Google Analytics is able to track the traffic that you get on your website track. User’s engagement track many different things. So basically, the most important thing is obviously what can it do for you. It can provide traffic information, right? So it can show you how many unique visitors you get, how many pages you get, things like that.
I think more importantly than actual demand of traffic you get. What really matters is how you can approve upon the traffic that you do have but ultimately you want more traffic or you want better traffic. You can also use this information for search engine optimisation and target the most productive search queries for your website.
Some information that it gives you are things like bounce rate, how you actually acquired users and website visits duration, Geolocation and Daily Trends. I want to talk about the idea that bounce rate is the amount or percentage of times people go on the first page and they just leave. It does not necessarily have to be your homepage. It can be any page, for example, they found your blog post through twitter and then they just close it.
That would be considered, a bounce and that would increase your bounce rate. So you want lower bounce rate simply because that means a lower percentage of people leave after the first view. And acquisition is simply where they come from, right? Are they coming from a lot of Google searching, email, social media, other websites things like that. And that’s something that would be very beneficial for you simply because, if you know how you acquire your visitors then maybe that’s a place where you can push that even more and try to improve upon that because you’ve been successful in it. How can you make those aquisition sources better? Two fold in that sense, website duration. Website duration is very good because if they’re on your website for a longer amount of time, that not only means that what you have to say is good but that also tells Google that what you have to say is good.
So having a very low visitor duration is going to definitely be bad overall not just for you but also for Google, right? So you mean to try to increase that almost impossible and the only way to know that is to actual Google Analytics or some type of other analytics tool. Geolocation is important simply because, if the majority of your traffic is coming from a specific location whether it is people that are close by to you or in a certain country.
That can definitely spark what you may want to talk about or what may interest your users. You know you can target what you talk about on another blog, on a website based on the traffic that you do get, it’s all about adaptation and daily trends and I think that this is important as well. In the past what I noticed was that this may just be the specific kind of category that I was in. I saw a lot of users during Monday to Thursday but then on Friday to Sunday, the views just dropped and so what I decided to do was every time I was going to post a new blog entry, I was going to post it during those Monday to Thursday because that’s when people we’re really looking at the website and I thought that I would just increase the views.
I was also able to find out when was the best time, when was the highest amount of traffic and so that was how analytics was able to help me in that regard. There are other things that are much more complex that you can use Google Analytics for. I mentioned before which posts are they finding the most. You can target or adapt to write more those types of posts and it can overall just teach you how to direct or improve your website’s content. Now that we know the importance or what Google Analytics can actually do for us. Let’s look at how to set it up.
So what I did was create a test account for a demo website that we have all the information to get tracking ideas for. Accept the terms and the conditions and they’ll give you the tracking code. Once it loads up, just copy and paste it and there’s a number of places that we can put it in.
The first place that will notice is since we’re using the Genesis theme, what we can do is instead of changing anything, all we do is just pasted in here. So this is the header and footer scripts. Enter the scripts and code you would like to put to the header and we can just save it right there. So we would save settings, likewise where we could also do is we could also go into something you know, if you don’t have the Genesis theme where would you actually put it.
So what we do is going to appearance and then, we were going to the editor. And what we going to do is just put this code into the actual theme of our website. So we’re going to go into the main theme of Genesis, not our child theme. And we’ll put it in the header. Or we can put it in the footer. So let’s just put it in the header and paste it at the very bottom and save it in there. So in order to actually check that everything is working what we’re going to is just go back to home and we’ll see that our websites right here. You can just click on audience and overview and it’ll show you the information for your website for that specific day.
Another way to check, if you want to check right away is by going to real time. You can actually show your real time traffic and so if you notice here since we are physically logged in on our website, it shows active users on the site is one because that’s us. So thats a good way to check it, if you have a lot of traffic to begin with. And then you’ll see more people out here but this is a demo website. The only person who’s going to be using it is us, when we teach you right now. So that’s kind of how you can check to make sure that Google Analytics is set up correctly.