Validation is pretty much always exhilarating. It’s probably what makes Facebook likes or retweets on Twitter as addictive as it is. And for food bloggers nothing is as exciting as increasing traffic, which is one way of validating the great work that they are doing. And the most accepted way of understanding traffic to a blog, is by using Google Analytics. And I DREAD IT! I mean I can barely manage to use the computer without burning it to the ground… So clearly seeing so much information I cannot comprehend is not my idea of a holiday.
But Google Analytics is a treasure trove of information. Most often, however, we don’t need ALL of that information, and it’s a needle in the haystack situation. Because there is so much information you don’t know how to get to the information you want and it’s hard not to loose yourself in the maze.
So we decided to collate the things that would be most important to bloggers in terms of Google Analytics. This is by no means a comprehensive list. It’s just skimming the very top layer of what all GA can give you. So use this guide only to get comfortable with GA, and then explore.
How to Add GA tracking to your Cucumbertown Food Blog
The first thing that you need to do for this is to create an account on GA.
Once you have set up your account navigate to the ADMIN tab on your Google Analytics. You will see the screen below.
Then under PROPERTY, navigate to the desired website details. My blog is War and Cheese, hence why I can see that under the property. When you click on the property, it will take you to a screen where the TRACKING ID is visible. Copy this.
Then navigate to the Blog Setting in your Cucumbertown account. Add this ID in the box shown below and update the settings.
You should be able to see the results in 72 hours time.
Now here are the various things that can particularly help food bloggers!
Traffic
Traffic is obviously one of the most important things for a food blogger. And it’s not just about validation. It helps you understand if there is an audience for the content you are producing. so in a way it is valuable feedback for your efforts. When you log in to GA one of the first things you see is your blog/websites traffic. This is usually how it will look:
Sources
Now once you have an overview of the traffic, there are additional things to look at, like the sources for that traffic. This primarily helps bloggers to understand what kind of promotional activity is working and what platforms it is working on. For instance, if there is a sudden burst of traffic from Pinterest when someone starts pinning using long pins, they can then correlate the increase in traffic to the use of long pins.
The Path: Acquisition> All Traffic > Source/Medium
Geographies
Other data that can be valuable to bloggers is regarding the consumption of the content of the blog. Who are the readers? Which geographies do they come from? On the basis of these evaluations, bloggers can then develop plans around effective content and see what is working where.
Geographies Path: Audience > Overview > Country
Backlinks
One of the things that bloggers live for are backlinks. Not only do websites where recipes are featured drive traffic to the blog, they also are a valuable metric in the SEO war. This also helps bloggers to establish a conversation with others who may be sharing their content. This helps build relationships and encourages good practise. And can GA tell you this? Yes, it certainly can.
Path: Acquisition > Social > Trackbacks
Source Breakdown for Specific Pages
Wondering which page is getting the most traffic from Google? Which post is getting love from Pinterest? What works on Facebook? Here’s how you can find out.
Path: Acquisition> All Traffic > Source/medium > Second dimension: Landing Page
Click on whichever link you want to look up under ‘Landing Page’ and it will take you to the post. This way you can monitor what is working. For instance, if recipes with style based descriptive headings are always getting more traffic from Google, it’s safe to assume that may be working. While this is a generalisation, over time one can spot patterns and figure out what posts are working on which channels.
Destination sites and Bounce Rate (Engagement)
There are several screens where you see bounce rate on GA. Here’s how you can see bounce rate on one of them:
Path: Audience > Overview > Country
Bounce rate is simply to understand how much time someone is spending on your site. It can help you evaluate your content strategy to keep your audience more engaged. And along with it might be helpful to understand where your audience is going so that you can monitor if it something you can control. This can include things like; are you loosing your audience because of your Foodgawker gallery?
To track outbound links or destination sites, it’s a little difficult.You can do this by using Google Tag Manager, but it involves some coding.
Page Speed
It’s always a good idea to make sure that your page load time is less and that page speed is high. Here’s how you can monitor this:
Path: Behavior > Site Speed > Overview
Whenever you spot a miss in this, do not ignore it. Page speed is becoming a very important metric in SEO.
These are the most basic things one can track on Google Analytics. Of course, there is a wealth of information, so when you get more comfortable navigating around GA, feel free to explore.
Tips
One other feature that bloggers can really exploit on GA is the custom alert feature. This helps a blogger set alerts that satisfy a certain criteria so that they are informed in the event that those criteria are met. For instance, if you want to know when your daily traffic surpasses a certain number, you can set a custom alert to tell you that. Similarly if you want to know when page load time is going up, you can set an alert to do that.
Here’s how:
This in a gist is what GA can tell a food blogger. Get used to using GA because it could be your biggest friend in the blogging journey. If you want any specific clarifications, don’t forget to write to us on chef@cucumbertown.com and we’d be happy to investigate how to get to it on GA.
