Google Analytics

A couple of weeks ago, we were taught about installing Google analytics into our blog. For those that don’t know, this is a service which allows its users to get data regarding traffic and sources of traffic on a website. This service also provides statistics measuring conversions and sales. You can get a free basic version, or buy the premium service, all depending on your requirements. For our blogs, naturally we are using the free basic service. Here are some of the statistics for my South Florida Desi Lifestyle blog from Google Analytics.

From the screen shot to the above, you can see the sources of the traffic to my blog. I haven’t had anyone stumble across my blog through search engines, such as Google or Bing. The majority of my traffic came to the blog directly, 10 out of my 31 visitors, while the remaining all came from various referral sources such as Facebook and blogger.

From the next picture, found below, you can see the bounce rate on my page is 0%. The bounce rate is the number of the people that visit a site and leave without clicking on anything. Generally speaking, if I had visitors from search engines, there might've been a chance of having a bounce rate. Since currently I don’t have traffic from search engines that might be a reason why I have a zero bounce rate. The bounce rate is different than the exit page, which for my site is 31%. The exit rate is the percentage of visitors that also leave without clicking on anything else. Exit rate is slightly different than bounce rate because it just means that the user may possibly have visited another page on my blog, rather than clicking through the website and closing it.  

This picture (above) also shows that the average time spent on page was 1 minute 25 seconds. So some people might be looking at the blogs and scanning it for information or pictures they are interested in, while there might be some that actually read what I've written. However, if you look at the screen shot from above, you will notice that the average visitor is spending more than 3 minutes on the blog! All in all, it’s pretty interesting. 

The next few screen shots display the countries where my blog is being accessed from. Majority of my audience is from North America, while a few people in Pakistan have also visited my blog.

                                            

This picture (below on the right) shows that majority of my visitors are from Florida, which is a good thing since I am blogging about South Florida. Interesting enough, it can be seen that I also have readers in Illinois, Georgia, New York, and Virginia.

This next picture (below) shows there are 3 visitors from Pakistan. 1 visitor whose location can’t be pin pointed down to a city. The map is showing the northern region of Pakistan shaded in, but I am not sure what to think of that. I am not too sure if it’s shaded in because the region is somewhat disputed or if the reader comes from that location. Without trying to say much, this kind of worries me because this unknown location’s visitor has spent close to 9 minutes on each of my 6 pages, and I don’t really know anyone from the particular region that is shaded in. I will try to not over-think this situation, being the mellow-dramatic Desi Girl I am. Hopefully, my writing isn’t offending anyone in that region, or any region of the world, for that matter.  

 

From this last picture below, it can be seen that there were 20 unique visitors to the blog. Even though there were 100 page views, the 20 visitors are those users that access my blog from the same device, regardless of how many times they've viewed it. These 20 unique visitors to my blog can essentially be considered my audience. 

Google Analytics is a wonderful service! It should be used to learn more about a website's audience, and possibly will be able to help businesses to gain more audience and learn about their shortcomings.