If you’ve built a site in the past few years, chances are that you’ve asked yourself “Do I really need Google Analytics?” The answer, at least in my humble opinion, is always “yes.” It doesn’t matter what kind of site you’re running, either. Small business site. Blogfolio. Travel blog. Humor site. Cat blog. It doesn’t matter, really. You want Google Analytics on your site and you want it sooner rather than later.
Why?
You want to know how people are finding you.
Why?
Well, let’s see…
Understand Your Audience Through Analytics
If you’ve never used it before, Google Analytics provides you with a very, very comprehensive overview of your site and its visitors. To be honest, it’s probably more than you could ever want to know. The meat and potatoes of Analytics come in the form of “traffic sources” and “content.” These components are perhaps self explanatory; how your visitors are getting to your site and what they’re looking at once they get there.
…and then Grow That Audience
This may seem somewhat arbitrary at first, but assuming that you want to grow your site’s readership and following, traffic and content are critical. For example, you notice that your travel blog’s post about sushi restaurants in New York is driving ten times more traffic than the rest of your posts. What does this mean? People like reading about New York. People like reading about sushi. Dually noted. Revisit those topics on your site, perhaps spinning your original blog into a “top five” list. You could take things a step further and write individual posts about each restaurant you talked about in your original post.
Google Analytics affords a truly unique opportunity in terms of creating new content for your site. Instead of taking a shot in the dark and attempting to overcome writer’s block to come up with something to write about, you can create content based on what you already know performs well. You may also discover what sort of content doesn’t perform well by examining bounce-rate and average time on-page.
…and Know (and Grow) Your SEO
And when we talk about content that “performs well,” we’re talking in terms of traffic and keywords. For example, if your site is ranking for a long-tail keyword (three or more words in a keyword phrase) such as “New York sushi restaurants,” you can use this information to your advantage by creating new content to help dominate that key-phrase. This doesn’t mean writing spam or keyword-stuffed drivel, but rather well-crafted blogs and articles with your keywords in place where it seems natural. Having such keywords under your belt will only do well to increase your traffic and readership, which ultimately leads to more clicks, conversions, shares, or whatever it is that you’re looking to do with your site. And really, if nothing else…
Google Analytics is Fun, Right?
You may not care about traffic or readership, and that’s fine. If nothing else, Google Analytics serves to satisfy your curiosity. Understanding how people find your site through Analytics is a fascinating and sometimes humorous exercise in seeing how both search engines work and how people utilize them. For example, I had visitors to my former blog from keywords such as “Brent vs. Usain Bolt” and “Bret Easton Ellis.” Such tidbits of information simply make running a site that much more satisfying.
The takeaway from all of this is rather simple. Google loves content, and through Analytics you may better determine where your focus should (or shouldn’t be) when it comes to content creation for your site or blog.
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