Blogger December 2015 Stats

Google Analytics
Sessions = 905
Users = 817
PageViews = 1898

Google Webmasters
Impressions = 6392
Clicks = 710


Google AdSense
Page Views = 121
Clicks = 0

Blogger
Pageviews Last Month = 1960
All Time Posts = 374
All Time History Visits = 66818

Life: Blogger Dec 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 2280
Users = 2089
Pageviews = 4818

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 362
Impressions = 10,161
Clicks = 1621

Google AdSense

Page Views = 588
Clicks = 2

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 3254
All Time Posts = 327
All Time History Visits = 34069

Life: Blogger September 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 1120
Users = 1031
Pageviews = 2444

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 327
Approximate Impressions = 8171
Approximate Clicks = 733

Google AdSense

Page Views = 953
Clicks = 1

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 2080
All Time Comments = **
All Time Posts = 287
All Time History Visits = 25195



* Approximations are rounded down
** Switching to Google+ comments removed the ability to count total comments

Life: Blogger July 2014 Stats

Missed July earlier in the month.

Google Analytics

Sessions = 605
Users = 524
Pageviews = 1383

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 285
Approximate Impressions = 6276
Approximate Clicks = 307

Google AdSense

Page Views = 506
Clicks = 2

Blogger

Does not allow for previous data.



* Approximations are rounded down
** Switching to Google+ comments removed the ability to count total comments

Life: Blogger August 2014 Stats

I seem to have missed metrics for July.

Google Analytics

Sessions = 594
Users = 511
Pageviews = 1362

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 292
Approximate Impressions = 6595
Approximate Clicks = 318

Google AdSense

Page Views = 588
Clicks = 2

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 1500
All Time Comments = **
All Time Posts = 261
All Time History Visits = 23142



* Approximations are rounded down
** Switching to Google+ comments removed the ability to count total comments

Blog: Cannot get demographics to work with Google Analytics

I have made some changes and have not been able to get the demographics portion to work. Checking back in the scripts, I noticed that the change that I needed was no longer there. This probably happened when I switched to the Universal Analytics scripts (as opposed to the classic scripts). I have re-added it and waiting to see if there have been any changes.

I have been waiting since I had put in this line before. I had thought that there was a minimum number of visitors needed before it could report something. The warning in Google Analytics is somewhat misleading:

Some data in this report may have been removed when a threshold was applied. Learn more

Reference

1 - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357?hl=en

Life: Blogger June 2014 Stats and 20202+ Lifetime visitors

Odd that my analytics numbers is much lower than usual even compared to the other metrics. I wonder if something happened with the analytics scripts.

Google Analytics

Sessions = 76

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 223
Approximate Impressions = 5800
Approximate Clicks = 287

Google AdSense

Page Views = 448
Clicks = 3

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 973
All Time Comments = 39
All Time Posts = 222
All Time History Visits = 20202

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger May 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 267

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 232
Approximate Impressions = 5700
Approximate Clicks = 318

Google AdSense

Page Views = 638
Clicks = 1

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 960
All Time Comments = 38
All Time Posts = 210
All Time History Visits = 19267

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger April 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 321

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 259
Approximate Impressions = 12400
Approximate Clicks = 455

Google AdSense

Page Views = 748
Clicks = 3

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 1275
All Time Comments = 38
All Time Posts = 201
All Time History Visits = 18144

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger March 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Visits = 361

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 299
Approximate Impressions = 7400
Approximate Clicks = 500

Google AdSense

Page Views = 792
Clicks = 1

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 1788
All Time Comments = 34
All Time Posts = 192
All Time History Visits = 16930

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger January/February 2014 Stats

Analysis

Seems that my traffic is decreasing a little bit. I think this is due to the decrease in a couple of my older posts that have been driving most of the traffic. My guess on that is due to the age of the posts as they over a year old. 

I still have not figured out what keeps causing the 1 or 2 visits on each of my pages. The first visit almost always occurs within a few minutes of posting, but sometimes could take up to a day or two. The second visit is more erratic in that it could be within a day to a few days (maybe a week).

I am glad to see that my traffic sources are now search engines. Last year there were a couple that would always sneak onto my list that were for other advertising. I do not think that I did anything to change that, so hopefully that is just blogger cleaning up the data or the ad sites disappeared or the ads do not think it is worth there time anymore.

I am trying to reuse my lables, so hopefully the number of single tags will decrease over time. Or perhaps, I will be trying to increase the higher count labels.

Google Analytics

Visits (January) = 450
Visits (February) = 371

Unique Visitors (January) = 403
Unique Visitors (February) = 330

Page Views (January) = 615
Page Views (February) = 436

Pages per Visit (January) = 1.37
Pages per Visit (February) = 1.18

Google Webmasters

Total Queries (January) = 275
Total Queries (February) = 266

Approximate Impressions (January) = 8,500
Approximate Impressions (February) = 6,960

Approximate Clicks (January) = 600
Approximate Clicks (February) = 437

Google AdSense

February = 794 Views
January = 951 Views
All = 2037 (since 12/19/2013)

Ad clicks = 0

Blogger

Comments (January) = 9
Comments (February) = 2

Posts (January) = 24
Posts (February) = 18

All Time History Visits = 14,967
Last Month History Visits = 1,285

Life: Blogger 2013

Google Analytics

Average Visits = 38

2 full months, started in October.

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 183
Approximate Impressions = 2000
Approximate Clicks = 1000

Started in October.

Google AdSense

Page Views = 286
Clicks = 1

Started 12/19/2013

Blogger

Comments = 12
Posts = 129
All Time History Visits = 11948
Max Month Visits = September 2248

Review: Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics on Blogger

I've used these tools before on regular websites that attempts to market their products. That was a while back and the tools have changed quite dramatically since I've last played around with them. I was by no means a professional at these tools back then, much less now.

But to fulfill my curiosity, I implemented Google Analytics a while back and Google Webmaster about a week ago. There was some fascination to which posts are clicked on and which ones are visited. At the start of my use of analytics, there was some influence on which topics I was going to write next. There was a slight need to fill what my current audience was looking for. Although I was happy there was a large audience for a couple of the posts, the posts were not my primary interests. I returned back to just writing whatever was on my mind at the time.

Google Analytics

This tool allows you to track the traffic that comes onto your site. It provides data primarily on the visitor which means it tracks where they came from, search terms they used to get to your page, how long they were on the page, etc. There are a lot of information but I found myself primarily just looking at the search terms used (Acquisition > Keywords > Organic) and location (Audience > Geo > Location) because I find it interesting how they are getting to my blog and where they are coming from.

One nice thing about Analytics is that the visitor count is closer to actual count, in my opinion. Blogger provides much larger numbers because it also includes all the sites that try to get your attention by crawling your site thus making you curious about who they are. About 90% of my traffic is from those visitors with no intentions of using or reading the content. I dare not provide examples as that would just feed into providing more free marketing for them.

I believe the reason for the actual count is that most crawlers will not execute the scripts, thus not added to Analytics. If Analytics had a filter for that kind of traffic, I was hazard a guess that blogger would have implemented the filter.

Analytics is more of a marketing tool. You can use this to determine which of your pages are popular, determine if your keywords are working, and drive your site accordingly. Since a lot of the data is oriented around the visitor, a company can make use of the data to focus on key solutions that are not performing or use the data to clean some solutions that are not getting any traction.

Also, Analytics can be useful for campaigns or promotions. If you market your pages on other sites like Google Ads or your industry pages, you can determine if the cost of the ad is worth the traffic generated from those sources.

Google Webmaster

I actually prefer webmaster to analytics because I am not marketing my website. For marketing, both tools are useful. What I like about this page is the actual number of impressions and click-through (CTR) on certain queries (i.e. search terms).

This fascination does not help me any bit for my blog, but it does fill a tiny bit of curiosity on how Google ranks their pages. Also there is an unfounded joy of seeing that some of my pages are ranked in the top 10 of certain searches. There is also a content keyword where it shows you how Google "ranks" certain keywords for your site. For example if I write a lot about software engineering, it would rank "software engineering" as a high relevance to the site. So it was no surprise to see life and interview on the list. Surprisingly, Google was ranked first which I do not have a lot of content on (I have no explanation for this).

For webmasters, there is a feature that allows you to find any dead links. This is extremely useful to identify those pages and should be addressed because it does hurt marketing if the pages are not coming up. 

One feature that I found fun was the Links to your site. I just received data today on it but hope to see more relevant sources.

Overall

Both tools are useful for companies for their websites if you do not mind the conspiracy theory behind Google's tracking of your sites data. If you are writing a blog to cater to your audience, this can also be useful. For those who just write whatever is on their mind with little care to who is visiting, then these tools are not needed. For those who are curious, these tools are free and easy to implement. 

I have not explored all features. And some I have not quite figured out how to use yet.

Reference:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Complaint: Google Analytics - Demographics and Interest Reports - New Tracking Code

I was playing around with Google Analytics and stumbled across the Demographics and Interest Reports which seemed interesting at first but it brings me to a page to say that I need to make a change to the scripts to have this work.

Why didn't they just give me the proper scripts to begin with? I have the option already enabled. This is quite a hassle even though I know how to do the work. Then again, after trying to follow the instructions I could not find what they needed me to change.

The instructions is to change:

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

To:

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://' : 'http://') + 'stats.g.doubleclick.net/dc.js'; 

And no where in the script do I have these lines. The code surrounding the lines are not supposed to change but even those are not what the script was provided by Google Analytics. What is provided to me is the follow:

  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
  })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
  ga('create', 'UA-xxxxxxx-x', 'xxxxxxxxxxxx.blogspot.com');
  ga('send', 'pageview');

Figuring what the changes are, I could deduce that I change google-analytics.com/ga.js to stats.g.doubleclick.net/dc.js. But then I checked the privacy policy and noticed that that this also required me to update my privacy policy. At this point, this is just too much of a headache so decided not to move forward this change until I figure out what to do about the privacy policy part. Whatever reason for not implementing the change, I find it odd that the instructions to update the script is not correct for me which I would expect from a company like Google.

Release Management

Who's responsibility was this issue? For my team, this would appear to be needed from our product team. It is also odd that no one has a checklist to make sure that documentation should be updated since the instructions appear to have been for an older version (here's an example to publish versions for those people who believe version numbers are practically obsolete due to new agile processes). None of the steps after product would really check on this change because it wouldn't exist in the requirements since it was missed. This wouldn't have a chance to be caught until much later in the process like User Acceptance Test (UAT)... possibly System Test (ST) if they did some free-style testing which I find unlikely since most corporations would have the team follow test scripts which would exist since there was no requirement. Also odd is that even after all that, a user like myself should have reported this by the time I got to this (although I am making a huge assumption that this feature has been out for while). But Google typically had something like a "did you find this helpful" and of course, it does not exist for the one time I looked for it.

So even after all that, there is a chance that I have missed a step somewhere. I am not sure where I skipped a step and if it wasn't that intuitive then something at least needs to be improved.

Reference
Instructions to change - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2444872?hl=en&utm_id=ad
Policy requirements - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2700409
Google Analytics - https://www.google.com/analytics

HOWTO: Add google anaytics to blogger

I'm a little disappointed in myself in taking a while to figure this out which turns out was a rather simple process since I've worked with Google Analytics before. The step I just didn't consider editing the template to add the script files needed for Google Analytics. I thought there would have been an easier way through either Blogger or Analytics. Somehow my brain just didn't get past those options.

Below is the link I used to get that one step. Google Analytics has changed a bit since the article was written so not all the steps are exactly the same. I just needed steps #9-13.

Reference:
http://www.wikihow.com/Add-Google-Analytics-to-Blogger (10/29/2013)