I started my first post on using Google Analytics for Blog Analysis on my way back from the Emetrics Summit last week. I was too busy to follow up immediately - but now I'm ready to go forward. I'm going to use a site I have access to (I won't give out the name) that has a great deal of traffic and is a blog.
This series is going over several posts and at the end - I'll give my conclusions.
I'm going to start totally right brained approach - We'll start with Uniques - How many Visits does this blog get each day of October?
Answer: 1976 uniques per day in October 2006 How: Marketing Optimization - Unique Visitor Tracking - Daily Visitors
Approximately 96% of the visitors are uniques - Marketing Optimization - Unique Visitor Tracking - Absolute Unique Visitors - that means most people are coming to the site once and not returning (otherwise there would be less uniques and more return visitors). How can we prove this? By looking at Return Visitors - except there appears to be two measures in Google Analytics - Visitor Loyalty and Visitor Recency. I'm looking at Visitor Recency first. Out of the last 50,000 visitors, about 44,000 only came once and never returned Marketing Optimization - Unique Visitor Tracking - Visitor Recency.
But that's general - Google Analytics tells us exactly how man are new vs. Returning Visitors in Marketing Optimization - Unique Visitor Tracking - Visitor Segment Performance - New vs Returning 85% of the traffic coming to this blog is new visitors and 15% are returning again. Cool! For a blog - that's not bad! Let's do some segmentation analysis and see what we can see about the new visitors first - since there are the majority of visits - I am going to chose "Cross Segment Performance"
The sources of New Traffic (that had not returned to the site yet) was 67% from Google Natural Search and 5% Yahoo - Google is King of Traffic for blogs! Interestingly - 1.5% of the traffic came from StumbleUpon!
As far as keywords go - a lot of searches to this blog were on the keywords like "dogging stories", "indian sex scandals", "webcam porn", "bluetooth sex" and "happy slapping" - yet alot of traffic did not come from keywords at all - they were "direct visits" no keyword involved.
Where does the traffic come from? The biggest cities are Houston, Los Angeles, New York, London, Singapore and Chicago, in that order.
Now, lets look at people who are returning visitors what are their characteristics?
About 37% of return visitors came from Google the first time while 5% came from bloglines while only 0.60% of new visitors came from Bloglines. MEANING: This blog should strive to get more visitors to come from Bloglines as these visitors will more likely return to the site than those who come from any other source.
Geolocation of New Visitors - California, Texas and New York more than anywhere else while return visitors seem to be more likely to come from Leek and New York City.
So the take away so far......get more people from Bloglines to come and work on people located in Leek and New York City - as these will most likely want to return. If your running Geo-Targeted ads - go after locations that show more return visitors.
That's enough for this post - in the next post I'll go into the post popular blog posts of this blog.
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