Driving Traffic to Your Site(s)

By now you should start to see data from your blog or website captured by Google Analytics. If you don't, you'll have to reinstall the javascript code again. Check out Google's Installation Troubleshooting if you are having problems.

So you want to know what all this data means and what you can do with it to drive traffic to your site(s) right?

Let's take each area and look at it in depth and what the numbers mean. The first one is Visitors. (Just click Visitors in the frame on the left.)

First you will see the overview with a nice graph showing your traffic and then a summary of various types of visitors and their behavior on your site(s). If you click on any of the categories, a horizontal bar graph appears showing that metric for each day. This is good to show trends for the month. Is your traffic increasing? decreasing? variable or static? You can also click on the date section on the top right and check the "Compare to past" box to compare last month's traffic. Google also is nice enough to put percentages in green or red showing whether your site increased or decreased traffic.

Ok. I'm going to stop here for now and give your brain a rest. You will also notice under Visitors there are additional metrics and some have a list of subcategories. We will get into those in subsequent articles.

More importantly is whether YOU are generating traffic to your site(s). Just because you have a website or blog doesn't mean the world will flock to your URL. The old adage, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat down your door" does not necessarily apply here because there are too many mousetraps and people are already caught in lots of others. The adage does work IF you tell enough people about your site(s) and you have content that will interest, inspire, entertain, inform, evoke emotion or make people laugh. I know your brain is not hurting so pay attention.

Here are some ways to get traffic to your site that I have used successfully.

Search Technorati or Google Blog Search for blogs similar to your website or blog. Read them and leave comments. Don't leave short comments like, "I liked your article" or "Cool, man!" You have to leave a comment with substance that will interest readers. And make sure you leave the link to your blog or website in your comment. Then you can check your analytics dashboard in a day or two and see if your traffic increased. You can even see which blog generated the most visits by clicking on the Traffic Sources section on the left and then on Referring Sites. When you see which sites generate the most traffic check them often and leave additional comments.

Other traffic generating methods include creating a Facebook or MySpace site, joining Twitter and Linkedin and other social networking sites. Most have applications that link your site to theirs so that when you add content to your site it shows up on the other sites. But we can get into that another time.

For now put your feet up, relax, and start searching for sites similar to yours. Happy searching.

Ok, so you think you are ready to try web analytics?

If you can copy and paste that’s all you need to know to get started. You’ll be the dog chasing ghosts instead of your favorite pet.

Ready? Go to Google Analytics and create an account. If you have a Google account for gmail or another Google feature you may be able to use that ID and password. If not just sign up.

On the next page, create an web page account.

Fill in the fields on the next page for your website or blog.

You’re almost there. After you finish with the account creation the JavaScript code is generated and you are ready to copy and paste.

Ok, now here is where you have to pay attention. Read everything on the page especially this sentence just above the JavaScript window: “Copy the following code block into every webpage you want to track immediately before the tag.”

You’re brain is hurting now, right? Take an aspirin. If you have never seen or created HTML language then might as well be hieroglyphics.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, the universal code read by every web browser on the planet telling it what to display on your computer screen. Since your brain is hurting I captured the link to the HTML definition on Wikipedia in case you wanted to know more.

The tag tells the browser that it’s the end of the body of your web page. The Google JavaScript code goes right in front of the tag and there is a good reason for this location.

Quickly, I’ll tell you because I know your brain is overloading – when you request a web page, the browser begins reading the HTML code and loading the elements of the page including cool pieces of information called meta data which is like the inside scoop on the web page and browser. Other pieces of information from the browser are also there like where the person was before they entered the site, the name of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and other bits of juicy data. No personal or identifying information, mind you.

While the page loads, the Google JavaScript records all this juicy information and sends it to a server somewhere in Google land with your account numbers and stores it there for about a year or so. When you access your Google Analytics account, it pulls all the data and compiles into nice graphs and charts on the analytics web site.

There are a lot of other things going on, but I wanted to give you the simple version of how web analytics works. You’re probably passed out by now. Let’s take a rest and continue another day. Next will be how to put the code on your web site and how to make sure it works.