One of the many advantages of Google Analytics (GA) is the ability to integrate GA in a blog. You may ask why you should add GA to a blog, and the answer is directly correlated to the purpose of your blog and what you may or will write about.
One of the first questions that Google Analytics will provide you is to the question: \u201cwhere are people coming to my blog from?\u201d Just as this question is as relevant for your website, this is a crucial question because it will define how you blog and what you blog about.
This is why installing Google Analytics should be one of your first steps upon setting up your blog. The process for setting up an Analytics account and integrating it into a blog are well documented on the Google Analytics site.
When you are checking your blog GA stats, 3 key areas you should be reviewing at least regularly are:
Check recent visits:
This first section will indicate how many visitors you are getting to your blog. As part of the drill down, break the visits down to specific blog page postings. From that you will see how many visitors have been to a particular posting. More importantly, through analyzing average time on page and bounce rate, you will be able to gauge how engaging your posts are.
Keywords:
When you start blogging, you may not have any idea which keywords to optimize your blog for. With practice and through evaluation of the GA keyword sources, you\u2019ll be able to discern which keywords are driving traffic to your site. This in turn will provide you with more valuable insight as to what is of interest and topic worth for your visitors and your posts. The key is to see which of those experimental search referrals create a pattern and start writing posts around those terms.
Top Landing Pages:
Over time, in looking at the top landing pages, you gain further insight into what are the top pages that are the first point of contact to your blog. This will provide you with information on what pages and related keywords are ranking well.
This information along with the other 2 points above will provide you with more in-depth analysis as to what are the hot or sought after topics that you are writing about and garnering the most interest in your blog.
As a final note, in looking at new versus returning visitors, you\u2019ll also be able to evaluate your blog \u201cfollowing\u201d. A high percentage of returning visitors is an indication that your blog is being read and followed on a regular basis. Armed with this knowledge, in no time will you start to see your blog relevancy and posting quality improve in value for searchers, and your \u201cloyal\u201d blog followers increase.
