Using Analytics - An Overview

Okay, at the request of a few lovely followers, here is how I track my site's analytic details.  Let's get all technical up in here!  Woot!

Whaaaaat?  I'm a writer, not a techie!

Yeah, well, I'm not a techie either.  But if we're serious about the business side of our writing, it's something we've got to learn to do.  :)

Isn't it hard though?

Ummmm, no.  Really, it's simple.  It seems daunting at first if you have no idea what you're looking at, but it's actually pretty self-explanatory.  Here we go.

I use Google Analytics.

 

When you sign in, this is what you see...  Whatever websites you have set up to track will be listed with their reports.

When you click on view report it takes you to the dashboard, which looks like this:

 

Lots of interesting information, right?  When you start clicking on the different reports, you can learn things like: search terms used to find your site, the popularity ranking of your posts, how people are finding your blog, who's linking to your blog, etc.  Awesome.

This is the Traffic Sources page where you'll see what websites have lead people to yours, and what search terms people found you with:

Your Content Overview pages looks like this:  It shows page hits and post popularity.

You can also use the Stats function on blogger (if you use blogger that is):

 

The blogger Stats page looks like this:

Not too hard, right?  I love checking my analytical data out.  It's so cool to see how people find me!

Anyway, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.