I have traditionally done earnings reports every month but it has actually been several months since I last posted a true “Analytics” report for DragonBlogger.com. Using the magic of Windows Snipping Tool and Paint.Net I was able to compile all of my metrics into a single image to show readers the stats for April 2010 on DragonBlogger.com according to Google Analytics.

As you can see from the picture, my site had 15,401 Unique visits, with just over 20k pageviews.  75% of my traffic comes from Search Engines which is very very high, only 12% of my traffic comes from referring sites like StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook and other referral networks.  12% of my traffic is direct which is via bookmark or email link from my feed.  My site has a 71% bounce rate which is much better than the 80+% bounce rates I was having, this is due to me adding more YouTube video demonstrations in my posts which keep a reader on the site longer.

My site has reached a visitor plateau for about four months now where my site traffic stays hovering around the 15-17k user mark and the 20-21k pageview mark.  Despite my search engine traffic increasing slightly, my social networking and promotion of my site just doesn’t have much impact to my overall site traffic.  If I were to literally stop using Twitter tomorrow, I would only see about 200 less visits per month to my site, which almost makes me question why I spend so much time on Twitter.  For me it just isn’t an effective promotional tool for this blog, however it is much more beneficial to my Poetry blog where almost 5% of my traffic comes from Twitter visits.

As I realize where my search engine traffic comes from, most of my traffic comes related to my technology / software related reviews and instructional articles.  It is ironic that 2 sponsored posts from SocialSpark account for the highest number of individual page views on single posts in my site.  This is good because it means my sponsored posts are being found and reaching users which is what the advertiser wants.

How did my fellow bloggers fare in traffic stats for April 2010?

-Dragon Blogger

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On my poetry blog Wanderer Thoughts I have some unusual issues with the Google Analyticator Plugin for WordPress where it shows my GA statistics on my dashboard but some of my top 5 content pages show (not set). Yet, when I visit Google Analytics itself it shows the actual top 5 content just fine, it doesn’t have the “not set” issue. Though if if I hover over the not set link it shows me which post it refers to, it often is the same URL as the top 5 link just under it.  Example below the first “Not Set” with 222 views links to my /top-5-poems page, but that is also listed as number 3 with 149 views, so not sure why it is showing up like this.

My poetry blog is the only blog that I see the “Not Set” issues, it doesn’t occur in any other of my 8 blogs that use the Google Analyticator Plugin for WordPress, which is a great plugin as it not only inserts your GA on all your pages and posts, but also creates a quick dashboard entry that reduces the number of times you have to go to Google Analytics homepage if you just want quick stats. The only disadvantage is you only see your stats from the previous day as GA doesn’t record visits in real time.

If you want real time visits on your dashboard, I recommend you use Counterize-II or WordPress.com Stats on your WordPress Dashboard, but these create new SQL Database tables and require additional writes to your SQL database for each visit which can affect blog performance. These SQL writes do not cache and WP-Super-Cache will not prevent these SQL writes from occuring (they wouldn’t reflect visits if it wasn’t writing them).

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL

I have compiled a list of tips and helpful hints for anyone who needs to add Google Analytics code for your WordPress blog.  Some of these tips were provided to me by my blog mentor Damien Riley especially about the WP-HEFO plugin.  I have been troubleshooting my Google Analytics for several days now, I originally had it working and noticed for the past 2 days I had 0 traffic at all, when all my other blog stats have shown a fair amount of unique visitors.  Between 70 and 120 visitors per day was my average at this point.  I spent all of today troubleshooting and learned the hard way:

Don’t mess with your footer.php page included with your theme, they hide some custom stuff in there that will break things if you try to tweak or replace the file.  Especially if it is a compressed php where it looks like garbled text.

Don’t accidentally have Google Analytics code in more than one section on your side, always view Source and make sure you don’t see 2 GA code snippets on same html page, if you do, this will definately break reporting to Google Analytics.

With that in mind I wrote these simple instructions anyone can follow to add Google Analytics to their blog, read on.

• Pre-requisites:

1. Make sure you are only using your theme’s default footer.php file, if you edited it, deleted it and swapped a new one, you may have problems like I did.
2. Make sure you have no google analytics code or widgets installed, if you have duplicate google analytics code then it will not report your site stats to google.
3. Download and install the “WP-HEFO” plugin

• Configuring Google Analytics on WordPress Blog

1. First you have to create a Google Analytics account, log into http://www.google.com/analytics and create an account.
2. After you create an account, link your blog.
3. After you enter the information and register your blog click on Edit under the settings for your blog
4. Then click on “Check Status” on top right
5. You should see instructions for adding trackin code (ga.js)

This code should look like this below:  (Note, your getTracker(“UA-*) will actually be your unique identifier.)
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

• Adding Google Analytics code to your blog with the WF-HEFO Plugin

1. Keep the GA code handy from the previous step
2. Open web page up and open up your wordpress blog
3. Click on Design -> Header & Footer
4. In the Footer: Section cut/paste your full Google Analytics code.
5. Click Update

• Validation of your Google Analytics Code

1. To make sure your Google Analytics code is working right on your blog I found an exceptional website called EpikOne’s SiteScan
2. This site for free will scan your website or blog and analyze ever page to check for the Google Analytics Plug-In.
3. This site found and scanned all my pages and confirmed my Google Analytics was working, it provides a great report summmary:

Screenshot of SiteScanGA Summary:

• In Summary:

With the WP-HEFO plugin by Kaloyan K. Tsvetkov and the www.SiteScanGA.com I was able to get Google Analytics up and working properly with ease.

With these easy steps I was able to get Google Analytics working and reporting correctly for my website.  If you have not setup google analytics for your blog and have wanted to go ahead and follow my instructions.  Please let me know how well they work for you, and/or if you think I need to amend some steps.

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I discovered a new view under the Content Tab -> Content Drilldown in Google Analytics the other night, this “Pivot” view is which is found by pressing the right most button next to the graph buttons just on top of the statistics shows you your top pages, and which referrers yield you traffic to which pages.

With this I was able to see which specific pages StumbleUpon sends traffic to, vs Google and Entrecard as well as much more. I was surprised that a single post of mine about the HP Gift Card giveaway from September received over a thousand hits from StumbleUpon in the last thirty days.

It is no surprise that 4 of my top ten trafficked pages were dominated by Google searches and related to NBC Heroes which accounts for about 35-40% of my blog traffic so far these last two months.

Currently 61% of my blog traffic is Organic Search traffic and I am averaging between 18k and 20k pageviews for the month.

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL