So You Thought Chasing Ghosts was Easy

You have proven to be a top notch Internet marketer and you are diving thousands of visitors to your site each day. No? That's not happening? Don't fret. There's more to chasing ghosts than you think.

I see driving traffic to your site similar to hand cranking a generator. As long as you keep cranking, the lights stay on and traffic flows to your site. Once you stop, the lights go out and your traffic goes away. The key is content and frequent content. So make sure you have interesting material and you update it at least once a week or more.

Just six reports will tell you all you need to know

Now that you have the basics, there are really just six reports that will tell you all you need to know. And you can create a customized dashboard on Google Analytics showing just these six key performance indicators (KPI).

Here are the coveted six KPIs:

1. Where visitors are coming from; what websites or links are bringing people to your site.

You can find this information under the Traffic Sources link on your Google dashboard.

Under Traffic Sources you will see Direct Traffic. These are visitors who know your site URL and either typed it directly into their browsers or have it as an RSS link or saved in favorites. These are loyal visitors who want to make sure they find your site again. So work on driving up your direct traffic by posting your site address, emailing it to friends, relatives, and coworkers and just shamelessly promoting it.

The other KPI under Direct Traffic is Referring Sites. This information will tell you which sites are driving the most traffic to your site. These are the blogs and sites where a link to your site is listed if you had done your homework and asked to exchange links or left comments on blogs. The highest traffic generator this week for this blog was Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 blog where he was gracious enough to run my post announcing this blog. My post drove traffic to this site.

2. What search engines and keywords are driving visitors to your site?

You will see the link Search Engines also under Traffic Sources. Here is a list of the search engines used the most by your visitors. When you first start using analytics only Google will show up since it is most popular. In a few weeks, you should see others. You may want to place an ad on the search engine home page that drives the most traffic.

Keywords are probably the most valuable KPI in the mix. When you click on the Keywords link you will see the words your visitors put in the search engines to find your site. These are the words you want to make sure are always used on every page of your site or in all the posts on your blog. For this blog, I'm finding "dog chasing ghosts" are the most popular keywords and that is the title of this blog. I purposely chose that title because it intrigues most people and is easy to remember. And analytics is proving me correct.

Keywords are the words you want to make sure are always used on every page of your site or in all the posts on your blog.

Keywords are also important when you bid on adwords through Google. If "ghosts" is my most popular keyword, I could buy (bid) on its ranking for this blog. Depending how deep my pockets are would determine how high in the search list my site will appear when visitors search for "ghosts" on Google. There is a lot more information on adwords at Google so check it out if you want to know more.

3. Content. This is what it is all about.

If you don't have good content nothing you do will keep your traffic flowing. Under the Content link on your dashboard you will see which content generated the most visitors. This is a highly important indicator because it will show you what your visitors want to read, and what subject matter is most important to them.

With a website, the content metric will tell you which content is most popular. With this information you can then optimize the other pages with similar content.

With a blog, you can see which subject matter is most important to your visitors and post accordingly.

With my other blog, The Writer's Edge, the analytics tells me that the most popular posts deal with how to articles on writing and publishing. This tells me that the majority of the audience is composed of aspiring writers and just published authors.

4. Top Landing Pages


A nice metric under Content tells you which pages are most interesting to your visitors. Analytics also gives you the bounce rate for each page. Remember bounce rate are visitors who stayed less than 10 seconds. This metric will not only tell you which page is most successful, it will tell you which pages need to be changed or fixed to make them more attractive.



5. Top Exit Pages


Just the opposite of Top Landing Pages. Did the majority of your visitors exit from your home page? If so, there is nothing there to entice them to explore further on your site. Or did they exit on the last page of your navigation tree meaning that they viewed your entire site before leaving.


6. The Site Overlay


A really cool feature and its free! When you launch it, a new window with your site pops up and in a few seconds boxes appear over your links with percentages in them. When you scroll your mouse over the boxes, it tells you how many times visitors clicked on those links in a given time period. This is especially helpful on a home page because you can see if your visitors clicked on your navigation links to go to other pages. If you find that your visitors are clicking on links that take them off your site, I would eliminate those.


Another cool thing about this tool is that you can change the layout of your page to see the best place to position your navigation links or checkout cart.


Well, that's it for now. Don't tell me your brain hurts - just open your dashboard and use the information to optimize your site. Happy ghost chasing.

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.

The Acid Test

Ok. Here's the acid test. You managed to create a Google Analytics account, generate the javascript code for your site, and place the code at the bottom of your site. So what's next?

Sign into your account and go to your dashboard which will look like this. I'm tracking several sites so yours may have only one listing.


If you look under the status column you should have a green check mark - that means you successfully installed the Google code and Google is receiving data.

IF you have a yellow triangle you're in trouble, but don't panic. Give the site a few hours and come back later to check it. Sometimes it takes awhile for Google to retrieve the data, figure out it's yours, and place it on your dashboard.

IF you still have the triangle after a few hours, you will have to go back and install the code again. Maybe, you placed it in the wrong area. In any event, Google has a lot of help information so take a look if you get stuck.

Ok, so let's assume you have a nice fat green check mark. Now comes the fun part. Really, I mean that.

Click on the "View Report" link and almost like magic, Google has created an analytics dashboard for you complete with a month's worth of data from the day you open the report. Of course, if you placed your code a few days ago you will see very little data. You can change the date range or make it just one day by clicking on the date.



There's a lot you can do here and you'll have to play with it. I'm just going to highlight what you first see for now because I know your brain is starting to hurt again.

The first element is a nice line graph showing the number of visits by day. This shows you which days visitors decided to come to your site and how many.

The next section is Site Usage. This shows visits, pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and the percentage of new visits or visitors. Most of this is self explanatory except maybe bounce rate. This shows the percentage of visitors who stayed less than 10 seconds. That means they found your site, glanced through it and left - they were not interested. A higher bounce rate will tell you something on the site is driving your visitors away. Ideally, you want a low bounce rate.

The average time on site tells you just that - how long the average visitor stayed. If the average is over a minute or so you can assume they liked what they saw and read something there.

The last metric tells you the percentage of new or first time visitors. Obviously, you want this to be high because it will indicate that whatever you are doing on other sites, it is driving traffic to your site. But, a high visits number and a low percentage of first time visitors will show the majority of your visitors are loyal and make repeat visits.

Image via CrunchBase

Ok, are you passed out yet? Just a few more metrics to cover and you're off the hook.

Visitors Overview on the left is just that, but the Map Overlay is really cool. Click on any country in dark green and it will show where your visitors are from by country and by state or region. I find most of my visitors are from my home state and that makes perfect sense since most of my friends and relatives are here.

The last two sections are highly valuable in determining what's working and what is not on your site. The Traffic Sources Overview will show you cool metrics like the percentage of direct traffic (visitors type in your site address), the referring sites (where you have links on other sites to your site), the search engines used to find your site and the keywords visitors used in those search engines. All valuable information that will tell you how effective you are in driving traffic to your site.

The Content Overview tells you which content on your site is getting the most visits or interest. This is great for blogs because it will tell you which post is getting read the most and you can determine what subject matter the majority of your visitors like best. It is also valuable for multiple pages on a web site to determine the most interesting pages.

You can also customize the dashboard to show different reports if you don't like the default offering, and you can easily export any report to a PDF, CSV, XML or TSV file in addition to emailing them.

I think that's enough for now. Go pass out.

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.

The Dog is Chasing Ghosts

Every so often, our labradoodle, Nickie, will confidently stare into a corner of a room with no windows and bark repeately for several minutes.

"What is the dog barking at?" my wife would ask.

"Ghosts. I think the dog is chasing ghosts." I say.

She raises her eyebrows and her face says, "maybe," and the dog stops barking and we go about doing whatever it was we were doing.

Whether my dog is barking at ghosts or not, something is there, something triggered the keen senses of my pet whether it was a sound, a smell or a noise.

The Internet is similar in that of all the millions of users out there, you can't see them or touch them, but you know they are there. And if you are involved with the Internet with a website, a blog or paid advertising, everyone wants to attract as many users as possible to visit our websites, read our blogs or buy our products.

So like my dog, Nickie, we too are chasing ghosts whether you want to call them that or not, but we don't want to chase them away - we want to invite them in.

And that is the hard part and what this blog is all about.