Google Analytics is amazing. There’s nothing it won’t tell you about your website traffic. I can figure out how many people visited my site, how much time they spent on it, what pages they loved the most, what cities they’re from and so on. And because it’s been 4 months since I decided to start a blog to help boost my jewelry sales, I figured I’d show you how far I’ve come and give you an understanding of google ananlytics at the same time.
My first official blog post was on September 8th, 2008 and since then, I’ve tried to promote my blog as best as I could. I could definitely use more help with my SEO campaign since most professional bloggers would probably have ten times the traffic I do by this point in time, but either way, I’ve had approximately 4,000 hits since the launch with a fairly low bounce rate of 56%.For those unfamiliar, the bounce rate means that 56% of the people who visited my blog, clicked it off even faster. Everyone has a bounce rate and getting it as low as possible is ideal.
Looking at my stats I also realized that I need to find a way to improve my organic hits, meaning search engine traffic. Only 11% of my traffic came from search engines. My top 4 referring sites included Savor the Success, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Kirtsy. This is invaluable information. I haven’t even fully taken advantage of most of these sites and yet they’re consistently bringing me traffic.
Although this next stat is less important, I like to see where my visitors are located. It’s pretty cool to see that people from 1,064 cities all over the world have checked out my blog at one time or another. It’s also good to see that the majority of visitors are residents of the U.S., which is my direct target market for the jewelry business.
As for the most important stat, I get to figure out what articles and topics my readers liked the most:
1. The Gift Fest { 860 hits }
2. The Esculon Shop {395 hits}
3. Twitter Tip: How I got 100 Followers in 10 Days! {212 hits}
4. PR Lesson #2: Media Lists {176 hits}
5. Amazing Websites for Women, Entrepreneurs & Bloggers {139 hits}
If you have a blog or plan on starting one, I highly recommend signing up for google analytics. Afterall, it’s free! If you’re a blogger, please share your most successfull articles in the comments. I’d love to check them out.
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Thank you! Great and important information.
Natasha
You are so right, this is invaluable information and should help you move things along this year. It’s obvious that you’re going to be doing more gift fests, right?
Congrats on your stats! And now you have a new plan…what could be better? Here’s hoping you received 4,000 sales.
Thanks for sharing! This is really great information – I had no idea what to expect and what others were seeing, so this is really helpfu!
I am addicted to Google Analytics. I’m wondering, though, if you have more traffic than you think. Usually it figures your traffic over a month’s time, automatically moving the time period as days go by. You can change the parameters to figure out traffic for a single day or for a few entire months, but the default setting is 30 days (I think, might be 31). Anyway, I have some hints today on my STS blog about SEO that might be helpful. Just did something that was easy and successful! Woot.
@Lynn, I’m definitely going to do another gift fest…a little different than the last but something very exciting and unlike anything I’ve seen so far. Let’s hope it’s a hit. I’ll let you know all about it soon.
@Lisa, 4,000 hits resulting in 4,000 sales would’ve been a dream come true…sadly, it wasn’t quite 4,000. lol
@Alisa, I just read your blog about the SEO and honestly, that’s got to be the best tip I’ve ever ever ever read. And being that it’s so good I’m going to put it in action today and see what happens. Thank you so much for that.