Google Analytics basics: how to see your website’s performance in a few steps

Most website owners have spent the couple minutes installing Google Analytics on their website. But when was the last time you actually looked at the Analytics dashboard? What did you learn from that?

If you’re like most business owners I’ve talked to, you haven’t opened up google.com/analytics since you installed it. Or, if you did open it up, you weren’t too sure what all the numbers meant or what you were supposed to do with that information.

In this post, I’ll show you how to access actionable data with Google Analytics so you can improve your site and get a better understanding of how it’s performing.

Before we begin, have you seen the new Analytics dashboard?

Not too long ago, Google Analytics updated their main dashboard (or “Google Analytics Home”) with more user-friendly wording and graphs. Right away, you can see how you’re acquiring new visitors, what pages they’re visiting the most, and what devices they’re using.
Continue reading “Google Analytics basics: how to see your website’s performance in a few steps”

Exploring and acting on analytics data from a site with 1 million pageviews/week

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If a website is only seeing 10 visitors a day, exploring visitor stats through Google Analytics can be boring and unnecessary. It’s true – at that point, the dataset isn’t large enough to make rational judgment calls about what needs to be change don the site and how to get more people converting or accomplishing business goals. But when dealing with a site that has substantial traffic flowing through the pages regularly, the real fun work begins.

We maintain and develop some really high-traffic sites. Today we’ll be exploring an ad-supported blog that receives 1 million pageviews per week on average. The goal of this site is to (1) direct the user to the content they are interested in, and (2) get the most pageviews (aka ad revenue) per visitor possible.

In this post, we’ll explore the statistics, ask a question about visitor behavior, answer the question through the available data and segmenting options, then make recommendations for what changes to the site can be made & further analyzed. In future posts, we can review the effects of our changes to see how things turned out. Continue reading “Exploring and acting on analytics data from a site with 1 million pageviews/week”