linked to your blog, something that 99% of you surely have. And for that 1%, now is your time to start making data-driven decisions to optimize the performance of your blog.

In this panel, dashboard or scorecard (terminology to suit each one) you will see several reports that will help you to become aware of the main metrics and KPI's that you should not escape from your analysis.

To activate the dashboard you just have to click on the link and link it to any of the views with data from your Google Analytics. Being a template, it will dynamically adapt to your own data of each account where you link it, so you will not see my data, but yours directly.

To get 100% of the practical part of this guide and start applying reports and making decisions right now.

Discharged? Well, we are going to analyze it in detail so you can see all the juice you can get out of it.

1.- Readers vs Readers

This first report tells us for the time range that we indicate, what number of readers we have on our blog. It is always a good indicator to take into account, especially in those blogs that deal with specific topics or that are part of the corporate strategy of a company whose products are more oriented to a specific sex.

Without further detail, we can easily see another key metric that we must cross with this first reading, and it is the time that men and women spend reading our blog on average.

"And it is not enough that we are properly oriented to the target sex we reach, but we must also verify that it is responding favorably to that content we generate"

Sometimes it might surprise you that despite talking about eminently feminine themes, men's reading time is similar to women's or, at least, considerable to be taken into account. In that case,

"It will be an excellent opportunity to create a small and new section that gives more response to that small segment that was passing unnoticed"

Sometimes it might surprise you that despite talking about eminently feminine themes, men's reading time is similar to women's or, at least, considerable to be taken into account. In that case,

"It will be an excellent opportunity to create a small and new section that gives more response to that small segment that was passing unnoticed"

This first report may not show up in your Google Analytics account. The reason will be because we do not have activated the "Google Analytics demographic and interest reports".

To activate this information so relevant for the web analytics of a blog, we must follow the following steps:

• Go to the "Administrator" tab of Google Analytics
• In the column "Property", go to the section "Property configuration"
• Enable the box that says "Enable demographic and interest reporting"
• Include a line of code in the Analytics tracking snippet that you have inserted in the source code of your blog. For those of you who use Universal Analytics, it should be as follows (where the UA and the domain it refers to must be those of your account, obviously)
• Ready, from this moment you will begin to receive demographic and interest data in your Google Analytics reports, and for that matter, in your control panel that I have shared with you.
• As a final note and to do things well, all that remains is to update the cookie policy of your blog to include information about this new source (you have many examples easily on the internet that will serve as a model)

2.- What age range are we most interested in?

This question that every blogger or blog manager should ask has its answer in the second report of the control panel that I have shared.

By generating a dynamic graph that crosses gender, age and visitors, we can easily see those age ranges that have become (voluntarily or naturally) our most loyal readers.

Analyzing men and women separately will help us maintain that extra segmentation that helps us make better decisions about content policy and the blog's own strategy.

It is very relevant information to decide if we are reaching the age ranges that interest us. Maybe for a personal blog that is written as a hobby it might not be decisive, but without a doubt for a professional or corporate blog it will be worth a lot of money to know who is reading us.

Again, the commercial readings are the most determining. If the company to which the blog belongs sells products aimed at men between 40 and 50 years old, we must control that this segment is the one that predominates among our readers. If not, surely we should rethink the content strategy or the social dissemination channels that we are using to expand the circle of readers of the blog.

3.- What age range dedicates more time to us?

Very well, having seen who our main readers are, now we will pass the magnifying glass on them and we will value the time they spend reading our articles based on their age ranges. In this report of the panel I have not differentiated between men / women, although that is information that you can easily know in the detailed reports of Analytics.

Thus, the next step is to know if the age ranges that generate the highest age peaks are also the ones that spend the most time reading our content. Again, if everything goes with respect to what is expected, it will be positive, although this does not mean that other behaviors are not interesting to interpret.

Let's imagine that despite selling or writing about adult fashion, we have some young readers who, although they are not the majority, spend as much or more time reading the articles than the rest. It could be due to several factors (that they have more free time, that they do it in their dead times at university or school, etc.) but what we should not ignore is that this target is reading us in detail. Why not try to identify with a specific section or with an article oriented to this profile to adapt a part of our content to them and, in return, try to better understand their motivations?

It is possible that for this theoretical example there was a part that were students of design and that, therefore, we are interested in capturing to create a new niche aimed at "young talents". Who knows, the magic of web analytics is that it allows detecting many segments of interest for a blog with which to generate positive synergies and optimize decision making.

4.- Do they read us calmly or "on the go"?

Another source of information that will give wings to any content strategy is to know how our readers read us. In other words, when do they have time for us?

A first way to identify this reader / article interaction is to know from which device they read us. To be clear, do they read us from the mobile, a desktop or laptop or from the tablet?

Knowing this distribution is the first step to understand where they read us from. This information, in addition, can be crossed with an hourly report indicating at what time we have more readers from each device. In this way we will be able to create reader profiles based on device and time, because we may have different peaks in various time slots, but they will not always respond to the same way of reading us.

Going to a practical case, if our readers take advantage of the time on the bus or breakfast to read to us, they will surely do so from mobile devices, while there will be another segment that may read us at night from their tablet (stretched out on the couch and with a blanket over it). And the desktop ones?

"Ah! I always like to give this information, and it usually happens that most visits arrive during working hours "

We will also see in the chapter of the guide oriented to web analytics for ecommerce that, in the same way, an important part of the sales and inquiries is made before lunchtime, when the energy drops and the time until food goes slow.

So, have you already identified all your types of readers?

And is that if we have several peaks, we can generate articles or structure their dissemination based on who is going to read us. A tweet before our readers catch the bus, a joke for those who read us before eating, a message of envy for those who read us from the sofa at night ... personalizing the content to our readers and, as we see, the the way we present them to you we will be stealing their hearts instantly (and making it better than the competition for sure)

Another maxim in this report is that the sessions we capture on mobile phones will be shorter than on desktop computers, it is evident since on mobile phones we get tired earlier. But far from being something negative, again, we must be able to understand that reality and know how to adapt our content to an increasingly faithful and demanding mobile mass. Do you adapt or wait for the competition to do it before?

5.- What channels bring us more readers?

Knowing how they behave is essential as we are seeing, but more classic and direct reports should not be left aside either. We must be able to identify which traffic sources are those that report the highest quality readers.

Do they read us thanks to our SEO efforts or because we have a wonderful community manager? This first interpretation will come from the Google vs. social networks binomial, and we have to go further and find out if those readers are relevant to our content or not.

Is there a channel that generates poor traffic that bounces up? We could have an advertisement active in Facebook Ads that attracted a large number of readers but had a bounce well above the average, that is, they came and went without doing anything. It could even be that they read the article but were marked as a bounce, since if they do not interact with the web Google Analytics will not be able to eliminate that visit from the bounce rate.

"It is in this line that it is essential to incorporate calls to action and other incentives to continue seeing other articles to reduce the bounce rate"

For the more advanced, by editing the analytics tracking code, we can configure it so that visits that exceed a certain number of seconds automatically exit the bounce. Being a blog, this figure will depend on the size of the articles in question, but if, for example, we remove those that exceed 30 seconds from the bounce, we will have more data to know that they have been interested in the article they have reached even though they have not seen anything more on our blog.

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6.-Do we catch? Do we loyalty? Or both at the same time?

As parallel strategies, recruitment has tools to enhance it, and likewise loyalty follows an independent path.

Based on how the blog's online strategy is structured, crossing these data will give us information on how readers evolve.

A graph like the one on the dashboard that I have shared with you that crosses “% of new sessions” vs “total sessions” has the great advantage that it allows us to see at a glance if the strategy is following a channel more oriented towards capture or investment. loyalty.

If the percentage of new daily sessions (that is, new readers) is high, it will mean that we are attracting more new readers than we are not loyalty. Now, interpreting this metric separately could lead to errors, and if total users grow over time it could be the case that successes are being achieved in both recruitment and loyalty.

If, on the contrary, daily readers do not grow and the percentage of new sessions is low, it means that we have a very loyal base of followers and that, therefore, our point of improvement will be in discovering new channels through which attract a new legion of readers relevant to our interests and goals.

7.TOP 10 Most Viral Articles

This report cannot be missing from any web analytics for blogs worth its salt, since it will provide very useful information on the success of the social media, SEO, SEM or email marketing strategy that we carry out in parallel, indicating the articles that have attracted a greater number of readers and that it has acted exclusively as a landing page for them.

Does the article in the top 1 mean in all cases that it is the most interesting?

Not necessarily. It could happen that yes, as logic leads us to think, but other inputs should also be studied, such as the source that has captured this social traffic (What social network was the main one? Is it usual for our blog?), As well as the title that We share on social networks (Did you talk? Did it have a different structure? What time did we share it? ...), and finally if this viralization resulted in quality readers or they were deceived by false expectations.

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So, as we see, the top 1 in viralization is not always the best blog article. A message that leads to confusion could cause the opposite effect, and that this success in viralization has resulted in a bad brand image or a disappointment of potential readers who have reached the blog.

Finally, to say that by viralization applied to this case of web analytics we do not understand the number of retweets or other metrics, but the effective clicks from each social network. Because it often happens that certain articles fall into what I called in another article " fever of sharing without reading" or another oriented to "Newsjacking as a viralization technique, and these huge viral data does not translate even remotely into an increase in blog readers.

Oh, and if your goal with the blog is to get an article to reach an incredible diffusion, I recommend that you keep in mind this other article about "Newsjacking, a technique to achieve a legendary social viralization" .

However,

"Whether you like to viralize or not, the big mistake will be that quantitative data blinds your qualitative analysis"

For those of you who download the panel, you will see that the “home” section is automatically downloaded by the report so as not to mix and generate confusion. Whether you have your own domain for the blog or if it is hosted on a corporate website as a category / blog. A detail, right?

8.TOP 10 most read articles

Now, this report will help us to know which article has had the most absolute readings (that is, counting when it has acted as a landing page and also when it has been a page of passage within a complete navigation a reader)

Crossing as in the panel that I have shared the pages with more readers together with the reading time of those pages (here we are not talking about the average time of the session, that is, from when the reader enters until the blog leaves, but the average time in the article in question) we will obtain data of great interest again to understand the operation of the current strategy and assess its successes and points for improvement.

On the one hand we will have information on which is the article with the highest volume of readers, and on the other hand which of them is the one that has captured the most reading time.

It could happen that the comparison is not clean if the blog post structure in terms of article size is not stable. To give a clear example, when Devansh analyzes the reading time in the web analytics of her blog, she will notice that this article will have a much longer reading time than the rest, but this fact is due to the fact that its size is also larger than the usual size of Devansh's posts.

That is why again there is no need to confuse metrics. If we are homogeneous in the length of the articles, on the other hand, we will know which of those that is in the top 10 has a higher reading index, with which we can once again draw excellent and interesting conclusions. What sets you apart from the rest? Is it just the theme or is there some aspect related to the design, the structure of the article, the writer or the type of readers that has influenced this unique behavior?

Also, remember that this dashboard (for those of you who have downloaded and integrated it into your Analytics account) is dynamic, that is, by varying the date ranges or comparing two periods with each other, we can play at will with the information and detect trends or draw comparisons of great strategic value.

9. What do our readers want!

This report is one of my favorites, I have to be honest. With web analytics for blogs we have the ability to know what searches our readers make on our blog. Magic? No, let's activate the internal search engine of our blog in Google Analytics.

Again, we have to do a previous configuration in our Google Analytics account, but do not worry, you will see that it is very simple to create and it will give us invaluable information:

• Go to the "Administrator" tab of Google Analytics
• In the "View" column, we select the view to which we want to add the information about the queries in the blog's internal search engine and enter the "View configuration" section
• Enable the box that indicates "Site search tracking"
• Indicate the query parameter (Which right now I explain what it means)

 

How to know the query parameter of our blog?

Very easy, we go to our internal blog search engine and make any questions. I am going to use two practical examples so that you can see it more clearly. First of all I will use Devansh's own website so that you can easily configure it if you still do not track it in your web analytics.

I'm going to look for my name in the search engine: Roger Llorens (any other search is valid). Now we look at the URL that has been generated, in the case of Devansh's website the following:

As we can see, after the URL from where I have searched, an extra information appears that indicates the search query (the query) and other parameters that Devansh has configured in her blog. In our case, we realize that what comes before the “=”, before the search in question, matches the letter “s”. Well, as easy as adding "s" (without the quotes, let's be clear) in the Google Analytics space where it asked us for the query parameter.

Another example, on the web where I am an editor and you can read me weekly I have done the same search. As we can see, here the URL that it returns is simpler, but again it coincides with the fact that the query parameter is an "s" as well.

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This is not always the case, but for the vast majority of blogs (especially those hosted by WordPress) the query parameter will be an "s" or a "q".

And that's how easy we have managed to configure the internal search queries report in Google Analytics, now we are going to explain what strategic information it can give us.

Let's retrieve the thread of the blog's web analysis, what do our readers want !?

"A question for which activating this internal search report is going to give us very powerful weapons to discover it"

Well, first of all it tells us those topics, topics or queries that the reader expects to find in our blog and that they do not want to search manually between the categories. This could often be the case in blogs of a certain size, where there are several categories and generate a considerable number of articles. Although this does not mean that it could be used, for example, from a mobile phone to find an article on a specific topic or by a certain author.

In addition, for those of you who are reviewing the panel as you read this guide, you will see that we have incorporated “time after the search” data. How do we interpret this metric?

It will indicate roughly whether the query was satisfactory. It is clear that if they search for a term that we have not written for, they will not find results, so it is likely that the reader will leave the web. In these cases, we will find that the post-search time is low.

How to interpret low back time numbers?

It has a double reading on which to build the pillars of immediate and urgent optimization. It could happen that you find results for the search but that you do not like, in which case we will have to review the quality of our articles. On the other hand, it could happen that it leaves because it has not returned results, so we will have a market gap if that query is repeated systematically over time or is relevant.

What more information does the internal search engine report give us?

Well, one that you are going to love and in which you have surely already fallen:

"The report from the internal search engine will give us ideas to write new articles based on what readers expect from our blog "

If we identify that there are some queries that we do not satisfy, but that readers would expect to find, we will have to get down to work and include them within the short-term editorial calendar so as not to miss more readers.

At the same time, it could happen that some specific terms have a "street" use different from the one we propose on the blog. This happens with words imported from English, which often take hold before a translation and are often a point of disagreement with the way of speaking. Either the way of searching between the Spanish of Spain or Uruguay can give rise to different ways of finding results that must also be taken into account.

A thousand and one uses for this report, all of them of utmost importance for the content strategy and to better understand what our readers are looking for in our blog, what they hope to find, what they find and, above all, what they do not find!

Did I mention that this is one of my favorite reports? Not enough.

10. Where are my readers?

Our city of residence or the origin of the writing of the articles in no way limits the scope that these may have on the network. On the contrary, we surely realize that we have loyal readers beyond the borders of our country. Is this good, bad or indifferent? Well, as in everything in web analytics, it will depend on the objectives set.

For a commercial blog, having readers outside the borders if the company for which it is written does not sell abroad will make little sense in the medium term. If it is residual or not very relevant data, it will not have a major problem, but what if they are my main readers?

"A reader costs a lot to get, whether he is new or if he is someone loyal, so we should never lack the trust that someone has placed in us"

And this reading is valid whether it falls within our strategic or commercial objectives of the blog, or if it does not. Even so, detecting that the cities or countries from which they are reading us do not fit the ideal strategy will be reason enough to reformulate it and direct it to where it may interest us most.

That said, knowing where they read us from also has very constructive readings of business interest or blogger. On the one hand, we can better segment content, launch geolocated campaigns or get in touch with other key people in certain regions to continue achieving our objectives.

Analyzing the bounce rate by cities we will also see if there are certain points that, not by language but by dialect or by concerns or tastes, we are not knowing how to attract and integrate within our regular quality readers. In addition, if we go further and delve into the source of that specific traffic, maintaining segmentation by city and with the bounce metric in mind, we could see that, for example, we have followers on Facebook that are not relevant to what we share since they tend to leave us without reading, or that Twitter in a certain country has a high diffusion but they are readings of fast consumption.

They are examples, in the end the reality and depth of each interpretation will be marked by the economic sector and the purpose of each of your blogs.

11. What day do they read to us the most?

There are studies that say that ... Nono, don't be fooled with generic figures, it's time to focus on the web analytics of your blog in particular.

“There are a lot of infographics about hours, days, social networks, formats and other details that determine the success or failure of an article or a tweet. And I'm not saying they are not right, but web analytics is based on testing and decision-making based on data. In this case we can obtain our own data, so let's play with them and don't think that what works for someone else will work for us too "

When analyzing the days that generate more readers, it is interesting to always try to cross this metric with the duration of these sessions on the blog. In this way, we will not only know quantitatively which days are our top days, but also the time they can dedicate to us based on the day of the week that it is.

It could be that Monday and Tuesday we have a lot of readers, but instead they will spend much more time reading the articles on the weekend.

"This psychology of the reader will be decisive to organize the dissemination strategy, especially that of social media"

If top days in readers do not coincide with top days in reading time (as it usually happens, no one said this would be easy) then we will have to find a balance between diffusion interests and engagement interests.

Once again, the strategic objectives will mark the line towards which to choose. And it is that, again,

"More is not always better in web analytics"

12. At what time do they read us?

Let's retrieve the information about mobile devices and see what are the hours in which we have more readers, on the one hand, and how much time we can spend reading the articles.

Generally (yes, I am going to generalize) the mornings have high readings but short in time, just before eating there is again a peak of readings this time with greater dedication, after lunch and before the end of the working day there is usually longer reading times (once we discount those who take a nap with our article) and finally the night has an interesting behavior also in available time. The rest of the hours have their peaks, and we must know how to understand them based on the type of readers that we have (it will not be the same that we orient ourselves to technicians than to unemployed people for example) and their usual schedules (remember the quick readings in the subway or bus, or our faithful reader who dedicates time to us every day when she covers herself with the blanket)

The essence of all web analysis is in the segmentation and in knowing how to understand the psychology and life habits of our readers. Not easy, I admit, but with the scorecard that I share with you, I trust that you are one step closer to achieving it. Well, that is something that is never achieved 100%, since web analysts never have enough and we live in constant investigation of a new niche, segment or reader profile (or client for when we analyze ecommerce) that represents an opportunity to business or be worthy of being included in the online marketing strategy.

12 + 1. conclusion

If you were not convinced at the first time to download the Google Analytics template to study the web analytics of your blog, I hope this review has convinced you and you have one more tool at your disposal to continue improving and optimizing your content, reaching more people and loyalty to your legion of readers.

Go ahead analysts, you have to devour the numbers of your blogs and continue optimizing your online marketing strategies.