Once your website starts receiving traffic, you can track exactly where it’s coming from by using Google Analytics – a completely free tool that offers tons of insightful data.
How to Install Google Analytics
Use the following steps to get Google Analytics installed on your site:
Step 1: Create or sign in to your Analytics account.
- Go to google.com/analytics.
- To create an account, click Start for free. If you already have an account, click Sign in to Analytics.
Step 2: Set up a property for your website.
Follow these steps to set up a property for your site.
Step 3: Set up a reporting view.
Follow these steps to set up a reporting view for your site.
Step 4: Add a tracking code to your site.
- Make sure you’re signed in to your Analytics account.
- In the bottom left corner, click Admin.
- Under the Property column click Tracking Info, then click Tracking Code.
A code snippet will appear that looks like this:
<!– Global site tag (gtag.js) – Google Analytics –>
A bunch of code
</script>
Copy this code.
Then, in your WordPress dashboard go to Settings on the left side and click Insert Headers and Footers*. Paste this code into the box that says Scripts in Header. Then click Save.
Google Analytics is now connected to your site.
*If you don’t see this option then you need to first install the plugin called Insert Headers and Footers.
How to Use Google Analytics
Once Google Analytics (GA) is installed, you can use it in four ways:
1. Monitor your traffic in real time.
GA allows your to monitor your traffic in real time so you can see exactly how many people are currently on your site and which pages they’re on.
2. Gain an understanding of your audience.
You can also use GA to see the following information about your audience:
- Distribution of readers by country.
- Distribution of readers by time of day.
- Distribution of readers by device (desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet)
3. See where your traffic is coming from.
Along the left side of the dashboard, click Acquisition and then click Overview. This will display a page that shows where your traffic is coming from, broken down into four categories:
- Organic Search: Traffic that comes from Google organic search.
- Direct: Traffic that comes from people typing your domain name directly into their browser.
- Referral: Traffic that comes from another site referring people to your site.
- Social: Traffic that comes from social media platforms.
The following screenshot shows my traffic sources for Statology:
I can see that 93% of my traffic comes from organic search while the other three sources comprise the remaining 7%.
I can also click on any of the individual traffic sources and see exactly how that traffic has grown over time. For example, I’ll click on Organic Search, then in the top right corner I’ll change the date span to Jan 1, 2020 – May 9, 2020:
I can see that my daily traffic from organic search increased from 150 per day in January to around 4,000 per day by May.
I can also see that my traffic is highly cyclical – more people find me through organic search during the week than on the weekends. This makes since considering most students who land on my site probably aren’t looking for statistics tutorials on the weekends.
To smooth out the daily trends, I can click the Week filter in the top right corner to see my traffic by week:
I can then repeat this process for the other types of traffic I’m receiving: direct, referral, and social. This gives me a good idea of how traffic from each of these sources is changing over time.
4. See how people behave on your site.
Lastly, GA can be used to analyze how people behave on your site. Namely, you can see:
- Which pages readers visit the most.
- The average time spent on each page.
- The bounce rate for each page – how many readers “bounce” away from your site after reading just one page.
To access this data, click Behavior on the left side and then click Overview. On the new page that pops up, click view full report in the bottom right corner. The following page will appear:
For every page on your site you will be able to see the total pageviews, average time on page, and the bounce rate.
In general, the following things hold true:
- The longer the average time on page, the better. This means people are staying on that page and reading through your content, as opposed to leaving and going back to the Google search results.
- The lower the bounce rate, the better. This means people are clicking onto different pages on your site, rather than leaving immediately after reading through one page.
As a rule of thumb, most pages will have a bounce rate between 70% and 90%. Any page with a bounce rate above 90% is one that has potential for more internal links to be added to it – this increases the chances that a reader will click on one of the links to read a related article on your site.
It’s a good idea to skim through the data on this page and see which pages have low average time on page and high bounce rates – these are potentially pages that need some work done to them since readers aren’t spending a long time on them and are leaving the site immediately after reading them.
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