Are You Blogger: Statistics

Statistics

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Setting up Google Analytics for a 2nd or later blog

Pasuruan IT Store February 10, 2014 Add Comment

This article is about how to set up Google Anaytics to work on subsequent Blogger sites, if you have already set it up for your first blog or website.

If you already have Google Analytics set up, then the process is a little different to setting it up for your first blog (which is nicely described by GreenLava over on BloggerSentral) - because you already have a Google Analytics account, which you must add a new web property to.

How to set up Google Analytics for a subsequent blog

Log into Analytics using the Google Account which you use for Analytics overall (ie which you used for your other blogs or websites).

Choose the Admin tab (currently linked from near the right on the orange menu bar)

From the drop-menu under Property, choose Create a New Property

Choose Website (it's the default)

Choose whether to use Universal Analytics (currently still beta) or Classic Analytics.
(I've chosen Universal for the blog that I've just set up - will be interesting to see how it's different from classic for blogger).

Enter the

Sitename
Blog's URL
Industry category

Choose the Reporting Timezone: I've left it on US / Pacific, because that's what my other blogs are based on.

Click Get Tracking ID. The page that shows has your Tracking ID, it's like this (where the n's and m's are numbers):

UA-100nnnnn-mm

nnnnnnn is your own number, identifying your account.
mm is the number of this analytics property - it is what makes your property ID unique.

Log in to Bogger using an account which has Administrator rights for the blog.

Put this Tracking ID into the Settings > Other > Google Analytics > Google Analytics Web Property ID field.

Click Save settings.

Wait 24 hours or so, for the code to activate. If you're not seeing statistics after that, check if your blog really is getting visits (eg visit it yourself a couple of times) - and ask for assistance in the Blogger Product forum.

Do you have Adsense on more than one site, including this one?

If you have AdSense on more than one website, and you are going to have it on this site, then you need to take some extra steps so that Analytics gets the AdSense data. See here for more information.

Do you need to install the tracking code?

As well as your trackingID, Analytics also shows a block of code, with this header:

This is your tracking code. Copy and paste it into the code of every page you want to track.

The good news for Blogger users with newer Dynamic or Designer templates is that we can ignore this: Blogger puts the code in for us.

But if you're using an older Layout or Classic template, or a Designer template that's older, you may need to install some code (not the Analytics tracking code, though) manually.

If you'e in doubt, edit your template in the usual way, and search for:

<b:include name='google-analytics' data='blog'/>

If you can find it, then do nothing, your blog already has the code you need, and your statistics should start flowing soon.

If you cannot find that line, then add it, just before the </body> tag. (Search for </body and paste just before it).

Either way - don't install the tracking code from Analytics, because as Blogger operates now, this will not correctly count visits from mobile devices.

How to edit your Blogger template

Using Google Analytics if you have AdSense on multiple websites.

Understanding Google accounts

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

Searching SEO Statistics Webmaster Tools

Pasuruan IT Store October 01, 2013 Add Comment

Pasuruan IT Store

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog.

Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased

If SEO is important for your blog, and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic. (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.)

This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like SearchEngineLand.

Opinions vary, but many people believe that

"Not knowing keywords has big implications if you use data about what people search for to decide how to develop your blog." [tweet this quote].

For example, I publish listings of the contents of old (ie graphical copyright expired) song-books in a particular niche on one of my blogs. There are far too many songs for me to load the full text or sheet music of all of them. And this is a niche with lots of competition: there are a zillion websites distributing song-lyrics (most illegally). But by watching the search-terms that led people to arrive at certain pages, I can identify particular songs that people were looking for and not finding anywhere else (the so called "long tail" of search keywords). If these songs are now in the public domain, I can make a dedicated page for them, and share what I know - in many cases after doing more research and pulling together information from a range of different sources. Not knowing the keywords that people use to get to the book-listing pages would totally destroy this approach.

What you can do about it

So far I've identified three alternative options for getting data about what my visitors are searching for.

Ask for user-provided information

I've used Google Docs to make a data-collection form, and invited my visitors to use it to tell me about songs they are looking for.

The advantage is that I can ask them for richer information than just the keywords, eg where / when they remembmer it from, multiple snatches of the lyrics, what style the music is, etc.

But the disadvantage - and it's a big one - is that it only works for people who actually get to my site and then go into the other page where this form is kept, and fill in the form. I don't want to go into details - but let's just say that I haven't been run off my feet!

Get data from WebMaster Central

If you have verified your blog in Google Webmaster Tools, then the Search traffic > Search Queries tab shows the queries that have caused your blog to show up in search results pages, as well as how many times this has happened and what position, on average, you had in these pages.

This is richer information than you get from Analytics or Blogger-Stats, which only tell you about people who actually visited your blog.

But the disadvantages are that data is only kept for 90 days, and it only shows the top 2000 keywords. Both of these are issues for me - some of my song-book contents are seasonal - if something is being looked for now, then the moment (week, month) may have passed by the time that I've noticed the trend, researched the song and written it up to a standard that I'm happy to publish. So really I want to checking the logs for nine months ago, so I can research things that are likely to be popular again next year.

Get data from AdWords

Advertising campaigns are the one place where Google is passing the search-keywords through to back-end systems. And because of this, Adwords does have data about what your visitors are searching for - provided you've set it up to collect this data. To get it up:

Firstly, sign up for an AdWords account. You probably have to deposit $10 into the account to get started - but you don't actually need to set up any advertising campaigns or spend any money after that.

Then link your AdWords account to your Google Webmaster Central account.

Once this is done, Adwords will start collecting the search-keywords for your blog. To get at the data:

Log in to AdWords
Select "All Online Campaigns,"
Make an empty campaign (if you haven't got one already)
Go to the "Dimensions" tab
Change "View" to "Paid & organic".

AdWords will display your stats, since you signed up and linked your account. This includes the top search terms that users got to your site with, number of clicks, number of queries and some other measures too.

I'm only just starting to assess how well this will for for my song-listing site - will update this post when I have more specific information about how well it works and whether I can get actionable results from it.

What other alternatives have you found?

Leave a comment below, and I'll expand this list as we find out more options for accessing keyword-based search traffic information.

Using Google Docs to put a survey questionnaire into Blogger

Six reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

Setting up Google Analytics so it gets AdSense data from more than one blog or website

Adsense Analytics Statistics

Pasuruan IT Store May 06, 2013 Add Comment

Pasuruan IT Store

This article is about setting up Google Analytics on your blog in a way that includes data for AdSense clicks and behaviour.

Google Analytics and Blogger.

Analytics is Google's tool for measuring website performance: how many visitors, how long do they stay for, what pages do they look at - and if you use AdSense, where are your earnings coming from. It's a major step up from Blogger's Statistics displays, and has far more details eg where the visitors came from, what browser they are using.

When people first started using Analytics with Blogger, they followed the standard Analytics instructions to edit their template and add the tracking code to it.

However if they switched to use a different template, the tracking code was lost unless they remembered to re-install it - and many people didn't remember.

So some Google engineers started telling people to put the code into an HTML/Javascript widget instead, because widgets are kept through template changes.

This worked well, until mobile templates were introduced. By default, mobile templates don't show HTML-Javascript gadgets. And while this can be changed, it involves editing your template (so brings back the "what if the template is changed" issue) - and it relies on the mobile-visitors using devices that run Javascript.

So Blogger added a field to the Settings tab where you can enter the Google Analytics profile ID for the blog: GreenLava over at BloggerSentral wrote an excellent post about using this, including how to
check if your existing template has the code needed to make use of this new field.

But recently I've noticed that while setting up Analytics this way collected data about visitor numbers, it doesn't always get data about AdSense (eg how many ad-impressions, what page do "clicks" come from, what were the keywords, what browser were getting the AdSense clicksetc). In fact, this data has been missing for all but one of my blogs recently. So I did some investigation and found that this is deliberate - but that you can fix it.

Getting AdSense data from Analytics

If you only have one blog, and you have linked your AdSense and Analytics profiles, and put AdSense ad units in your blog by getting the ad-code from AdSense and adding it as code, then you should be seeing AdSense data in your Analytics account.

To check, log in to Analytics and check the Reporting > Standard reports > Content panel: when you expand it there should be a line for AdSense, and when you click that line some data should appear in the middle report panel (assuming your blog has some non-ad-blocked visitors).

But if you have more than one blog or website, then AdSense data is only put into Analytics for the one that is identified as "primary" in your Analytics profile. (For me, this is was the first blog that I added AdSense to.)

To get AdSense data in Analytics for more than one site, you need to get the tracking code-snippet for non-primary website from Analytics and install it in your blog. See below for exact instructions for this.

I've found that AdSense ad units that were added from Blogger's Add-a-gadget wizard don't report data through Analytics even if the tracking code is installed - and this support article from Google confirms that this is expected behaviour. I haven't been able to find any way to work around this, as yet.

How to get the AdSense tracking code for non-primary websites and blogs

Log in to Analytics with the Google account that owns your AdSense profile, and in which you have linked AdSense and Analytics.

Click on the Admin tab in the top right hand corner of any page.

In the Accounts section, click on AdSense Linking.

In the Secondary Analytics Properties list, find the name of the site you want the tracking code for (if you have more than one account).

Click the Code Snippet link to the right of the chosen profile name.

Copy the code that is shown, and install it to your blog. As menioned above, there are two choices for doing this:

Edit your template and add it to the header (ie somewhere between <head> and </head>) - but remember that it will be lost if you change templates again in future.