Wednesday, February 3, 2010

How to Use Google Analytics

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In a previous blog post we installed Google Analytics onto our Passy World of ICT blog. If you would like to see the instructions on how to add analytics to a web site, then click the following link:
http://passyworldofict.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-install-google-analytics.html

The Home Page for Google Analytics is here:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

We have had Analytics set up for about a month. So now it's time to interpret the data that has been collected.

Here is a YouTube high level technical overview of how Google Analytics works:



Here is a good Beginner's Video about how to interpret Analytics Data and Graphs. The sound track is not all that good, but the content and explanations are excellent. It also includes a blog example.



As soon as we set up Analytics on our Blog, Google emailed us an excellent list of resources for Analytics. This email is contained in the PDF document below:




The above PDF document has all the links to the You Tube Channel, the Blog, the User Guide, and so on.

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.


Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:





Analytics Reports for Passy's World of ICT

Let's examine the Reports that Google has generated for Passy's World of ICT.

Here is the main Analytics Dashboard Summary:

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The stats are showing that people stay for an average of 55 seconds on our site, with a high bounce rate of 70%. This is probably because they click a link on our page to go watch a YouTube video or some other link we have in our post. This makes their time appear very short, as if they have nearly bounced straight off our site. Passy's World of ICT is basically a portal to other media that is located elsewhere on the web. This is what we have planned to be from the outset, and so all is good here.

As a more detailed reporting example, let's examine "Traffic Sources".

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If we examine the URL source report in detail, and click on the pie chart option, we find that virtually all our traffic comes from the Googles for various countries around the world:

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Another interesting thing, is that over half our visitors use Firefox as their browser:

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And currently it seems that we are mostly getting new visitors, and the return rate is quite a bit lower than what we would like. Perhaps this will change over the next few months.

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Summary:

Analytics is telling us for Passy's World of ICT:
  • Most Visitors are brand new visitors
  • They only stay on a page for a short time before clicking one of its links
  • Our post on Orianthi the female guitarist is our most popular post.
  • The post we did on Graffiti Creator is also very popular.
  • Firefox is the browser of choice and most visitors have high speed internet connections.
  • Most of our visitors are located in the USA.
  • The least number of people visit our site on Sundays.
  • The most number of people visit at 7am in the morning.
  • Most visitors only view 1 or 2 of our pages and then exit.

We will check out Analytics again, in 2 or 3 months time, and see what trends emerge.

It is certainly a very useful free tool for anyone running a Blog or a Website.

DON'T FORGET TO DO OUR ONE CLICK SURVEY AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS WEB PAGE. JUST CLICK ONE OPTION IN, AND THEN CLICK THE "VOTE" BUTTON.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

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