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This isn’t particularly useful to me as I run a photography blog using wordpress, but if you’re a website designer, it’s important to view which browser your visitors are using and that’s just one more thing that Google Analytics can do. Browsers act slightly differently to each other so you want to check how your website acts in the most popular browsers. Currently about 40% of my viewers use Chrome, 25% use Firefox and 19% use Safari.

This is a particularly useful tool which I’ve only discovered recently which tells you the amount of times that everyone has visited your site. Over the last month, roughly 57% of my visitors have only visited my site once, but that’s to be expected as many readers may not be interested in what I have to say. When you compare that to July when I had a lot of visitors come to see top lists, that percentage goes up to around 67%. The people who only visit my site once don’t bother me, it’s the people that come again that I care about, as they’re my real audience.

When you select traffic sources, you’re taken to their dashboard where you’ll be able to select the period of time which you want to study as well as glance over all the relevant data from this time. This includes comparing your traffic sources and search engine traffic, as well as being able to see the most popular keywords. The dashboard is particularly helpful for helping you find your way around the sections that you need, and it acts as a general overview of all the information that you’ll regularly need to see without delving too much deeper.

Direct traffic is pretty simple, it’s the amount of visitors who have come to your site through no other means, or at least that’s what it looks like. It’s actually doesn’t tell you a whole lot about your reader because there are ways for traffic to appear as if it’s come direct, when really it’s come through a program that manages a website such as Twitter. It’s believed that about half of the traffic that comes from twitter is viewed through a piece of software such as TweetDeck, which makes it appear as if it’s direct. I don’t really pay too much attention to direct traffic as I know that my readership is growing and more people are coming direct to my site, which is demonstrated through other statistics on my site such as Visitor Loyalty.

This is probably one of my most frequented statistics because my website relies heavily on referenced traffic, and that’s what the traffic source section is all about. People are surprised a lot of these features are even possible, let alone all in one place, but that’s what I love about Google Analytics; they make it so easy for us. When you can study where your traffic has come from, as well as how long they stay on the site, which page they’re viewing when they leave, how many pages they visit, and how often they’re visiting; you’re given a distinct advantage in knowing how to make content which will suit your readers.

From looking at the sources section, I know that I get a lot of readers from StumbleUpon, and on top of that, I know which pages they like to look at. If I want a lot of traffic, all I have to do is look at which pages they’re looking at and write more content like that. Looking at sources is also a great way of tracking how well my social marketing is going, and I can see from my second most popular being Facebook that it’s going very well this month. You can then click on the source to find out more detailed information about how many people came each day. In the past month, my clicks through Facebook range between 53 and 191 a day.

To me, this is the traffic that I strive to reach the most as I’ve written 85 posts over the past 5 months and I’d like people to be able to find them. If I’m in Google more then I’m going to be reaching more people who are looking for exactly what I’m trying to teach them, and these people always work out to be better viewers. By this, I meant that they spend more time on the site, look at more pages, and invariably, click on more ads, which earns me money.

If you want to know more about how to rank well in Google (and you do), then it helps to know which are the most popular keyword search terms. When you see what’s popular with Google in comparison to sites like StumbleUpon then you can start to target what you’re writing to rank higher, which will also make the rest of your content rank higher. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an element of a waiting game, but there are steps that you can take to help you make your way to the top.

One thing I’ve noticed, purely through studying my keyword data is that whenever there’s a spike in my traffic from a popular post, Google recognizes this and ranks me higher. But unlike my day to day traffic which goes back down, I stay at this higher ranking until my next spike which will take me higher again. I wouldn’t have known this without actually delving deeper into the stats and finding it for myself, in fact, it was only about three months ago that I realized this.

When you’re under this new heading, you’re greeted with another dashboard which again holds a timeline and details on the amount of pageviews and how many of those are unique. Also, you’ve given a small preview to the top content section where you can learn which are your most popular posts.

When I’m tracking how many visits I’ve had to my site, I like to see a complete timeline from when I very first began writing, all the way up to present day, and I can do this because my site isn’t very old yet. When I’m tracking content though, and other then the odd time where I wanted to see my post popular posts of all time, I like to look at my overview for the past month. This allows me to see what’s the most popular at the present time and then I can track where these views are coming from and act accordingly.

I’m usually surprised by my findings as it’s very hard to predict which posts are going to be the most popular; for example, this last month, only three of the top ten post popular pages were written recently, the others are much older. This page breaks down all the information that I need into a handy list with all of the information that I have come to expect such as pageviews, unique pageviews, time on site, bounce rate and exit rate for each source.

I can look at it in much more detail than this, I can break it down into sources as well. For example, I’m looking at my most popular tutorial this month and it’s one of my earliest which is unusual, so I delve a little bit deeper. I see from the overview that my exit rate (the amount of people who leave after seeing this page) is 72.45%, but when I click through and divide up the page by entrance sources, I see my top referrer has an exit rate of only 47.26%. Top content is really only an overview page – there’s a lot more that can be explored by clicking through the links.

When you go through the navigation summary, you’re taken to a very useful page which shows you where people have come from and where they go next. As this is a very popular post which people have been directly linked to, the majority of people have come straight to this page – 89.06% in fact. To see this more effectively, I’m going to use a different tutorial for an example and come back to my most popular post for this month.

I’m going back to the most popular post of the month now because I want to see what’s made it so popular, and who’s been sending me the traffic. When you click on the entrance sources page, you’ll notice that the page has suddenly got a lot more pageviews, but don’t worry, it’s supposed to be like this. This page lists counts all of the pages that have been viewed after people have finished on this page as well. For example, my top referrer is Uglyhedgehog.com, so everyone who comes through them is listed as a view and then every page they click on afterwards are also listed as their views, which is why you’re able to produce such high numbers.

Landing pages look at the traffic period that you’ve selected and then tell you which page those visitors came to first, as well as how many people bounced after visiting that page. This information differs to what you can find in the top content because if a post is particularly good at directing people to other pages then it may be high up on the list of top content, but not on the list of landing pages at all. I use this page quite often because it only supplies the information that I’m looking for, not information such as time on site which can be distracting.

Exit pages are the pages that people leave your site from, and they’re listed in order depending on how many people have left the site on a particular page. As expected, my most popular tutorial in the last month had the largest amount of people leave that particular page, so listing them in this order isn’t the most useful way of using this section of Analytics. I like to change the order of the list from the number of people who have left from a particular page, to the percentage, because then you’re not mislead by large numbers. To do this, click on the ‘% Exit’ column and order it in whichever way suits you.