Starting a new blog can be challenging, especially when everything is new. However, tracking and monitoring your progress using measurable factors like traffic and audience metrics is crucial to making progress after launching. As the age-old saying goes, “you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” This is especially true for WordPress traffic, where keeping track of your stats is essential to see what you’re doing right or wrong and make adjustments to boost traffic.
There are several reasons why you should track your website statistics. Analytics are an excellent way to see who is visiting your site, when they visit, and where they come from. This information is crucial in optimizing your content by creating relevant and targeted articles for your audience to be released at the best time. Analytics also help you see what your visitors are doing on your site and how your content is performing. You can see which articles are getting the most views, how long your readers are staying on them, if/what links they are clicking, and the related bounce rate. These tools are essential in creating better content that your audience will respond to.
Google Analytics is one of the most common ways to measure and keep tabs on traffic. As the #1 search engine, Google has the ultimate tool to help users optimize their SEO methods. It’s a free web analytics service that you can use to track and interpret your website’s traffic. With this tool, you’ll be able to discover facts and trends related to your website that can help you better understand its performance.
There are several benefits to using Google Analytics, primarily ascertaining how visitors use your site. As such, you can better analyze your content’s performance and notice trends such as a high bounce rate. With this tool, you can collect data on your traffic sources, devices, events, and more. Plus, there are many reporting tools to help you view the data in an easy-to-understand format such as graphs, percentages, maps, and timelines. This way, you can see at a glance which posts are performing, where the majority of your readers are from, or even how a customer goes from your homepage to a completed purchase.
Signing up for Google Analytics is quick, easy, and free. You’ll need a free Google account to use for your analytics, a Google Analytics plugin, access to your WordPress website via FTP, or a compatible theme like Total. The first step is to click on the button to Sign Up and select the new account option for “website.” Then add an account name, website name, URL, and your industry/timezone info. Click on the blue button to get your tracking ID. Next, you’ll be presented with a tracking code for your website. Copy your code to paste into your preferred Google Analytics plugin or theme. The final step is to return to your Google Analytics account to save. Now you just have to wait a bit for Google to collect data from your website so you can start checking out your stats and reports.
There are several Google Analytics plugins available that bring Google Analytics right to your WordPress dashboard. The official Google Site Kit plugin is an excellent option that allows you to access all of your Google tools from your WordPress dashboard, including Analytics, Tag Manager, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and more. Another popular free solution is Google Analytics by MonsterInsights, which integrates Google Analytics with your WordPress installation. There are additional options to track demographics, record outbound links as page views, customize tracking of internal links, and more. The free Google Analytics Dashboard for WP plugin enables you to display key analytics metrics directly on your WordPress dashboard.
Interpreting your Google Analytics reports is essential to using them effectively. Some of the key reports you’ll likely want to view are pageviews, traffic sources, and bounce rate. Pageviews tell you how many times a page has been viewed, allowing you to learn what’s popular on your website and what could do with some work. Traffic sources track where visitors are coming from, both on the web and their geographical location. This metric can be key in measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Bounce rate measures how many visitors browsed to your home page, then immediately left without interacting with it. A high bounce rate indicates that people are not sticking around to view your content, which is bad. However, once you’re aware of this, you can explore why it’s happening.
If you don’t want to go through all the hoops to set up Google Analytics or prefer not to rely on third-party websites, you can still keep track of basic website traffic statistics on your own. Matomo Analytics is an excellent alternative that allows you to keep track of your stats all on your own.
In conclusion, tracking and monitoring your progress using measurable factors like traffic and audience metrics is crucial to making progress after launching a new blog. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for measuring and keeping tabs on traffic, and there are several plugins available that bring Google Analytics right to your WordPress dashboard. Interpreting your Google Analytics reports is essential to using them effectively, and there are several key reports you’ll likely want to view.
