How To: Google Analytics

There are many ways to track your blog stats, the best one being Google Analytics. Blogger does have a tracing system with their blogs but they also count spam hits and actual hits, so Analytics is a more accurate count.

Google Analytics is simple to set up. You sign in with your Gmail/Blogger account, select your url type (most of you will be a single url) and add your url. Then you simply add the tracking html code on to your blog and it will start tracking. 

It will take a day for the numbers to show up, it refreshes every morning.

 

The next time you sign into Google Analytics you will see this crazy graph and chart.

The line graph shows you how many visitors you had each day, and the pic chart show you who was returning and who was new. 

On the side you will see this:

Visits: 560

 The total number of hits to your blog.

Unique Visitors: 338

Unique Visitor report counts visitors to your website (counting each visitor only once in the selected date range.

Pageviews: 977

A Pageview is the standard unit of Web traffic. Each time a webpage is viewed, it counts as one page view.

Pages / Visit: 1.74

 The Pages/Visit (Average Page Depth) metric displays the average number of pages viewed per visit to your site. Repeated views of a single page are counted in this calculation. This metric is useful both as an aggregate total as well as when it is viewed with other dimensions, such as country, visitor type, or mobile operating system.

Avg. Visit Duration: 00:02:19

 Average link some one is on your blog.

Bounce Rate: 69.46%

 The Bounce Rate is the percentage of bounced visits to your site.
A bounce is calculated as a single-page view or single-event trigger in a session or visit.
The following situations qualify as bounces:

• A user clicks on a link deep into your site sent by a friend, reads the information on the page, and closes the browser.
• A user comes to your home page, looks around for a minute or two, and immediately leaves.
• A user comes directly to a reference page on your site from a web search, leaves the page available in the browser while completing other tasks in other browser windows and the session times out.
•  

% New Visits: 60.36%

The percent of your viewers that are new.

I hope this helps break down the numbers for you. Google Analytics gives you a lot of information for your blog. But the information is useless if you don't know what you are looking at. 

Please remember to use these numbers to make your writing better, not as a bar or standard for where you should be as a blogger.