Knowing your audience and what they want is an important success factor for any website. The best way to know your audience is through your traffic stats and this is exactly what Google Analytics provide for FREE. There are plenty of stats softwares and plugins, but we believe that Google Analytics is a must have for every blog.
It shows you:
- Who visits your website – user’s geographical location, which browser did they use, what is their screen resolution, which language they speak, etc.
- What they do when they are on your website – you can see how long users stay on your website, what pages they are visiting the most, which page is causing the users to leave most often, how many pages an average user is viewing etc.
- When they visit your site – you can see which time of the day is the hottest for your website. This helps you pick the time to publish your posts. If that time zone is not compatible, then you can schedule your posts.
- Where did they arrive on your website from – you can see how the user found you. Whether it was through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc), social networks (facebook, twitter etc), a link from another website, or a direct type-in. Google Analytics also shows you the breakdown of each traffic source, so you can focus on specific ones if you like.
- How users interact with your site’s content – You can see how many users clicked on a specific link.
- And much more.
We use all the data to improve our site and give our audience what they like. You should too. We have written an excellent guide that will show you how to install and setup Google Analytics in WordPress.