Google Analytics is a wonderful free tool for webmasters to track stats. The only problem with it is that some of the most common tasks seem abnormally difficult to do, or are buried under a bunch of menu items with strange names.
If you have a large number of articles, it’s often difficult to figure out which articles have been the most popular over time, or even for a particular time frame. If you notice an abnormal amount of page views, you will probably want to figure out which article people are coming to.
This is fairly easy to do in Analytics. Once you’ve figured out which articles are the most popular, you can even figure out what keywords are bringing visitors to that particular page.
First, select the date range with the calendar in the lower left hand corner. Then navigate to All Reports \ Content Optimization \ Content Performance \ Content By Titles:
You will see a graph of the most popular items, with a table listing them out below it:
Obviously my articles on upgrading Ubuntu are fairly popular… but why?
We can figure out what keywords are bringing the visitors to that particular article by selecting the red circular arrow, Cross Segment Performance, and then Keyword:
Now we can see some of the keywords that have brought people to this page. You’ll notice that the vast majority say (no data), and that is because they found the page via a referral link, instead of an organic search result.
It’s useful to do some of these comparisons at least once a month, to see how your content and traffic is changing over time.
Subscribe to the RSS feed, because some more indepth Google Analytics HowTos are on their way!
