H. James Harrington (of the Harrington Institute) put it best:

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”

If you want to measure and improve your website performance then you need to use GOALS in Google Analytics.

In Google Analytics we use “goals” to measure how often users complete specific actions. For example – make a purchase (for an ecommerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).

Marketing Consultant Paul Manwaring and author of this Google Analytics Tutorial explains more…

A Beginners Guide to Setting up Goals in Google Analytics

So you have Google Analytics installed and collecting data, well done! I bet you’re having a lot of fun looking at how much traffic you are getting to the website and where that traffic is coming from.

While this data is very useful, it will not give the Return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts. To get any bottom line key performance indicator (KPI) you will need to setup Goals in Google Analytics.

This Tutorial will walk you through everything you need to know to set up your goals.

How Do Goals Work in Google Analytics?

Goals in Google Analytics are your website conversions. Conversions can come in the form of sales, leads, email signups, watching a video and more. Whatever it is you want to measure as a success point, you can set up as a goal? You can then use these goals to measure how successful your online marketing is and whether you are making a return on any advertising spend. Having concrete numbers is important to justifying further investment in advertising or marketing spend.

How to Set up Goals in Google Analytics

You should now have an idea as to why setting up goals in Google Analytics is worth doing. You will not be able to optimise areas of your website or marketing without this data.

Knowing specifically what campaigns are working and not working or what landing pages are working and not working will help grow your online business faster than you could imagine. What business owner or marketer could say no to that!

This process may seem daunting but please don’t be put off by it, it really is well worth doing and a lot easier than it looks.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to set up Goals in your Google Analytics:

1. Create a New Goal in Admin

First step is to log into your Google Analytics account and select the ‘Admin’ tab at the top of the page. Make sure you are in the right account, property and view before setting up your goal so you don’t set up a goal for the wrong website if you have more than one on your Google Analytics.

Next, click on the ‘Goal’ tab underneath the ‘View’ column. A new section should open where you will see a red button that says ‘+ New Goal’; click on this.

2. Choose Template or Custom Goal Type

Again, a new section will open and you will see a list of options to choose from. Either choose a template or you can create a custom goal. There is no right and wrong here and if you’re unsure about any of the templates, then always go for the custom option. For this guide we have chosen ‘Make a payment’.

a. Template – These goal types were built by Google for the most common business objectives such as hotel reservations, dental appointments, phone call inquiries and even video tutorial websites. For example, an ecommerce site would choose the ‘Make a Payment’ template while a business that may want to see if their video is being viewed would choose the ‘Media Play’ template.

b. Custom – If you can’t see a template that meets your business objectives then choose the custom option. This doesn’t mean that the process will be any harder nor will it include any coding.

3. Choose the Goal Type

Now that you have selected your goal template and have clicked ‘Continue’, it is time to choose the name of your Goal.

Once you have picked a name that is relevant to the goal you will need to choose the goal type. There are 4 different goal types to choose from which we have explained what each is about so you can make a better decision.

(a) URL Destination Goal
This is the option to choose if you want to track how many sales or leads the website is generating by having the ‘Thank You’ or ‘Confirmation’ page as the URL destination goal. This means that every time a user lands on this page, a conversion will be counted.

(b) Duration Goal
You can use this as goal to track those that have spent a minimum amount of time (set by you) on your website.

(c) Pages/Visit Goal
Use this goal type to track how many people are visiting a number of pages (set by you) on your website.

(d) Event Goal
This can only be used if you have setup an Event in Google Analytics. You can use this to track whether users have played a video, whether they have clicked your social media buttons, have downloaded something and any other interactions.

4. Add Goal Details

How are you doing so far, still following us? Good.

After you have chosen the most relevant goal type for the goal you want to create, you will need to set the goal details. Each goal type will have its own set of details. Below, we have explained what details are needed for each goal type.

a. Destination Goal Details

If you have selected the destination goal type, you will need to enter the URL of the thank you or confirmation page next to where it says ‘Equals to’. Don’t add the full URL of the page however, just the request URI. For example, www.mywebsite.com/thankyou.html would become /thankyou.html. You can then choose to add monetary values or create a sales funnel, which we will talk about further on in the blog post, and click save. Make sure users aren’t visiting this page for any other reason than after completing a sale or filling out an enquiry otherwise the goal data will be inaccurate.

b. Duration Goal Details

If you have selected the duration goal type, at this stage you will need to enter the hours, minutes and seconds you want to set that a user will need to stay on the site for to become a conversion.

c. Pages/Visit Goal Details

This is just as simple as the duration goal type in that you just need to enter the number of pages a user must visit to be classed as a conversion.

d. Event Goal Details

Event Goal Details which can only be done if you have setup an Event for the interaction you want to count as conversions in Google Analytics. Please see screenshot below:

=> Category – This will be for if you want to track a group of interactions such as users watching videos or downloading eBooks.

=> Action – An action is literally the action you want users to take on your website such as clicking the play button on a video or clicking a download button.

=> Label – Use this to add more details to the goal such as the name of the video or download.

=> Value – This is to measure the monetary value of the event. If you would like to keep the value the same as the event value then set the toggle to ‘Yes’. If you would like to add a different monetary value than the event value then set the toggle to ‘No’.

5. Add Monetary Value and Goal Funnel

These are optional extras and depend on what goal types you are setting up. While they are optional, the data that they provide is very useful so don’t skip on this if it is relevant to your business objective as they are both really easy and quick to set up. Here is some information as to what each are.

a. Monetary Value – Use this if you want to set a monetary value for your conversions. For example, if you have a lead generation website and are selling leads for $20 each then set the monetary value for $20 for a conversion. You will easily be able to see what your ROI is from different channels by adding a value to goals.

b. Goal Funnel – This is great for ecommerce sites that want to track how many users are adding items to the basket, proceeding to the checkout but then not completing a sale. You can use this data to help with your email marketing and also to help optimise the checking out process.

Where to View Your Goals in Google Analytics

Now that you have set up your Goal in Google Analytics, you will need to know where to find this new and extremely useful data. To find the information, sign into your Google Analytics account and go to the reporting tab. On the left hand side, select ‘Conversions’ and then ‘Goals’ underneath it. You can then select ‘Overview’ which will show a page to the right of the navigation. Here you’ll be able to see how many goals have been completed during the period of time you are on, the conversion rate and where those goal completions have come from.

There you have it…

You should now have all the data you need to optimise landing pages and marketing efforts to achieve better conversion rates and a higher ROI. Don’t be intimidated by all the different options there are as setting up goals doesn’t take that much time and is actually a fairly easy process. The data you will get from it is well worth it so don’t put it off any longer, do it right now!

About Paul Manwaring
Paul Manwaring is the founder of Outsprung, a multi-disciplinary design and marketing agency based in London. Their aim is simple; to help small businesses and bloggers grow. He has a background in graphic design and UX design and has consulted over 1200 websites through his website review service.

More About Google Analytics…

Google Analytics For Bloggers – The Definitive Guide

Making The Most Of The Google Analytics Intelligence Feature

“Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost”

– H. Thomas Johnson

The post Google Analytics Goals – Setup Guide appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

How Alerts Work

Every time Google sees something that it thinks is significant, then they create an alert, which matches up with the websites time-line of traffic. These alerts range from boost in traffic, and time on site, to location of visitors and traffic sources. If you don’t want to look through all of your Analytics everyday then I suggest that you use the intelligence to alert you to what’s going on instead. When you open up the Intelligence section, it should look something like this.

The alerts that you’re seeing on the time-line at all alerts set by Google with what they deem to be significant. These alerts can start to add up, so if you want to make sure that you only see much more relevant information, you can change the sensitivity slider down to low. This will remove the results that are not especially important, although it won’t delete them, it’ll just hide them. Unlike setting goals, or combining your Adsense earnings with Analytics, you don’t have to set anything up for this to work, nor do you have to wait to start seeing results as it will show you all of the results from the past too. When I adjust the sensitivity slider to low, this is what my results look like.

Sliding this far along the slider is quite extreme, but relevant to show you the difference – I usually have it set somewhere around the middle where the mix of results are more relevant. Below are the results that you see when you click on one of the bars containing alerts. As you can see, at this end of the scale, the results are quite extreme, and results such as source information and visitor location have been taken away. It’s all about what you’re interested in seeing, and how relevant they are to your website. I personally don’t have too much need to know any more about the location of my visitors.

So far, we’ve been viewing these results on a daily basis, but you can also view them on a weekly or monthly basis too. This doesn’t combine all of the data into a week’s worth of information, it changes how Google will look at what is significant. A large boost in traffic from Mexico one day may have been relevant on a daily basis, but when you look at one week and compare it to another, it may not longer be deemed significant. Looking at the results on a weekly or monthly basis become as relevant as daily views for you when your website gets older. I would always recommend tracking the website on a daily basis, but checking at the end of each week and month on those basis’s too is a good idea.

What the Alerts Track

To look closer at the results that Google provide me with, I’m looking at the day with with most amount of alerts, with a total of 14. There was a small spike in traffic on this day, but it was mostly from the aftermath of a much larger spike in traffic. This did provide me with a couple traffic alerts telling me that my percentage of new visits was up by over 40% and because of the increase in traffic who were being linked to a single page, my bounce rate also went up by 15%, providing me with a second alert.

All this new traffic produced further results such as a decreased time on site and boosts in traffic from certain locations. Google does exactly what we’ve come to expect and breaks this down into easy to read information, referencing the result it was expecting for the day. Not only was I provided with relevant information on what was going on with my visitors, but it was further broken down by location. I had two alerts for United States and they were grouped together with an increase in visitors, but a decrease in time on site.

The final bit of information that I was provided with was the Traffic and Content alerts, which told me where my traffic was coming from, along with how long they were staying on the page. I can see from my alerts that both Reddit and StumbleUpon picked up on my link and I received an increase of traffic and time on site respectively. This is all very nicely laid out for me in this easy to read intelligence section, without having to do any confusing looking around. The Content information even went so deep as to not only tell me which page was the most popular, but which landing and exit pages had an increase in time on site.

How to use this New Information

If you’ve read my recent article on Custom Reporting and Advanced Segments, then you’ll understand the extra control and knowledge they can provide if used properly. Google understands the uses better than any of us, and that’s why they’ve added the ‘Create segment’ link at the end of most of the alerts that you see above. We can use this new information that we’ve found through our alerts to study the traffic in more detail and provide us with better results and knowledge.

Say for example, I notice one day in my alerts that my Facebook time on site has gone up, I may want to track this further and more often in the future. I click on the Create Segment at the bottom and I’ll be taken to an Advanced Segment page, where all I have to do is add any other metrics I may be interested in, name it and save it. Even though the alert was referring to the increased time on site, the segment is still only going to show a single parameter referring to the source. This is because we can examine all the future information by saving the segment and using it in the dashboard as our only traffic source under the segment section in the top right-hand corner.

How to use Custom Alerts

When you’re in the Intelligence section, click on ‘+ Create A Custom Alert’ on the right hand side to take you to the right page. You create these alerts similarly to how you would an Advanced Segment. You first select whether you would like the traffic to apply to the Day, Week or Month, and then whether you’d like to be alerted by email for these. I select yes, as I like to know straight away when something is happening on my website so that I can act accordingly. Next, you select conditions from the drop down menus for whatever you would like to test. I’ve gone for the source of Facebook.com and asked it to alert me when the % of traffic from them is more than 50% greater than the day before. It’s up to you to experiment with this and find one that suits your traffic, I may find in a few days that 50% is too low.

When you take the added functionality of the intelligence reports, and combine that with advanced segments and custom alerts, you can produce a lot of very useful information from this feature. This is a quite advanced feature for Google Analytics and if you’re having trouble then I suggest you go back and read my post on Google Analytics and my post on Custom Reports and Advanced Segments to get a better idea of how this all works.

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How to Make a Custom Report

When you open the custom reporting section, it can look quite confusing at first glance, but it’s not that hard when you start to understand what everything does. There are two main elements to custom reporting; metrics and dimensions. Metrics are the main statistics which you would typically study, such as site usage and content, and dimensions are the different values for each metric such as time on site and bounce rate. It’s really simple when you get started with making your own.

Firstly, you need to choose a metric that you want to work on and drag that into the metrics bar in the custom report. You can study up to 10 different metrics in one tab of a report at the same time, but if you run out of room, you can always add another tab. The metrics that you can chose from are Site Usage, which contains all the information about your visitors, Content, Goals, E-Commerce and Advertising. The last three metrics are more advanced and niched, so we won’t be going into too much detail about them. You use the drop down menus to choose which metric you want to use and drag it into the metric bar as shown below.

I’m going to make this report really simple to help you to understand it, so for now, I’m only going to use one metric – we’ll be looking at multiples further down this post. The next thing you’ll want to do is add dimensions to your report and that’s done much the same way as metrics, you simple drag them over from the left hand side of the page. When you choose a metric, it limits the amount of dimensions that you’re allowed to examine, so for example, when I chose visitors, I could only then look at Day, Week and Month.

Adding a dimension effectively cross references the metric to produce results. By adding Day to the metric of Visitors, I find out which days were the most popular and which days were the least popular, and I can then use this information to my advantage in the future. It basically lets you customize your Google Analytics results to provide you with information that you either wouldn’t have had before, or would have been hard to find.

If you want to expand on this you can add further dimensions, just make sure that you add them in a sensible order. For example, I may have wanted to originally look at Day, but if I add Week below, it’s only going to show me the week that my selected day was in. So if you’re adding additional dimensions, make sure you add them in order. If you’re only looking to see which Day is the most popular then stick to the single metric, don’t try to make it more complicated because the most popular days may get lost in the Month and Week dimensions.

When you’ve put all of this together and click on either preview or create report then you’re taken to a more recognizable side of GA, where your results will appear. When you click on the results to investigate further, you’re provided with the next dimension, so for example, I clicked on the month of July below which was the most popular month. I’m then shown the graph for this time as well as a run down of the most popular weeks in this time. If I were to then click on these weeks, I would be taken to a very similar page, only this time it would have a run down of the days.

When you’ve finished with a report that you’re happy with, just make sure that you title it with a relevant name and click ‘Save Report’ at the bottom of the page. Now that we know how to put one together, lets have a look at some useful custom reports that you may want to consider making yourself.

Useful Custom Reports

The first report that I recommend that you use studies the traffic on your site in a much more detailed way, by day. To do this, I examine the number of unique visitors, visits, pages per visit, average time on site, percentage of new visits and bounce rate all as metrics, and have the dimension set to Day. The time period you select is entirely up to you; if you want to know for the current day, then the choice is obvious, but if you’re looking to see how popular your site has been over the past week then you can select longer time periods. Here’s what my report looks like, followed by the overview.

To make things really easy for you, I’m sharing all of the custom reports that I’ve made in this post, so here’s the link for the report above. One of my favorite things to look at each week is which day was the most popular day because it helps me to understand when I should post my content. Taking this a step further, I like to examine what the most popular time of day by using this custom report which examines the amount of visits broken down by the hour and arranged by their popularity. If you go one step further, you’ll be taken to the source dimension which tells you exactly where all these visitors are coming from during a certain hour.

From these two reports, I can work out which is the best day of the week to post and what time during that day that I should be posting to get the best results. I didn’t include the Hour dimension in the original report because the result would have been dependent on how popular the day was. These reports are particularly useful if you’re planning on posting a top-list that you hope will do well.

Something that GA is definitely lacking is a customizable section to look at the amount of unique visitors your website is receiving. By creating a custom report we’re able to see these results in a graph as well as look at some of the finer details about how the visitors have found your site. For my report, I’ve selected to view unique visitors and visits (for comparison) as the metrics and the dimensions as Page, Source and Keyword. Page is an obvious choice because it will tell you exactly which ones are the most popular posts, and Keyword is there to help you understand how people are finding your content. When you click on a page, it’ll take you through to the Source section, and if you click on Google, then you’ll be shown the top keywords which have taken the visitors to your site. This is always good to know as it gives you a good insight into what people are searching for and how relevant the results are. Here is my custom report – Unique Visitors by Page.

The bigger your website is, the more use you will have for some of these custom features such as revenue, and various goals that you set yourself. There’s loads of different variables you can try, so I suggest you go in and explore what works for you. Chances are you’ve been in GA before and not been able to find a statistic that you’re looking for, and quit in frustration. Custom reports put a stop to this as they open up many more answers to you.

Advanced Segments

Advanced Segmentation is a tool you can use to slice and dice your Analytics data with great precision. Advanced segments allow you to choose what types of visitors you want to be considered when generating the data for a report. If you find that you have a large amount of data but you’re having a hard time filtering the information into a report, then you can easily create your own segments and apply them to any report instead of creating different filters for each profile.

One of my favorite things to do is to track the quality of visitor that I’m receiving and there’s no better way to do this than to create and advanced segment which will filter out all of the information that I don’t want. A quality visitor for me is someone who spends over 20 seconds on the site, and views at least 2 pages. These are people who haven’t just come to visit a top list or a popular post that’s been shared on the Internet somewhere. The time factor is still relatively short, but the majority of visitors stay for under 10 seconds, so 20 seconds is still quite generous. When you look at all the factors together and press test, it’ll look something like the the image below.

When you save your segment, you can save it and view it like any other Google Analytic result. To view it, go back into your advanced segment section and click on it, or use the drop down menu in the top right hand corner of your dashboard. It will update your dashboard with only information that fits within these parameters, and then you can carry on researching your website analytics with more accurate results. Here’s a link to the Advanced Segment.

I do a lot of marketing through social media, which I suspect a lot of you do too, so it’s important for me to track my progress through these means. This is really simple, all you do is open up another advanced segment and add a list of sources with ‘or’ between them, so that the segment considers all of the results. Then make sure all of the condition parameters say ‘contain’ and then list the website name in the value box, like I’ve done in the image below. List as many sources as you wish to examine at a single time, and then save it down. Here’s the one that I use.

You can include more advanced segments such as the ones above, or keep it much simpler and only have a single parameter. I have a segment set up for Google traffic so that I can easily view my traffic from my dashboard and delve deeper into the statistics than Google previously allowed me. I have all of the information that I would typically look at, only now it’s specific to traffic that’s come from Google. This is really easy to put together, and here’s now you do it.

Combining Custom Reports & Advanced Segments

The excellent thing about Advanced Segments is that I can then use these new parameters to look more accurately at my custom reports. By using the segment on quality visitors, I now only examine the information that matters to the growth of my blog, which is the quality traffic. It will also help me to see which is the most popular content with people who are already following the website, so I can get a better idea about what they’re interested in learning.

All of this makes for a free program, that you probably didn’t realize could get even better. I use Google Analytics almost everyday and having this added functionality has really improved the quality of my results.

The post Make The Most Of A Custom Google Analytics Report & Segments appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I take steps everyday to make sure that my quality of reader is improving, whether it means installing a new plugin to help direct traffic to certain places, or posting photos or polls on Facebook, encouraging visitors to get more involved. Through the past few month, I’ve started to see my different techniques take effect as my quality of visitor has gone up.

How to Track the Quality of Reader

I like to look at my website in periods of a month and see how my progress has improved, and there’s four different factors that I look at – Pages/Visit, Time on Site, Bounce Rate and Percentage of Returning Visitors. Looking at the amount of pageviews, unique visits, and visits per day is nice, but they don’t tell you much about the type of person viewing your blog. There are days when I reach a huge spike in traffic and make noticeably more money, but I always prefer quality over quantity as that’s my target market.

How Has The Quality Improved

Pages Per Visit

The first factor we’re going to look at is the amount of pages per visit that the average reader looks at. This is one of the best indications of the quality of visitor you have because the more a person views, the better they are. My website officially launched at the end of April, but I’m starting with the month of May just to make it tidier. You’ll see in the graph below that I track the progress for 5 months, all the way up until the end of September.

This graph above is a good indication of what my visitors are doing and it’s good to see that for the most part, the pages per visit has improved. With any luck, I should be right on target to get two page views for every visitor each month, or so it may seem at least. The truth of the matter is that there’s going to be a lot of people who only view one page when they visit, and then there’s also a strong group of visitors who look at over ten. One of the many great things about Google Analytics is that they tell you exactly how many pages were visited by each visitor, in the visitor loyalty section.

I’ve had to separate my results below into two different graphs because the amount of people that only visited one page in their visit is actually six times as many people as visited twice. You’ll notice that all of these months have the majority of the visits only viewing one page, which is usually the page that they’re linked to.

The details are above are nice to know because they provide me with information that counts towards my views and tells me the amount of poor quality visitors, but I’m really only interested in the high quality visitors and for this, I need to see who’s clicking on more than one page. Below is a graph of all the people that view more than one page in a visit, spread across the five months I’m comparing here. All of the months are pretty similar at first glance and the results are pretty much how you would expect, that is, until you look at the last category of 20 or more visits.

The spike in the 20+pageviews section can easily be considered to be my regular following so it gives you a good idea of how well you’re doing. It’s best to look at this online and simply change the month that you want to compare as it’s easier to read, but I can tell you that June, which had basically the same number of views as September had a third less people over viewing over 20 pages each month, which shows me that my following is growing and the quality of visitor is going up.

Average Time on Site

When you look at your dashboard, you’re told the average time spent on site for each time period that you have selected, and for the past five months, mine looks like this. This is a good indication of how well your site is doing, but if you want to know the finer details, you have to look further by looking at the length of visit section under visitor loyalty in Google Analytics.

When you have a look at the average length of visit on the site, you’ll see that not only do most people only view one page, the majority of them only stay for 10 seconds or less. This isn’t what you want, but it’s ultimately hard to avoid, although there are steps that you can take to reduce this percentage, but we’ll get to that further down this post. Lets have a look at how long my visitors stay for, divided up into groups of time as percentages for each month. You’ll notice that the majoirty of visitors only stay for 10 seconds or less, but that’s not really a problem.

From looking at the graph, you’ll see that when you compare September to May, you’ll see that there is a lot more more people who are staying for 61 seconds and longer and less people staying for a minute or less. The aim is to get the all the time under a minute, specifically less than 10 seconds, to be as small as possible. The progress I’m making so far is pretty strong, but the main difference between September and July is the lack of spikes in traffic produced by top lists. Not having these spikes in traffic haven’t been entirely bad because I can see clearly that the quality of visitor that’s now following me has improved greatly.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who view one page and then leave straight after without browsing the site anymore, so you want this to be as low as possible. As you can see, this is a little bit harder to control and large spikes in traffic, or traffic from certain sources causes this rate to go up quite substantially. If you compare May when my website was first starting out, with September where I’ve built a strong following (now 1100 fans on Facebook), you’ll see that people take my site more seriously because of the amount of content that they can find on there and because of certain visual improvements I’ve made.

Returning Visitors

The improvement in bounce rate has a lot to do with whether the visitor has been on your site before, because if they have then they’re more likely to stay for longer as they’re familiar with what you have to offer. To do this, you need to look at the percentage of new visitors page in GA. It’s common to think that if the percentage is low then you’re not reaching a new, wider audience, which is true to some extent, but that’s not what is important to start with. You’re better off writing great content while you find your way through Google and then as your website grows you’ll become more popular. It takes a while to build a good website, so give it time.

My favorite stat to look at when trying to gauge the quality of visitor that my site is receiving, is the visitor loyalty stat. It will tell not only how many people have visited before, but how many people have visited your site in a certain time period, from one single view to over 200 views. When you take some time and put these into a graph like I have, then it becomes really easy to compare. Have a look at my graph below.

This shows the amount of people each month who are visiting my website multiple times and if you compare May on the right with September on the left, you’ll see that the amount of people who only visit my site once in a month has gone down from around 82% to 58%. This is one of the best improvements to track as it tracks visits and not pages per visits, so it’s easy to see if your following is improving. You’ll notice that the biggest improvements are in the 9+ visits a month section, where I’m starting to see a steady following.

How to Improve Your Visitor Quality

This is actually easier than you may think, and if you’ve managed to read through the material above, then you’ve probably got a few ideas of your own by now. We’re going to look at each factor in order and see what steps you can take to improving it.

Firstly, we can try and improve pageviews, and this is surprisingly easy to improve, it just takes a little time before it starts to take effect. I’ve managed to improve mine quite substantially by the installation of a single plugin which does most of the work for me – SEO Smart Links. I’ve mentioned it multiple times on this site before, but it’s always worth mentioning again because it’s a really powerful tool. It will take all of the keywords that you input and assign them to links that you also input so that every time one of these keyword terms pops up in the text, it becomes a link and starts to send people to different pages on your site. I have my plugin set up so that it will link a maximum of three times for each keyword so by the end of the post, with about 80 keywords listed, I can have a huge amount of links sharing other pages on my site with people. This has proven to work as the more links I input, the higher my pages per visit seems to become.

Time on site is slightly more difficult as there’s a lot more factors to it, but of course the SEO plugin does help. One of the biggest changes that I’ve made which I think has improved time on site, is my writing. As I’ve written more, my style has improved, along with my grammar and structuring. I looked back recently on a post that didn’t make it to publish, although I was considering using it, and in my opinion it was unusable. I was clearly struggling with what to write and the content and length was suffering. It was a typical ‘Top 10 Reasons…” style post (which are usually a little shorter), but had just 566 words, and when you compare that to one I wrote the other day at 1634 words, there’s a big difference. I don’t do anything to bulk out the text at all anymore like I may have done in school tests when you didn’t know the answer – I just included everything that it required. The more recent posts can be done a lot quicker now as I know a lot more about what I’m writing about.

Bounce rate is pretty hard to control because the majority of the percentage comes from those who are only on the site for 10 seconds or less, and there’s not much you can do for them. When you do get to people who get to the end of a post but don’t browse any other pages, you need to add a reason for them to want more. At the end of every post I’ve included a related post section to give a more visual example of what else I have to offer. This encourages them to explore more site for longer and click on more than one page.

I’ve also made my site a lot more personal in the past few months, by including more anecdotes, not just on my website, but on my Facebook too. Most tutorial sites contain a lot of different writers, but on my site, it’s basically me and I think that people can start to relate to that a lot better. I used to copy and paste the same 4 lines to the bottom of every post asking people to come and visit Facebook, Twitter and to subscribe to the RSS feed, but it didn’t really feel very personal. I’ve recently stopped doing this and now I include a short sentence or two related to what I’ve been writing about and I have an image which encourages people to come to my Facebook. I’m still trialling this, but I can tell already that it’s having a very positive effect. To encourage new visitors to come to my site, I use my Twitter marketing to meet new people in my niche and then when they follow me back, I send them a message encouraging them to come to my fan page on Facebook. This can be a slightly slow process because you can’t really guarantee that they’ll follow back, but when they do, I find that about 25% of them will click on the link to my Facebook. To make sure that they want to click ‘like’, they’re taken to my welcome page where they’re greeted with this image.

I don’t know about you, but when I see this, I like to see the wall’s activity before I like a page so this is only half of the job. I interact daily with my fan page, whether I’m posting new photos, making polls, or posting quotes and tutorials and all of this makes my Facebook page look more interesting than anyone else’s. Because of this, my fan page has grown as a very good pace, and it grows faster, the longer it’s been around. Social media is a big part of my marketing as it shares my page with people who may never have heard of it before, while making them feel as if they’ve stumbled upon it themselves.

From my experience, people are more interested in talking to a person than to a website and that’s why at the end of every post, I have an about the author section, similar to the one on this page. It’s like shopping with an independent store rather than a big corporation – you know who you’re talking to, and you can come back and talk to them again. When you’re a massive website, you may not want personal interaction, and that’s fine, because you’ve already made it, but while you’re still growing, try your best to add a personal touch. When people comment on my posts on this site, they usually call me Josh (sometimes Mike), and that’s good because it helps to build a personal relationship with your following.

Hopefully you’ve learned something about how to make improve your quality of visitor and build a website that people want to follow. If you have any more questions about what we’ve covered here today, or need help with Google Analytics, please feel free to ask.

The post How To Track & Improve The Quality Of Your Visitors appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Visitors Overview

The number of visits is the amount of times that your absolute unique visitors have collectively visited the site, and the pageviews is the amount of pages that they’ve collectively visited in the times that they  have come. Average pageviews is the amount of pageviews divided by the number of visits, giving you an indication of how many pages the average reader is viewing, which is good to keep track of as there are certain things you can do to improve this. Time on site is for the the combined total amount of time for the dates listed in your graph above, divided by the amount of visits. The best way to track the improvements of this is to look at it in smaller sections and not as part of the whole life of your site. Bounce rate is the amount of people who left your site after only visiting a single page, so you want this to be as low as possible. Finally, % of new visitsis the percentage of people who have come to your site, for the first time. My percentage is 67.64, which means that 32.36% of the visitors have been on my site before.

The page tells you all about where your visitors are coming from, which may not sound that important, but I assure you it is – I use this information for all sorts of different things. I’ve found that two thirds of all my traffic comes from America which tells me that if I want to make money from Amazon Associates, I have to use American links as only about 10% of my traffic comes from Britain. It also tells what time of day that I should be posting content. I find that anytime after 5 o’clock is best as it means that the majority of America is going to be awake as 5pm over here is 9am in California. When I’m sharing content on Facebook, I want as many people to see it as possible so the time that I post it is very important. I posted a photo last night at about 1:30am and it got a really good response by the time I got up this morning because there were a lot more people viewing it.

On a much less obvious note, knowing that my main traffic comes from America, shapes the way in which I write. There are certain spellings that are different which I try to change so that it doesn’t stand out, such as; color instead of colour, or specialised instead of specialized, which might not sound like much, but I don’t want anything other then the quality of my content to stand out. There’s also slang over here that we might use that American’s won’t understand.

Browser

This isn’t particularly useful to me as I run a photography blog using wordpress, but if you’re a website designer, it’s important to view which browser your visitors are using and that’s just one more thing that Google Analytics can do. Browsers act slightly differently to each other so you want to check how your website acts in the most popular browsers. Currently about 40% of my viewers use Chrome, 25% use Firefox and 19% use Safari.

Visitor Loyalty

This is a particularly useful tool which I’ve only discovered recently which tells you the amount of times that everyone has visited your site. Over the last month, roughly 57% of my visitors have only visited my site once, but that’s to be expected as many readers may not be interested in what I have to say. When you compare that to July when I had a lot of visitors come to see top lists, that percentage goes up to around 67%. The people who only visit my site once don’t bother me, it’s the people that come again that I care about, as they’re my real audience.

In the last month, the second most visited amount of times was twice, which is to be expected, but what really surprised me was that the next two highest percentages are 15-25 times and 26-50 times and they represent about 4.5% each and count for 2100 visitors, which is huge for me. It shows me that I’m really starting to build a following so you can begin to see how useful this tool is. Back in July I was experiencing more visitors but these two brackets only represented 1.88% and 2.06%. If you’re looking for quality followers who are interested in what you have to say and potentially sell, then this is a great tool to get to grips with.

Length of Visit

Time on site can be a little bit misleading at times because you’re seeing an overall average time for the thousands of visitors that you’re receiving. That’s why I like to use the length of visit tool underneath the visitor loyalty section as it breaks down each visitor into different sections, for how long each of them spends on the site. I’ve just done a comparison of my site in the last month to the month of July and again, it shows that my quality of visitor has gone up with more people staying for longer and a lot less people staying for less than 10 seconds, which is useless to me unless they’re clicking on an ad and leaving. Here’s a comparison for the two months, which I’ve put into pie charts for easy comparison.

Traffic Sources

When you select traffic sources, you’re taken to their dashboard where you’ll be able to select the period of time which you want to study as well as glance over all the relevant data from this time. This includes comparing your traffic sources and search engine traffic, as well as being able to see the most popular keywords. The dashboard is particularly helpful for helping you find your way around the sections that you need, and it acts as a general overview of all the information that you’ll regularly need to see without delving too much deeper.

Direct Vs. Referencing

Direct traffic is pretty simple, it’s the amount of visitors who have come to your site through no other means, or at least that’s what it looks like. It’s actually doesn’t tell you a whole lot about your reader because there are ways for traffic to appear as if it’s come direct, when really it’s come through a program that manages a website such as Twitter. It’s believed that about half of the traffic that comes from twitter is viewed through a piece of software such as TweetDeck, which makes it appear as if it’s direct. I don’t really pay too much attention to direct traffic as I know that my readership is growing and more people are coming direct to my site, which is demonstrated through other statistics on my site such as Visitor Loyalty.

Sources

This is probably one of my most frequented statistics because my website relies heavily on referenced traffic, and that’s what the traffic source section is all about. People are surprised a lot of these features are even possible, let alone all in one place, but that’s what I love about Google Analytics; they make it so easy for us. When you can study where your traffic has come from, as well as how long they stay on the site, which page they’re viewing when they leave, how many pages they visit, and how often they’re visiting; you’re given a distinct advantage in knowing how to make content which will suit your readers.

From looking at the sources section, I know that I get a lot of readers from StumbleUpon, and on top of that, I know which pages they like to look at. If I want a lot of traffic, all I have to do is look at which pages they’re looking at and write more content like that. Looking at sources is also a great way of tracking how well my social marketing is going, and I can see from my second most popular being Facebook that it’s going very well this month. You can then click on the source to find out more detailed information about how many people came each day. In the past month, my clicks through Facebook range between 53 and 191 a day.

All of this useful information is listed in columns on this page showing the visits, pages per visit, time on site, % of new visits and bounce rate for each source.

Search Engines

To me, this is the traffic that I strive to reach the most as I’ve written 85 posts over the past 5 months and I’d like people to be able to find them. If I’m in Google more then I’m going to be reaching more people who are looking for exactly what I’m trying to teach them, and these people always work out to be better viewers. By this, I meant that they spend more time on the site, look at more pages, and invariably, click on more ads, which earns me money.

When you enter the Search Engine page, you’re given another timeline overview of all the hits that you’ve received from the different search engines. Again, they list all the details that you could possible want in an easy to read chart, and then when you click on a particular search engine, they tell you what were the most popular keyword results which took people to your website. I say a particular search engine, but we all know that there’s only one that really matters and that’s Google. Here’s a pie chart of my search engine referrers – it’s easy to see who’s on top.

Keywords

If you want to know more about how to rank well in Google (and you do), then it helps to know which are the most popular keyword search terms. When you see what’s popular with Google in comparison to sites like StumbleUpon then you can start to target what you’re writing to rank higher, which will also make the rest of your content rank higher. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an element of a waiting game, but there are steps that you can take to help you make your way to the top.

One thing I’ve noticed, purely through studying my keyword data is that whenever there’s a spike in my traffic from a popular post, Google recognizes this and ranks me higher. But unlike my day to day traffic which goes back down, I stay at this higher ranking until my next spike which will take me higher again. I wouldn’t have known this without actually delving deeper into the stats and finding it for myself, in fact, it was only about three months ago that I realized this.

My most popular keywords are to do with my most popular top lists and my website name as well as less popular photography specific search terms. You’re given information on how long a visitor has spent on your site after searching particular search terms, as well as how many pages they visit, average time, bounce rate and interestingly enough, the percentage of them that are new visitors. That’s helpful for me because the name Expert Photography could be someone looking for my website after having been on there before, or someone looking to learn expert photography. Turns out that a lot of the visitors over the last month were not aware of my site before searching that particular term, which tells me a lot about my choice in name.

Content Overview

When you’re under this new heading, you’re greeted with another dashboard which again holds a timeline and details on the amount of pageviews and how many of those are unique. Also, you’ve given a small preview to the top content section where you can learn which are your most popular posts.

Top Content

When I’m tracking how many visits I’ve had to my site, I like to see a complete timeline from when I very first began writing, all the way up to present day, and I can do this because my site isn’t very old yet. When I’m tracking content though, and other then the odd time where I wanted to see my post popular posts of all time, I like to look at my overview for the past month. This allows me to see what’s the most popular at the present time and then I can track where these views are coming from and act accordingly.

I’m usually surprised by my findings as it’s very hard to predict which posts are going to be the most popular; for example, this last month, only three of the top ten post popular pages were written recently, the others are much older. This page breaks down all the information that I need into a handy list with all of the information that I have come to expect such as pageviews, unique pageviews, time on site, bounce rate and exit rate for each source.

I can look at it in much more detail than this, I can break it down into sources as well. For example, I’m looking at my most popular tutorial this month and it’s one of my earliest which is unusual, so I delve a little bit deeper. I see from the overview that my exit rate (the amount of people who leave after seeing this page) is 72.45%, but when I click through and divide up the page by entrance sources, I see my top referrer has an exit rate of only 47.26%. Top content is really only an overview page – there’s a lot more that can be explored by clicking through the links.

When you first click through, you’re given all the basic run down information that was listed above, along with a timeline of the traffic to that particular content. It’s good to see which days are popular if there’s sudden spikes in traffic, but for this particular post it’s pretty consistant so doesn’t really matter too much. What is always useful though are the options listed on the right hand side of this page. 

Navigation Summary

When you go through the navigation summary, you’re taken to a very useful page which shows you where people have come from and where they go next. As this is a very popular post which people have been directly linked to, the majority of people have come straight to this page – 89.06% in fact. To see this more effectively, I’m going to use a different tutorial for an example and come back to my most popular post for this month.

The tutorial below is on natural light photography which didn’t get as much traffic as I had hoped at the time, but is providing a fairly steady source now. Around 50% of the visitors to the page have come from another page on the site, and the other 50% have been linked to the tutorial directly. When they’re done reading, around half of the readers exit the site and the other half carry on reading other articles on my website. Not only are we provided with this useful information, but we’re also told which page they came from and which page they visited next with the help of a very useful list.

If you’re linking through your pages properly with the use of a side bar, related posts, and plugins such as SEO Smart Links, then you should start to see results such as this. The longer a person stays on your site, the better chance that they have of clicking on your links and becoming a more regular follower so these are the sorts of results that you want to be aiming for. This particular breakdown is useful because it tells me exactly where the majority of people go after reading an article and I can then use that information to see what I’ve been doing right with that link – check if it’s mentioned a lot, or in a particular section. It tells me a lot about my writing and which posts relate to each other well.

Entrance Sources

I’m going back to the most popular post of the month now because I want to see what’s made it so popular, and who’s been sending me the traffic. When you click on the entrance sources page, you’ll notice that the page has suddenly got a lot more pageviews, but don’t worry, it’s supposed to be like this. This page lists counts all of the pages that have been viewed after people have finished on this page as well. For example, my top referrer is Uglyhedgehog.com, so everyone who comes through them is listed as a view and then every page they click on afterwards are also listed as their views, which is why you’re able to produce such high numbers.

This page will also break down the all the details listed in the overview into their separate sources which is particularly useful if you want to know more about who you should be appealing to. At first glance it appeared as if the exit rate on this page wasn’t very good because it was listed at 72.46%, but when I look though it in detail by referrer, I can see that my most popular referrer provides me with a much better exit rate of 47.27%. All this information can sound confusing, but so long as you know what you’re looking for, it’s really easy to understand.

Landing Pages

Landing pages look at the traffic period that you’ve selected and then tell you which page those visitors came to first, as well as how many people bounced after visiting that page. This information differs to what you can find in the top content because if a post is particularly good at directing people to other pages then it may be high up on the list of top content, but not on the list of landing pages at all. I use this page quite often because it only supplies the information that I’m looking for, not information such as time on site which can be distracting.

Top Exit Pages

Exit pages are the pages that people leave your site from, and they’re listed in order depending on how many people have left the site on a particular page. As expected, my most popular tutorial in the last month had the largest amount of people leave that particular page, so listing them in this order isn’t the most useful way of using this section of Analytics. I like to change the order of the list from the number of people who have left from a particular page, to the percentage, because then you’re not mislead by large numbers. To do this, click on the ‘% Exit’ column and order it in whichever way suits you.

I firstly order the pages by the highest exit rate, which is usually, a list of random search results and pages I don’t recognize, but expand your list to 100 and scroll down and you’ll start to see useful information. Here is where you’ll find the pages that are the worst at referring the visitors around the website, either because they weren’t designed to, or I’ve not done it properly. Below is my top 10 most popular pages for people to leave my site from. With this information, I can go back and study the content of the posts to see where I can improve, and maybe add some more details which will make people want to stay on the site for longer. The more you know, the easier it is.

When I’m done with this information, I like to reverse the list and see which of my posts are the most popular in terms of keeping people on my site because that way, I can see where I’m going right. These are my top ten most popular tutorials in terms of exit % in the last month. All of these tutorials are very easy to read, with 4 of them being top 10 list tutorials, which tells me a lot about what my reader likes to be linked to when they’re on the site. There may be more popular tutorials, but if I can find a way of working these sorts of links into my posts then I’m almost guaranteed that they’ll spend longer on the site. 

Dashboard

Now that you know what everything means, it’s time to go back to the Dashboard which is the first page that you’ll see when you enter the Google Analytics for your site. As I mentioned before, I like to see the whole timeline of my site on this page as I can quickly hover over the day and find out the number of visitors I’ve had, as well as easily comparing this with the past. You can add and remove different parts of the dashboard, but I always choose to include this.

The next section which I like to see an overview of is the Usage section as it give me a clear overview of all my key facts, as well as small graphs that I can look over to track the progress. Even with them this small, I can still see that my average time on site has gone up, as well as pages per visit, while the percentage of new visitors has gone down. You can also click on any of these links to take you to the right part of the Analytics program.

Then we have the traffic sources and map overlay section. Both of these are better seen in smaller time periods because then you can track more recent progress of how your links are being shared around the world. These don’t really tell you a lot of information so it’s best to click on them and see them full sized.

You can mix and match what you’d like to include from here, but I personally only use the ones listed above because I like to give them a quick glance when I’m visiting my dashboard.

Hopefully you’ve learned something from this tutorial and if you weren’t using Google Analytics, then you should be now. It’s by far the most powerful tool at your disposal for studying the progress of your website and seeing where you can improve.

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