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EP51 – WordPress Analytics – WPwatercooler – Sept 9 2013

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This week on WPwatercooler we will be discussing analytics for WordPress.

Analytics is the way you go about tracking information about the people going to a website. It tells you how they’re arriving on your site, what pages they’re viewing, browser type, country of origin.

There are 2 types of analytics.

Site based: Input code into the site and google will monitor the flow of traffic to/around/from your site.
People Based: It answers “What are the people doing on the site?” You can follow a person’s movements through your site.

What can you do with GA?

real time analysis
segmentation
integration of specific goals (such as tracking purchases and newsletter sign ups)
track pages they took to get to certain pages
Follow the dollars they spend

What are resources to learn GA

Beginners should look at WPBeginner
Google offers its own training as well. sign up for free and go through their library of resources
GA is constantly changing so you should look at those resources often
Spend time using it as much as you can
Jetpack

How long should you wait with a new site before really getting into GA?

At least a month or 2 for a new site.
If it’s an older site that just wasn’t tracking, there might be data available pretty quickly
Jetpack (plugin) is a great place to start for learning GA. You get the basics such as page views and growth, common search terms, outgoing links and more.

Once the novelty of GA has worn off and you will begin to want more detailed information. Be more strategic in what you want to track and make that information work for you.

You are able to set up a custom analytics dashboard.

Jason highly recommends Occam’s Razor. He makes really great prebuilt analytics dashboards you can install with a click and drop on all of your site profiles.

Clients should be in charge of their own analytics. If you need access or they want you to monitor the analytics, they should add you as a user to their GA account. We really recommend you keep client analytics separate from your own GA account.

Mentions:

Analytics Services

Higher-end Analytics Services

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One response to “EP51 – WordPress Analytics – WPwatercooler – Sept 9 2013”

Jeff Hester

September 9, 2013

Don’t forget Jetpack Site Stats! I use that for daily at-a-glance traffic (and it shows a spark-graph in the admin bar!). Then I rely on GA for more in-depth analysis (weekly and monthly).