How to Get More from Your Blogging Efforts by Using Google Analytics

To make your blogging efforts more productive use an analytic program to get deeper insight into what works. Alphabet which owns Google has a widely used program that can aid in your blog analysis.

There are many different analysis programs available in today’s marketplace. Google Analytics is a dominant player in this space. The amount of users employing this program reflects the wide reach Google has in online website or blog analysis. Many bloggers also link their analysis efforts to other webmaster tools. The analysis of your blog traffic can help an administrator tweak their decisions to better serve their visitors.

By analyzing your traffic or other measurements in depth you can more quickly reach your stated goals. These programs allow you to setup many unique specific goals that can be recorded for later analysis. Bloggers should make sure to keep a proper perspective of what analytics programs can and cannot do for them. It is vital to not over analyze your efforts and possibly lose your unique voice.

The analysis of traffic is more a bird’s eye view of what needs to be worked on or what seems appealing to your audience. It can be tempting to allow your analysis to lead you down paths that initially seem smart but overtime might draw you away from what really interests you. It will be hard to keep focused on your efforts day to day if you are only reacting to audience numbers rather than creating unique content which you find appealing.

A way to keep a realistic view of your visitor’s actions is to set a specific schedule for analysis. This means that you should sit down and come up with an analysis plan. If you do this before starting your blogging efforts it will be ingrained into your long term blog maintenance schedule. If you already have an ongoing blog it might be time to step back and review the previously mentioned schedule.

The time

By creating a certain number of days per set time period to check Google Analytics you can more effectively determine how productive you are over time.

An example would be to only check your statistics for set goals weekly or even monthly.

Much longer than monthly can lead to over extended periods of not knowing your audience preferences. Keep doing what you find interesting and engaging but step back from time to time to see if others agree with you.

Original and appealing content

Creating compelling content is the main priority of your efforts in the beginning of starting a blog. All your ideas should be geared to this goal.

Think about things you would like to read about. If you happen upon a subject that others find interesting as well you can use your analysis to further decide if more can be expanded upon. Using Google Analytics will help your efforts to increase traffic to specific posts that have more viewership in relation to others. This can be a sign that there is more information to present. Decide if you want to write about complimentary topics to the popular post or give the other side of whatever is being discussed.

Writing is not your only method to engage a blog audience you also can introduce other media formats when experimenting with ideas. If the above mentioned written post is popular maybe you can find a video that enhances your reader’s experience.

You can seek out others shareable content or produce your own video. Analyzing how much time the user spends on certain pages that you have changed can give you idea of what types of media increase user engagement. By using your blog analysis program you can more specifically decide what angle you should explore.

Searching and auditing

Discovering where your visitors come from is a great way to find out why your blog is being visited.

Maybe there are topics you write about that resonate with people from a different country or region than yourself. If you find that people are reading your content from an unexpected area do some research to find out why? You can reveal undiscovered niches. Again this is an opportunity to further expand upon the topic but written from these visitors perspective. You never know what will pique the interests of others in this more globalized world.

Blog analysis can also aid you commercially if you are seeking to monetize your content. By discovering what keywords are popular you can use this information to automatically set up ads. You can take this a step further and purposely seek out advertisers using the Google Analytics reports as a form of proof for your traffic statistics.

Having a direct relationship with an advertiser for something like referral service can be more lucrative than having to get a mass audience. If you can present information which impresses the advertiser to your blogs niche they are more likely to sign a deal with you.

Main words

Analysis in general has always been a key component of business intelligence.

Whether your blog is more geared towards personal or more commercial goals any insights into viewership can help hone your efforts.

Use the various statistics offered by Google Analytics to more deeply uncover what your audience finds compelling about your blog. In turn you can create a more engaging experience that will benefit both you and your viewers.

A guest post by: Rick Riddle he is a successful blogger whose articles aim to help readers with digital marketing, entrepreneurship and self-development. Connect with Rick on twitter and LinkedIn.