Your Blog's Biggest Fan
Do you know who your blog fans are – returning visitors who actually stay on your blog and read it?
Google Analytics does.
Why would you need to care, you ask?
Other than the fact that it’s pretty cool to know the nitty-gritties of your traffic, these statistics will help you to learn what your sticky content is.
What posts do your readers keep coming back to and bookmark? What pages have the least bounce rate?
Let’s take it a step further: if you knew what your best content was according to your readers, could you make sure it was well-optimized for search engines and push it to the top of Google? Wouldn’t that be a smart move?
Here’s how to find out in who your fans are in 3 simple steps.
Step 1.
In your Google Analytics dashboard, find “all visits” tab. Click on it and unselect “all visits”.
Step 2.
The segments you are interested in are:
1. Returning visitors – as you know, websites use cookies to identify folks who come back to your blog after an initial visit. Congrats, it means you did something right the first time around and managed to get them hooked.
2. Direct traffic – visitor who get to your site via a bookmark or by typing in your URL are considered direct traffic. They have obviously been to your blog before, that’s why they know how to get to it “directly”.
3. Non-bounce visits – visitors who visited more than one page per visit.
You can choose one segment at a time or all three. Press “apply”.
You should see a graph similar to this one:
Step 3
Analyze to your heart’s content!
These are the things I would look at (in the content section of your report):
1. What pages are frequented by my “fans”?
In my case, the first 3 are my Traffic Generation Cafe home page, Promote Yourself page, and Increase Blog Traffic page.
2. What is my search engine ranking for those pages? What if I tweak them a bit more: come up with a better title tag, tweak the keywords with Scribe SEO a bit, focus on building a few quality links to those pages?
Since this content is already liked by my “fans”, isn’t it likely that the organic search engine traffic will eat it up as well?
Question: do you think you use Google Analytics to its fullest potential? What’s the coolest thing you are tracking with it? Answer in the comments below.
You are right: you don’t have to comment or retweet, but would it help if I told you it would be much appreciated? 
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I really am a complete novice when it comes to Google Analytics. I have installed it on my sites and take a look at the stats fairly regularly, but the various features are still somewhat of a mystery to me. My next task is to start taking these stats more seriously and act upon the results.
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Thanks for sharing this Ana…
As a scientist I love crunching through data, and you’ve just shown me another cool way to get data from Analytics. The particular data you can get out of this tutorial is amazingly useful, as it allows you to determine the pages most visited by your fans and then you can spend time optimizing! Very cool!
Thanks, Ana…. awesome stuff, as usual. Tweeted and FB shared!
Bob
Dr. Bob Clarke invites you to read: How to be Productive When You Just Wanna Be a Couch Potato
You have made my day! I feel so clever knowing that I impressed a scientist!
On a serious note, I am glad you found the post useful. It is so much more effective to optimize when you know what people are interested in.
Ana | Traffic Generation invites you to read: What Can We Learn From the King of Blogging?
Yes you absolutely can. You can try using it anytime see how helpful it is.
Thanks,
Ana
Great post Ana!
I’m guessing I’m not doing too bad then, quite a bit of my traffic comes from those sources. My only gripe with GA though is it doesn’t match up with GetClicky stats! Says I have a 75% bounce rate, where as GetClicky says I’ve got a 30% or less bounce rate. Drives me batty that there’s such a big difference in stats between all the different analytic tools. :-/
Cori Padgett invites you to read: Put the “Pop” in Popular- Making Your Biz Cool
Yes, indeed there is, Cory…
In the end, I don’t think it matters that much; if our traffic keeps growing, then we are doing something right, whatever the stats say!
Thanks for coming by; always a pleasure.
Ana
Thanks Ana, that was a great tip. I never even knew the all traffic tab was up there and able to be changed.
Neither did I, Joy, until someone pointed it out to me. And now I am happy to pass it on to you!
Ana
PS Always love your comments; keep them coming!
Hi Ana, I liked this article so much it inspired a blog post I did. I mentioned you and linked this article.
Larry
Larry Rivera invites you to read: The Power Of Google Analytics In Your Marketing
Thanks for the mention, Larry; love your post.
Ana
Ana,
I thought I knew plenty of Google Analytic, I guess there is sure more to learn! New visitors are great but there is loyalty factor which is hard to find these days! Just found your blog from technshare! and I am glad.
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