How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

There is probably not a more interesting real-time or site statistics tool than Google Analytics. If you haven't used it before you'll find that it blows away the Blogger stats tool in the Blogger editor. I haven't added it to Blogger Tips Pro earlier since I've been intending to create the tutorial - but kept putting it off for other reasons. I do use it for my other sites, however.

Let's get started. If you don't have a Google Analytics account yet you just need to sign into your Blogger Google account to start. Now, if you have a large number of blogs under a parent name or company then I would suggest you monitor all of your sites from a single account. You be the judge.

Creating a Google Analytics Account

Once you're logged in, simply go to http://analytics.google.com - you should see a page like this. Just select 'create an account':

Now that you're into the main sign-up page just click the 'Sign up' button to start:

You'll now be presented with a number of options to get your account started. I chose 'Website' and 'Universal Analytics' as my options to start. I felt that the benefits of the Beta would be good to try out.

Scroll down the screen to find the rest of the options  - enter your 'Account Name', 'Website Name' and 'URL':

There are some more options near the bottom of the sign-up screen called 'Data Sharing Settings' and I will let you pick and choose if you want to opt-in on those. Once you've done that just click on the 'Get Tracking ID' prompt at the bottom of the page, accept the Terms and Conditions and you're ready!

Adding Your Analytics ID to Blogger

You'll be brought into the main page with the 'Tracking ID'. One point to remember is that the ID is tied to a specific blog. If you have more that one blog be sure to go back in and create another ID for a different blog.

I've highlighted the ID below - this is the ID you're going to want to copy and paste into Blogger. Be sure to copy this ID right now by highlighting it and using a mouse click copy:

Now, go back and log into Blogger - open your specific blog - and choose the 'Settings', 'Other' menus and scroll down to the bottom of the form to find the 'Google Analytics' entry field like this:

Add your analytics ID in the empty field as I have above and press 'Save Settings' in the upper right of the screen. Your blog is now ready and monitoring all users hitting your site.

Viewing the Google Analytics Data

The best part of the analytics screens is just the overall breadth of what data is provided. My goal in this tutorial is not to give you an in-depth view. You can take a look at this step-by-step tutorial. However, go back into your Analytics account to get to the reporting data.

The main page you want to look at is the 'Reporting' screens where you'll see your traffic and other analytical information:

Here is a snapshot of one of my old sites with the type of data you'll see in your main Google Analytics dashboard:

My favorite view in the Analytics page is the real-time view of who's hitting the site. Here is BloggerTipsPro.com literally minutes after I added the ID:

You can see that a desktop, mobile and tablet hit the blog and what pages are being access. That is a very cool view of your site's traffic. There's so much more you can do with what Google provides. Enjoy!!

Posted By my pwiki2:51 PM

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Google Adsense Penalty - How it Cut My Blog Traffic Nearly in Half

Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of Google. This post is by no means a Google bashing or rant about their products and services. I use a lot of the Google products for some very productive work - including Blogger which I do promote significantly. Additionally, I know some of the Google employees and have visited their campus. I believe Google is one of the most exciting places to work in America today.

However, the background to this post is that I felt that there might be some benefit to getting some small advertising revenue utilizing Google Adsense with this blog. Considering my traffic was running nearly 1000 visits a day this seemed like a good option based on the content and history of this blog.

I've used Adsense for quite a few years now in my earlier web work and have found it to be beneficial for high volume web pages. At one point some years ago I was able to make $10-$50 a day in revenue - that was a very unique case due to a popular surge online for a specific topic. In this case I was expecting about $1 a day since advertising tied to blogging is not a very competitive space. Ads such as hosting centers or blogger tools don't drive significant payout revenue as do some of these top paying Adsense keywords.

Some people make a living on Adsense revenue but it takes some significant savvy with deep traffic knowledge to do that. Others try to scam Google by building false links back to fake sites that have the high paying keywords just smattered throughout the site to generate profits. This aggravates Google and gives honest online workers a bad name.

Adsense Penalty

On December 16th I decided to implement Adsense on Blogger Tips Pro having not paid much attention to what was going on with it in the last two years. Within one day I dropped from 943 visits to 757 - not really much concern since I do get traffic dips. By day 2 I was down to 682 visits falling down to 534 by day 4. That is when the alarm sounded for me!!

What I hadn't realized was that as a result of the Adsense scammers, Google has been been penalizing web site search rankings based on their usage of Adsense to try and remove false content sites from the search results that rolled out in 2012. However, the impact was high as noted by Aaron Wall of Seobook.

I really didn't think that I had a lot of ads above the fold but felt that my traffic was much more important that a few dollars a month in revenue. I removed the ads on December 24th. But, the real question is just how much my traffic will be hurt from this point on when I went from a growing 900-1000 visits a day now down to 600-700 a day as you can see here:

Clearly, the Google Adsense penalty is real and can hurt your traffic. Don't believe me?  Read this statement and take a look at Google Page Layout Algorithm & Penalty.

If anyone else has experienced this effect I would love to hear from you - especially if you were able to revive the traffic back either by ad placement or removing Adsense all together. Also, if you're from Google please chime in - I think all of my readers would like to know more.

Posted By my pwiki11:38 AM

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Blog Traffic - How I Increased My Traffic by 10x

BloggerTipsPro.com daily blog traffic

It has been a full year since I launched BloggerTipsPro.com as my Blogger help site after my initial strategy in January 2012 was first developed. I've been using Blogger since 2005 and have come to really enjoy the flexibility of the platform for various types of blogs.

I know that many prefer Wordpress over Blogger but I still think having Google host my platform with more open customization vs. using custom hosting is an easier option.

That said, the blog traffic results for this site after one year are astounding! This being the 21st post in one year seems quite small overall - in fact, that is only averaging about 1.8 posts a month.  Yet, this blog is dominating Google results for many keyword phrases surrounding Blogger customization.

Blog traffic increasing 50% every month

Let's take a look at the numbers - since January 2012 the number of visitors has increased about 50% per month to a total of 35,000 visitors. As you can see the vertical growth is very fast now reaching about 400 visits a day or 12,000 visits a month. As of today - January 13th - I have 4778 visits. The peak traffic in December is about 8500 visits. You can see my current daily traffic at the top of this post hovering at about 300-400 visits a day - these are great numbers!

One thing I would like to point out about blog traffic is that I did no back linking strategy to this site other than having a hosted planning site that pointed to this blog as I built it and then a few social media sites - Twitter.com, Stumbleupon.com and Last.fm. Twitter was my only active links back - whereas Stumbleupon and Last.fm were just accounts that had profile links. I use Stumbleuopn and Last.fm to sporadically update my Twitter feed to keep it active.

What does this really mean to you? This truly means that you only need relevant content to drive higher search results with stronger blog traffic - and that Google will reward you for many search phrases if you target your posts. If you subscribe to my email list above, I'll give you deeper insight on how I approached this blog and how you can do the same for your blogspot traffic results.

Posted By my pwiki2:43 PM

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