Is My Blog Doing What I Want It to Do?

Bounce rates, time on page, unique visitors, frequency, channels and conversions. These are just a few of the metrics available about my blog, Now You Know, thanks to Google Analytics. But how do I best decipher all of the available information to craft a story about my blog’s success? Essentially, how do I know if my blog is doing what I want it to do?

In his book, Web Analytics 2.0, Kaushik (2010) explains that in order to measure success, I need to first establish my blog’s purpose, or objective, then I can pick the best analytics to tell me how I’m doing. Since I’m not selling a product, but am instead “selling” my knowledge of marketing, measurement and metrics, a good goal for my blog is to provide content that helps establishes my thought leadership and is interesting to my visitors. To determine if I am achieving my objective, I need to carefully choose key performance indicators that will tell me if I’m being successful. The analytics I need to consider, given my blog’s objective, fall under three of the five standard reporting sections offered by Google Analytics (GA) – Audience, Acquisition and Behavior – and will include returning visitors, average visit duration, channels and average time on page, to name a few.

Audience

I’ll begin by assessing the Audience analytics associated with my blog. GA (2013) lets me look at a number of metrics related to my visitors, such as age and gender, language and location, new and returning visitors, and mobile devices to help me better understand who my visitors are and their level of engagement. Keeping my blog goal in mind – thought leadership and interesting content – I’m going to look at metrics that can tell me not only who my visitors are, but how I can better tailor my content to reach them. Metrics I want consider include:

• Unique Visitors, Visits and Page Views. These foundational metrics can tell me how many individual visitors have come to my blog, how many total visits they have accounted for and how many total pages they have viewed during a particular time period (P.I. Reed, Lesson 2, 2013). Since my blog’s inception on Nov. 2, my site boasts eight unique visitors who have visited the site a total of 18 times and have viewed a total of 47 pages.


• Page View/Visits. This ratio is an engagement metric that is calculated by dividing the number of page views by the number of visits in a specific time period (P.I. Reed, Lesson 2, 2013). The data tells me that my eight visitors have viewed an average of 2.61 pages per visit.


• Average Visit Duration. By looking at this visit characterization metric (P.I. Reed, Lesson 2, 2013), I know that my eight visitors have spent an average of 3.08 minutes on my blog during each visit.


• Returning Visitors. P.I. Reed (Lesson 2, 2013) places this metric in the visitor characterization category. Returning visitors tells me that more than half of my visitors have returned (55.6 percent) since my blogging efforts started.


• Recency. Also a visitor characterization metric, this number tells me how much time has passed since a unique visitor performed a particular action of interest (P.I. Reed, Lesson 2, 2013). GA’s data reveals that the majority of my visits (15 out of 18) have taken place in a day or less (14 at 0 and 1 at 1).


• Visit duration. This visit characterization metric tells me the length of a session’s time for my visitors, (P.I. Reed, Lesson 2, 2013). For my blog, visit duration appears to be 30 seconds or less, with 10 of the total 18 visits falling in this range.


• Bounce rate. This engagement metric ratio, calculated by dividing single page visits by entry pages (P.I. Reed, Lesson 2, 2013), offers insight into how quickly visitors are exiting a site and where. As Kaushik (2013,) says, “In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave ‘instantly’." According to GA, my blog has a bounce rate of 44.44 percent.


• Age and Gender. Knowing this demographic information is helpful in identifying my visitors and better tailoring my content to them. Thanks to GA, I know 54.15 percent of my visitors are men, with the biggest percentage of visitors being between 25 and 34 years of age.

Acquisition

Next, I’ll look at some information related to Acquisition. Google Analytics offers insight into channels, keywords, referral sources, traffic and more to help me better understand where my visitors are coming from, and what or who is helping them come to my blog. The metrics I am most interested in – keeping my blog’s objectives in mind and availability functionality – are:

• Referrers. GA calls referrers – a visit characterization metric that tells me sources of traffic (P.I. Reed, Lesson 2, 2013) – channels. According to GA, 15 of my 18 visits came to my blog directly, two from blogger.com (social) and one from a bot - gadgets/ifr (referral source.


• Traffic. GA tells me that most of my visits, since my blog’s creation, have taken place on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

While GA offers a variety of metrics under this reporting section, such as information on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, social, cost analysis and Search Engine Optimization, I am presently not using any of functionality because I am not running a marketing campaign nor have I enabled Webmaster Tools.

Behavior

Under this final standard reporting section I am using, given my blog’s objectives, GA offers a variety of metrics related to the Behavior my visitors – information that will help me better understand what my visitors are doing, including where they are landing and exiting my blog, and what content appears to interest my visitors the most:

• Unique Page Views. This foundational metric is the number of times a page was viewed at least once (Google Analytics, 2013). GA reveals that 34 out of 48 total page views are unique. This metric also allows me to see that my top two articles are “What Story Does Your Web Metrics Tell” and “Taking Advantage of the Shift to Content.” My least popular blog is “Which Online Advertising Platform Will Best Help Drive Results.”


• Average Time on Page. This metric tells me how long my visitors on spending on each page on average. GA reports this metric at 1:57 seconds for my blog.


• Landing Pages. This metric tells me where my blog visitors are arriving. GA reveals that most of my visits (14 out of 18) start from my blog’s home page, and that 8 of these visits are from first-time visitors.

This standard reporting sections offers other metrics I am not using at this time, based on my blog’s objectives, including site speed, site search, events and Adsense.

Conversions and Real Time

While I’m not using Conversions and Real Time presently, I wanted to note that GA also offers these reports. Conversion reports allow you to see how you are progressing in your realization of the goals you’ve set for your website or blog. It also allows you to look at multi-channel funnels and your e-commerce efforts. Real Time reports provide information about your visitors as it is taking place, including events, traffic sources, content and locations. Since I’m not selling a product, pushing downloads of a white paper or really focusing on increasing blog visitors (just yet), conversions are not part of the metrics I’m analyzing for my blog at this time.

Assessment

So after looking at all of this information, is my blog doing what I want it to do? What do these metrics, taken together, tell me about my blog? Simply put, the metrics are telling me that while I am on my way to achieving my blog’s objective – thought leadership and interesting content – I have much room for improvement. Particularly, I want to look for ways to boost my engagement with my visitors, increasing my page views/visit, returning visitors and average visit duration metrics.

Since I know the majority of my visitors are men and are between 25 and 34-years-of-age, I might try to tailor my content more to this audience and their interests as related to my topic of web analytics. It may also be helpful to introduce new content (i.e. post new blogs) on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which are peak performance times. Additionally, I should consider what referral sources beyond blogger.com could be helpful in driving visitors to my site and adding widgets to my blog so visitors can share content they find interesting and help boost my audience. I also need to begin asking my readers to share their thoughts and opinions on each blog to enhance engagement. These are just a few of things the metrics are telling me about the performance of my blog and how to enhance it.

Based on the information I’ve shared here about my blog from GA, what suggestions can you make to help me reach my goal of thought leadership and interesting content? Are there other metrics I have overlooked that would tell me an important part of my blog’s story?

References

Google Analytics. (2013). Beth's blog. Retrieved Nov.. 23, 2013, from https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en#report/visitors-overview/a45647041w76369387p78959657/

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web Analytics 2.0. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Kaushik, A. (2013). Standard metrics revisited: #3: bounce rate. Retrieved Nov. 23, 2013, from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate/ <br><br>

Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, West Virginia University. (2013). Lesson 2: Web Metrics & SEO. Retrieved Oct. 28, 2013, from WVU eCampus Web site: http://ecampus.wvu.edu