Analysing Google Analytics!

As my semester draws to a close I have started looking back over the past few months and have realised how my blog has become a regular feature of my life. From the demanding task of thinking about various topics to blog about each week to deciding what other blogs to comment on it has been an interesting experience that I previously had no familiarity with. Not only was I somewhat clueless about blogging, and Twitter (as you will have seen from last weeks post) but I now had a new task to deal with, that of Google Analytics. So for my final post I will discuss what I have learned about people’s use of my blog from analysing Google Analytics…this should be interesting.

My initial experience with Google Analytics did not get off to the best of starts, the process of setting it up seems simple enough however unfortunately for me it didn’t seem to go that way and unbeknownst to me my blog wasn’t linked to Analytics for about the first week… great start. Despite missing out on the first week’s coverage of my blog I have certainly found the information from my new starting point as very interesting.

My first day of Google Analytics coverage started on Thursday March 11th and visits to my blog started to register on the site. March 17th proved to be the most successful for with Analytics reporting that my blog received 10 visits throughout the day. I am not sure what made this blog the most successful perhaps it was the topic discussed, that of love rat Mark Owen, or perhaps people had a look at this blog and thought that future ones would not be to their taste. Whatever the reason may have been Google Analytics has certainly highlighted the ups and downs of the popularity of my blog and has allowed me to see the various places where the viewers have come from.

There are three main contexts where the viewers of my blog have come from first was Direct Traffic which accounted for 4.17%, Referring Sites accounted for a massive 94.44% and finally 1.39% from Search Engines. All this sort of data sounds very impressive and grandiose however when you look at the actual amount of visits, 114, and the number of page views, 267, it makes for slightly less impressive statistics. I would like to be able to say that despite these small numbers that those viewing the page were staying for a long time however I am unable to make these claims and must admit to the average time of 4minutes 9seconds spent on my blog. Any success I felt I had with my blog seems to be disintegrating the longer I look at my results on analytics. Perhaps Google Analytics is really only of benefit to those who get a great deal of traffic to their page and for it to used to analyse a blog perhaps makes the blog look less successful than it has been.

I do however appreciate how Analytics can be of benefit to companies trying to analyse where their traffic is coming from and how they could try and encourage them to stay on their site and stay loyal to their brand and company. In the case of my blog the traffic flow has not been substantial enough to give any great incite, I would perhaps have to use another form of reference to compare and see where my blog could be improved and thus ensure that viewers stay for longer and are more interested in what is being said.