Analyze Google Analytics (Part 1): Improving Performance of Your Website/ Blog
As you might know I bought this blog one month ago. And I believe buying a blog is better and easier than building it from scratch. Yes! Buying is a lot of fun…
However, the task of buying can be tedious if you don’t know how to analyze a blog from its Google Analytics stats.
If you don’t know the meaning of each and every data that Analytics show you, chances are there that you might waste a lot of money for a crap site.
This post not only meant for those who are looking to buy a blog but also for every blogger and webmaster who wanted to learn how to improve their sites’ performance by analyzing Analytics stats.
(Special Note: This article series of analyzing Analytics is a chapter from my ebook How to Buy Sell Websites. The ebook is not published yet. There are a lot of chapters and I will not publish every chapter on this blog. So subscribe to my newsletter here and once it is published I’ll send the ebook right to your email!)
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This blog was DEAD before I bought it. No comments, no interactivity… the blog was just working like a static website. (You can check it by visiting my old posts)
Here are some of the steps I’ve taken to improve the site’s performance and I believe this will also help you to improve yours.
Data #1: Unique visitors
Simply unique visitor is the measure of popularity of your site.
An exact definition will be out of scope of this article but if you really like to mess up with definition here it is.
What does this data mean?
This is one of the biggest factors to analyze the total asset of a blog or website. While determining how much a site is worth and while selling advertising space this data have a big role.
In other words unique visitor is the life blood of a website or blog.
How to improve?
To improve, there is only one way. Bring more people to your site, yes, that means bring more traffic.
Here are some of the steps to bring more traffic
a. Have a link building strategy like guest posting often
b. Use the power of social media
c. Start networking
You know, there are endless ways ;)
Data #2: Bounce Rate
Bounce rate tells you how much percentage of your visitors are bouncing away after landing on your site. In other words if someone landed on a page of your site and leave away without visiting any other page it counts as a bounce.
Let me explain with a simple example.
Imagine that you have 100 visits a day and 80 people leave your site before visiting any other pages, your bounce rate is 80%.
That is,
Bounce rate= Number of visits leave the site before visiting second page/ Total number of visits
What does this data mean?
It is quite obvious that having less bounce rate means visitors view more pages of your blog or spend more time on your blog which is a nice thing especially if you are selling direct ads/ CPM ads because more page views means more money.
If you ask me I would say, better bounce rate of a blog is between 60-70%. In case of websites, it tends to have lower bounce rate comparing to blogs.
In fact, there is no such standard rate and it depends upon the need of your website. For e.g. if you have high CTR for the ads you sell on your website obviously the bounce rate of your site would be low.
How to improve?
Again it depends upon the nature of the websites. Here are some of the measures you can take to improve the bounce rate of your website.
a. Display more content
Case 1: If your website is laser targeted and the search engine visitors who lands on your site are getting the exact thing what they are looking for, chances exist that you may have high bounce rate because the visitors tend to leave your site immediately.
Case 2: If you have a popular blog and most of the visitors visit your latest post only then also you might have a high bounce rate.
What I would prefer you is to display more content to your visitors in both of the above 2 cases or any other similar cases of low bounce.
You can display more content either by using your sidebar where you can show popular posts, related posts or latest posts etc.
Use any plugin that show related posts just after the posts.
b. Make navigation easy
Do your readers can navigate easily through your site easily to find more stuffs?
You can have useful navigation bar, display categories option, have a search box, link to your old posts inside your post and show an archives page or a page that shows more articles.
c. Improve user experience
See other popular blogs and compare with yours. Try different aspects of better user experience like increasing the size of the fonts and more.
Data #3: Average visit duration
The time user spends on your blog on each visit.
What does this data mean?
This data reveals if your audience are interested on the content of your site.
For e.g, if you used to write 1000+ words articles on your blog and your avg. visit duration is 30 seconds, it shows you are wasting your time with such lengthy post because as of now users are not interested in such articles.
So this data reveals if the readers are interested on your content or not
How to improve?
1. Spice up your posts
Spice up your posts with eye catching images. Improve the readability by reducing the size of the paragraphs.
2. Avoid distractions
Do you have many ads on your site or does your site has high loading time? This may be also a reason for low average visit duration.
So avoid such distraction in the long run you can definitely find an improvement.
Data #4: Returning visitors
Returning visitors are what makes every bloggers happy.
It is too bad for a blogger if a visitor landed on your site once and never return again.
How to improve?
1. Provide value and make them come back often
2. Start an email list
3. Encourage feed subscription
4. Start networking with like minded bloggers
5. Reply to every comments
Final Thoughts
Don’t stick with numbers:
Analyzing and improving your site using Google Analytics is great. But never stick with numbers. There is nothing you can proud of if no one is getting value from your site but you still have decent traffic.
If your motive is money focus on providing value and get more money. Yes! you can make money without doing evil!!! Simply traffic means nothing and if you are not monetizing it correctly you are losing a lot on the table.
Don’t be Analytics slave:
You should not have a habit of checking Analytics daily and day dream about your future traffic unless you are paying for ads to get traffic.
Have a plan and stick with it. Check if the result is similar to what you were aimed at. Learn where you committed mistakes and update your plans because it is harder to stick with plans!
Go advance:
Create goals and track your conversion rates. If you are Adsense publisher identify which page you make more money and analyze the reason for it.
This is a part of series of Analyze Google Analytics
Part 1: Improving performance of your website or blog
Part 2: Find what your blog readers are interested in. (COMING SOON…)
and many more…
great past shazad.
i usually see the analytics only for lookin the keyword that searched in my blog and improve it.
but your tips is greatzz… i’ll give them try out soon :)
Hey Edi,
Nice to know that it helped you. Keep visiting back and I’ll assure you more quality content over here!
Best blogging wishes!!
Nice writing Shahzad, I’m eagerly waiting for your ebook.
It’s nice to know how you’ve grown this blog in a short time after buying it, and I’m sure to learn a lot from you.
Your kind words always encourage me Ehsan!
Thanks for that and sure asap I’ll complete my ebook :)
Hi Shahzad, Google Analytics is one of the tool that I often to monitor my blog traffic and the more it improve the more people will going to use it. Thanks for this update – Ferb
Glad to see you here again Ferb,
Keep coming back and drop your thoughts. That will surely encourage me :)
I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you create this website yourself or did you hire someone
to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking to design my own blog and would like to find out where u got this from. thank you
Great explanation indeed. Google analystics is really cool tools for SEO
Thanks for dropping by Ahmed.
Will be expecting you here often :)