Over the past two weeks I have been working my way around all websites, I still have a few to go, but for most of them I have installed a brilliant plugin called GADWP. It is tied to my Google Analytics Account and allows you to see how many visitors you get over various periods, what they are looking at, and lot of other useful information.
When you login you will see it on your dashboard. There are many different views available. You can select them from the two drop down selection panels in the top left of the panel.
Why is this important?
It will tell you how many people are visiting your site, over a day, a week, a month or 3 months. It will also tell you what they are looking at.
You can choose from several different periods:
- Real Time
- Today
- Yesterday
- Last 7 days
- Last 30 days
- Last 90 days
- Last year
- Last 3 years
For each of these you can choose one of the following analysis views:
- Sessions
- Users
- Organic
- Bounce Rate
- Location
- Pages
- Referrers
- Searches
- Traffic
- Technology
- 404 Errors
Some sites are using a similar plugin called Monster Insights. If that was active I have not added in GADWP. If you cannot find it, it is possible that you were in the first batch of sites I reviewed, and did not add it in, just let me know and I will add the plugin into your site and connect it with my Google Analytics account.
For anyone seeking deeper analysis, this is particularly useful if you have some sort of campaign running, let me know and I can grant access directly to the Google Analytics data for your site. This will tell you how many people reached a specific page, how they move through your site, and a ton of other things. Some people in IT have a full time job analysing what comes out of Google Analytics.
My advice, figure out what questions you have about your site and then go looking. If you do this in reverse (see what information is available) you will be overwhelmed.