Last updated on April 15th, 2022 at 11:35 am
I began using Google Analytics about three years ago since I started blogging. Not gonna lie, I didn’t like it at first because of the complexity and the endless ways to config the program. It’s a lot and was exhausting to learn all the elements and how one relates to another. But once I studied it bit by bit, once in a while, I started to see how it functions and understand how it works well enough to optimize it whenever I can.
Google Analytics is a software that helps analyze your website’s performance. For example, how many page views you have, how many people visit your site, what page has the highest views, how long your visitors spend on your site, and a whole lot more metrics beyond your imagination.
These days, besides my own personal blog, I also use it for my college newspaper job where I work as a web manager. Our news site is hosted on WordPress and has a different analytics plugin, which, in my opinion, is not as powerful as Google Analytics. Therefore, I integrated Google Analytics with the site to use along with the plugin.
Knowing these metrics of our website performance is really useful. Each week, I do a presentation to the news team about which articles gain good traction, what kinds of old articles that remain in readers’ interest that we should write more about, what social media platform that brings the most traffic that we should come up with plans to optimize it, etc.
Google analytics truly helps us focus on what’s important, where to improve, and what doesn’t matter anymore on the website. Without data from this tool, we lose our compass.
For those who are new to this product of Google, there are plenty of tutorials online that you can study from. As always, Google also has its on free tutorial as well. You can check it out here.
What is your favorite web analytics tool? Please share!
This is day#16 post and a part of my commitment to spend 30 minutes a day for 30 days straight to write about software development tools that I love. My goal is to build my daily writing habit and connect to more people. This project is inspired by @dickiebush ’s “Ship 30 for 30” Atomic Essays.