Understanding Google Analytics Reports

If you have your own blog or website for personal branding or promoting your MLM network marketing business, you may have chosen to install Google Analytics.

Understanding Google Analytics reports will give you a lot of clues about the health and overall appeal of your site to visitors.

Analytics is a very powerful script for compiling statistics about your site, and is provided for free by Google. There are many different reports you can run, and a ton of information you can review and analyze.

However, as a network marketer, your main concern is determining how your visitors are finding you, and how they are responding to your content.

Here are the stats that will be of most value and interest to you.

Pages/Visit

This tells you, on average, how many pages on your site that your visitors have viewed per visit. The closer this value is to 1, the less your blog or website is engaging and interesting those who stop by.

Average Time on Site

There are variables to take into account for this one, for example if you have a lot of ads that cause visitors to click away, but on average it’s how long people are staying on your site before they leave.

% of New Visits

This gives you a good idea of how many people are first-time visitors. A high value here can mean you are getting ranked in Google for keywords that are driving a lot of fresh, first time traffic to you. It could also reflect having a lot of backlinks to your site doing the same. If you are getting significant search engine traffic, Google Analytics reports will show you what keywords people are searching on to find you.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is tied to the pages/visits stat, and gives you a different perspective of what your visitors do. When they come to your site, if they decide they don’t like it (or it wasn’t what they were looking for) and leave quickly, then that is a 100% bounce. If they stick around and visit other pages also, the bounce percentage goes down accordingly. The higher this number, the faster your visitors are leaving.

One thing to consider when evaluating this is to compare the bounce rate for organic (search engine) traffic vs referring traffic (links from other sites or maybe from ads you’ve placed). If your search engine referrals show a high bounce rate, it could be that the keywords people are finding you with don’t match up well with your content and what they are looking for.

If you are seeing a low number of pages per visit and a high bounce rate, here are some things you can do to help engage your visitors more and keep them on your MLM blog or website longer.

• Visit MLM forums and message boards where network marketing is discussed, find the popular topics and questions, and use them as subjects for your articles and posts. If creating your post around a popular question, answer that question in your content.

• Check your navigation structure – be sure it’s clear and easy for visitors to navigate to different parts of your site without problems. I’ve visited many blogs where I had to hunt for links to check out other content, and this is frustrating for a visitor. Make it easy to get around.

• Do you have a lot of ads in the sidebars and content area? If your main objective is to sell affiliate products from external sites, no big deal. If you’re blogging to brand yourself and help your visitors get to know you, get rid of the excessive advertising.

• As you are writing your posts and articles, put links to related content on your site if you have it. I use a WordPress plugin on this blog to show links to older posts in the same category, right below each post. This encourages readers to visit other pages in my blog and stay longer.

All in all, understanding Google Analytics reports gives you significant insight into what matters most – where your visitors are coming from, and what they think of your content. Use what you learn to tweak things, because in general the longer a visitor stays on your site, the more likely they are to sign up for your list or respond to some other call to action that you have.

Did you get some value from this post? If you did, I would really appreciate you sharing it with others! And, your comments are welcome below!

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