Google Analytics - Why? How?

In my shoe post a few days ago (Thank you for your comments!! I ordered the peep toes - I'll let you know how it works out) I mentioned that someone Googled "bridesmaid porn" and landed on my site. I know this, of course, because I obsessively check my Google Analytics page every morning. A few folks left comments asking about Analytics, so I figured I'd do a little "how to" so you, too, can see all of the people that read your glorious blog!

So first thing is to have a blog. Once you have one, just click over to GoogleAnalytics.com and click "Sign Up Now":

Then, it will give you two choices - sign up for a Google account (gmail) OR sign into your Google account. Do whichever works for you and then follow the prompts. It'll ask for your blog address and some other stuff. And then you get to see super cool graphs, like this:

It also has stats for "bounce rate", "visits", and "page views". Basically, you want your "visits" number to be high and your "bounce rate" to be low. The "bounce rate" refers to the percentage of visitors that land on your site and realize it's totally not what they want to be reading. 100% bounce rate therefore means that every person that landed on your blog decided it was no good and bounced to another site. Boo.

Google Analytics also has the capabilities to do some other things, but really I just care about the number of eyeballs looking at my site, so I mainly pay attention to the visits and bounce rate - because who wants a million visits if they aren't actually reading anything?

It's also cool to see the spikes in numbers of visitors from day to day and week to week. The days I post pictures get more hits and I get a ton more hits when I post a comment on The Nest or Weddingbee (because those readers see my comment and click my blog link). I also noticed that if I post every day for a few days, the number of visitors increases each day, as opposed to if I post once every fews days; then I don't get as many visitors at all.

And I can see that there are at least 45 different visitors landing on my blog each day - sometimes more, sometimes less - but I'm not getting too many comments. Say hi and leave me a link to you blog so I can stock my Google Reader and then come visit you!