Why It’s Important to Analyze

Do you have a blog? Have you set up Google Analytics on your blog? No? Stop what you’re doing and set it up right now!

If you’ve started a blog or a website for your crafty business, the next step is to put in some analytics. I personally use and love Google analytics on my blog. You might be thinking “What more do I need to know besides how many people came to my blog today?” A lot more and let me tell you why.

Google analytics is a great and really detailed tool. You can find out how many people are coming to your blog and from where. If they click over from Facebook, Twitter, or even Pinterest. You can see which Facebook posts or tweets got the most clicks back to your blog. You can see who else is linking to your blog. You can see what keywords people are searching and finding your blog with. And there are many, many other tools and analytics you can pull up.

Now why are any of these important? They’re important because with a little analysis you can see what is working best for you and stop wasting time writing post, Facebook status, and tweets that aren’t helping you or your business.

Best Uses for Google Analytics:

Keyword tool: this is a handy part of the report to check out because it tells you what keywords people are searching that brought them to your blog organically. So if you see that a lot of people are coming to your blog from Google because they’ve searching for “knitting tutorials” or “easy knitting tutorials”, you’ll know that it’s a popular topic with readers and a good way to get new people to your site that have never visited before. This would be a good opportunity to create more articles about knitting tutorials.

Traffic Sources: This area shows you all the places that have been sending you traffic or readers. It’s helpful to know who is sending you traffic because you might want to create a better relationship if it’s someone you’ve never worked with before. Or it can help you plan out your time if you see that Facebook is much more helpful and directing traffic your way than Twitter. Now you’ll know you can put less effort into Twitter and more into Facebook. How handy!

Content Overview: You can filter the results by a time range, but in that time range you can see which page on your site or blog is the most popular. You can see which is getting the most traffic and interaction. Maybe this is a page you want to promote again since people really seem to like it.

Google analytics is a great tool for helping you filter out the important things when deciding what content to use for your blog. There is no sense in writing and promoting content that no one has an interest in reading, right?

If you’re still not convinced, there is a great article on Mashable on Why Analytics Matter to Small Business.

Do you use analytics for your site or blog?