When you first start attempting to grow your blog, you’ll probably promote it as often as you can, everywhere that you can – social media, other blogs, forums, etc. But time is precious, and wouldn’t you rather spend your time writing and developing content instead of promoting your blog on a website that doesn’t bring any visits?
Today, we’re going to look at Google Analytics to help us make promotion decisions. If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics (GA), then stop what you’re doing right now! Before you continue here, read about what GA is and why it’s important, and then set it up on your blog – it’s easy and free, and it’s incredibly valuable and useful.
If you just set up GA on your blog for the first time, you may want to wait a few weeks or a month so that it can collect data. If you’ve already got GA set up, let’s dive right in.
Log into GA and click on your site’s analytics. The first thing you’ll see is the Audience Overview.
This gives you a good snapshot of website traffic, but we’re going to get a bit more detailed today. So, in the left-hand navigation, click on “Acquisition” and then on “Channels.”
This report gives you a simple breakdown as to where your website traffic is coming from:
But what do these channels mean? Let’s break it down.
- Organic Search is traffic that comes from the search engines – mostly Google.
- Direct means that a user came to your site directly, either by typing your URL into their browser bar, or from a desktop or browser bookmark.
- Referral is a link from any other blog or website. If another blogger likes your post and links to it in their blog, it’ll show up as a referral in GA.
- Social includes any visit that comes from social media (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google+, Pinterest, etc.)
- Other means anything that doesn’t fit neatly into one of the other buckets – usually RSS feeds.
- Email is any visit that comes from an email, whether it’s an email newsletter you send, a user subscribing to your site via email, or just someone emailing one of your blog links to someone else.
Today, we’re going to focus on just two of these channels – Referrals and Social.
(And for more information about what those metrics mean (sessions, users, bounce rate, etc., check out our post from earlier this month.) — Metrics to Measure Engagement
Referrals
From the Channels report, click on “Referrals” and then make sure that, at the top of the report, you’ve clicked on “Source.” You’ll see a list of websites that have sent visitors to your site:
(Referrers blurred for anonymity)
Now, you’ve got a list of websites and blogs that have referred traffic to your blog (a “session” in GA is a visit to your website). You can click through to visit the referring sites themselves and find out more information about them. Since they’ve already linked to your blog at least once, you can reach out to them for link exchanges or partnerships – the sky’s the limit!
Social Media
Click back to the original Channels report, and now click on “Social.” Make sure you’ve selected “social network” at the top of the report:
As you can see, Pinterest and Reddit are the social media sites that have brought the most traffic to this blog. Twitter and Facebook have brought significantly less. This could mean one of two things:
- More time/effort is spent promoting the blog on Pinterest and Reddit than on Facebook and Twitter
- Or, equal time is spent promoting on all these social media sites, but Facebook and Twitter aren’t performing as well.
Regardless of what the reason is, you can now make some decisions. You can try to spend more time promoting your blog on Facebook and Twitter to see if they start to bring in more visits. Or, if you’re already spending a lot of time on those channels, you may want to back off of them and spend more effort on those that are already bringing in a lot of traffic.
By just looking at these simple reports in Google Analytics, you can tell which marketing efforts have been successful and which could either use more effort, or just aren’t worth it.
Do you use GA to help with your blog promotion?
