Breaking The Code For Google Analytics

I don't much understand it either. I don't appear to get many visitors here per day and only a few more to my Zazzle store. Wish I knew how to find actual buyers who would be interested in my work. I feel like a lot of my marketing efforts are wasted.

Exactly Mary. It would be more effective if we can understand the important information.

I also look at it and just see numbers! I would love to know what it all means...

You can see what was viewed, where the visitor is from and what site referred them to you. For example, once you are logged in to GA, under Behavior, click on site content --> all pages. That will show you the pages viewed during the specified time period. Under the "secondary dimension" pull down menu, select city to show where your visits came from. Just play around with it. Its real easy.

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

Thanks Dave.

LOL "it's real easy"

How can we use the information?

Where is Mike S. I have not seen him in awhile.....since he posted that I have a quick question discussion....


I started using that feature just recently when I launched my personal domain web page, they recommend I do so.....the web design hosting company...and I have seen what it is capable of, very good things.....

Could someone go to a mirror and say Mike Savad 3 times backwards. I saw once that is how he likes to be summoned. ;)

My guess is out shooting photographs.

I have no idea if he uses analytics or not.

He uses statcounter for the FAA site since you can't put GA on your FAA site, only AW.

Basically, if you can see where people are coming from to your website - you post more there and hope the trend continues and you get sales.

If you look at where people came from on a particular day, and got a sale that day, that may tell you that were your link is is a good place to find buyers.

Its of limited use to us since most sales come through via the FAA side of things through google search, and we can't use GA on this side of the site. Try stat counter as Mike uses.

Go to Acquisition on the left menu bar, then All Traffic - you can see where people are coming to your site from. Then you can click keyword above that list and if you had hits via a search engine it might show the keywords used to find you.

Keywords are hard though - most get blocked or whatever and just show up lumped together as (not set)...

I'm following this discussion because I'm at a total loss. This stuff is Greek to me. :-)

Where is this statcounter that you speak of? Here at FAA?

google statcounter

I seem to recall that he does not worry about the AW since Google sees

it as the duplicate....unless I am remembering wrong...Can't someone

just PM him? He is normally over at Z if he is not around here.

He doesn't - it doesn't come up in google search as readily as your FAA site does. People never get to my AW site via google. They get there via tumblr and my regular website.

I just wnt to my GA page and I am more confused than ever...I need to close my

accounts...not doing me any good when I hav no clue what all that stuff means!

IMO the only thing you'd want to look at is what I said above... Acquisitions -> All Traffic
That gives you the basics of how many people are coming to your site and from where.

I used to use GA to track my marketing efforts on my AW site. For some reason I found that most of the traffic shown in my GA stats was human traffic and not bots so it was a good way to measure real visits, where they came from and which marketing efforts seemed to be working the best for me. Its also interesting to see product page views as well as featured page views.

That would be very useful if we could have Google Analytics for the FAA stats as well but its not set up for that. Of course most of the FAA "visitors" in the FAA stats is comprised of either bots or fellow FAA members with an occasional outside real visitor lol. Or I should say that is what I have found to be true for my own FAA stats.

The data in Google Analytics is useful for high-traffic commercial sites. It has no value for people like us, even if we wanted to spend the time digging into that hugely complicated interface.

What we want is StatCounter, but we can't have it.

The more sites that point to your work the better. This is why you need to strive for organic popularity - blogging, newsworthy PR etc. Something that will get people to link to you.

Can someone elaborate on the differences between the FAA site and the AW site?
Is this the FAA site: http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/kunal-mehra.html
and this the AW site? http://kunal-mehra.artistwebsites.com/

...and so GA works on the AW site but not on the FAA site?

Angelina,

Just tried saying" Mike Savad 3 Times Backwards", NADA!

Rich

Kunal - yes.

"The more sites that point to your work the better. This is why you need to strive for organic popularity - blogging, newsworthy PR etc."

I'm confused by this. Has this changed with the release of Google Panda 4.0? I use StatCounter for my personal website and when one of my pages got added to StumbleUpon it got a HUGE boost in traffic for a few days. After that died down, my traffic is actually lower than it was before. It's as if Google penalized me for having too traffic from one source. Perhaps Google now considers social media sites to be poor quality links, lowering my page ranking for too much social media sharing.

Someone said he is in the Netherlands.

I think he is using statcounter from http://statcounter.com

I think you just set up a statcounter account and then insert the script into your bio on FAA.

I didn't think there was a way to use Statcounter with FAA but if the bio is HTML, then maybe it works. Might try it.

Yes, you can use StatCounter on FAA but it will only monitor visits to your page with the bio. You won't know about visitors who land on individual image pages. If they're searching using image keywords and not your name, which most people probably do, they will land on individual image pages and will never be counted. Sure would be nice of FAA would let us put StatCounter code on all our pages. :)

Thanks Crista, glad I didn't waste an hour trying to make StatCounter work.

"Yes, you can use StatCounter on FAA but it will only monitor visits to your page with the bio"

Just wondering if you could insert the script into a page description field or even a gallery description field.

Someone in another thread said Mike is traveling. He then showed up briefly but was posting from his cell phone so I suspect he may be out of town. I guess we'll just have to get by without him for a little while...

No, Dave, it's already been tried. The description field won't accept HTML or javascript, unfortunately, so StatCounter won't work there.

Thanks Crista :)

LOL, thanks Rich. =)

I know this is going to sound a bit crazy. But I have decided I don't care.
I started the thread, thinking...if I know how this works...I might have more sales.

But I am making more sales, when I have no idea how it works or what is actually bringing in sales...I guess I don't care now.

I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, my spattered my advertising...whatever.

I'll leave it open for everyone else.

If you have your own website and can implement GA on every page then you can see where someone came from, what they viewed and what they bought if anything. FAA can use it to see every little detail of activity on any of their sites. If you don't have access to implement it on every page of a website or at least in such a way to tie referrals to sales then it doesn't do a whole lot of good.

I used to use that, WebTrends, Omniture, Search Advisor and other similar tools on lots of corporate sites ( I don't use it on FAA) but since I don't think anything can be tracked to an actual sale on here I don't use it at all here.

I have it on my AW.

I just looked at the info that Heather directed me too. Very interesting. I'm getting alot of traffic from Houzz. Some is from FAA, but most of it is direct.

One way to ensure a certain level of traffic to AW is to ALWAYS use your AW site for images you post to the forums and posting to Twitter etc.

@Angel. Here are some examples from a quick look at my GA data for my AW site:

When looking under 'Aquisition' and 'All Traffic' I see that 25% of visitors during the last 30 days came directly to the site (not referred), so they likely have it bookmarked. The 'bounce rate' for those visitors was 40%, meaning 60% stayed on the site to click through to another page. They looked at an average of over 8 pages per visit and spent about 8 minutes looking.

Twitter brought in the most referral traffic. The bounce rate for those visitors was 33% (anything under 50% is pretty good). About 12% of the twitter referrals were new visitors. Those visitors tend to look at more pages than referrals from any other social site (at least for me during this 30 day period).

The next most common traffic source was other forums, particularly one focused on Yellowstone. The bounce rate for them is above 50%, but they do tend to look at more than 5 pages each visit.

I can see for my other personal sites which ones bring in the most visitors and which ones bring the fewest. Facebook and Stumble brought the fewest visitors among socials, so perhaps I need to spend a bit more effort there.

Looking under 'Behavior' I can see what pages got viewed most, which ones were the most common landing spot (Yellowstone for me), and which pages were the most common exit pages.

Hope that helps some.

From looking at your data posted at top (I didn't notice initially), 55% of your visitors were direct. Lots have you bookmarked. Houzz brought in your most referral traffic. Next was here (which is nice but doesn't usually produce sales). You're doing well with FB and getting some organic google results (which means you're coming up in search for keywords you can examine). Pinterest is producing some results. Don't see anything for Twitter, which you might want to work on. Your bounce rates and other data aren't visible.

Thanks Greg. Hmm...I didn't think the direct ones meant bookmarked.

I think it's interesting that people come from here to my individual site. Why would they go? And then...why would you think that doesn't produce sales?

My work is on Twitter.

.......

I use just the analytics here on FAA, this morning there was a lot of activity. It was most unusual for me. This morning all of my work was looked at by one person/bot. It was from New York but when I did a trace it was in Kansas and Bresnen was the service. Interestingly they were looking at some of my work last night as well. Perhaps I have been missing something by not trying Stat Tracker, or GA?

"But I am making more sales, when I have no idea how it works or what is actually bringing in sales"

If I had to guess I would say it is that wonderful smile! :-)

And of course the fact that you are out there doing things. As the old saying goes the greatest failure of all is the one you achieve by not even trying.

Or put another way, do something, even if it's a mistake... such as the furniture store deal. I am not saying it was a mistake, I have no way of know that. But you are at least out there trying new things and for that I applaud you.

The key to selling is finding out what works and keep doing more of it until it stops works. Sometimes the more difficult thing is figuring out what's working.

@Angel. Not all direct visits are necessarily bookmarked, particularly for websites with short domains such as Pixels. But the AW individual sites tend to have lots of characters, and unless you're putting out lots of business cards or flyers with that address, it's a safe inference that many (probably most) of your direct visits are due to past visitors bookmarking your site.

People from here occasionally click on other members' sites (I know I do). Maybe sometimes they do buy something, but I doubt it happens much. We tend to want to see others work but would rather hang our own stuff on our own walls.

We follow each other on twitter. The lack of many visitors coming from twitter in your GA data is an example of the potentially valuable info you can infer. For me, seeing your FB referrals tells me I should focus more effort on FB (which I have all but abandoned). I've used twitter for less than a year, but have found it the easiest social site to produce views.

Greg, I have been using more FB and Twitter these days if for no other reason, I find it a challenge to figure out how to generate views from them.

It is my opinion that unless you can get your relatively small numbers (compared to overall market place) followers and friends to retweet and share your post, it is not going to work all that well. Then the problem with that is, when I look on Twitter for instance and see who the other FAA members are following, they are mostly following other FAA members and artists. Not sure what those retrweets are going to accomplish.

When I log on to twitter the first thing I try to do is search on all FAA members by using artistwebsite and then FineArtAmerica by browser search. I retweet every one that comes up. But it is very disappointing that how few people, even FAA members, are retweeting in return.

Can it be that they just don't get it? I actually get more retweets from non members of FAA.

@Floyd. I suppose successful use of any social media requires a good strategy. I've been on FB for years and have just over 100 likes. I can't say I have a viable strategy there. I've been on Twitter several months and have just under 1000 followers and get more every day. For me, I don't attempt to follow other FAA artists much, although I follow back anyone who follows me. I'll RT those who offer work different from my offerings. I spend a little time each Monday thru Wednesday following new people, and I don't focus on other photographers. I particularly go after decorators. Once you get a few and a few follow back, Twitter starts suggesting more similar accounts. On Sunday, I unfollow anyone who didn't follow me back during the week. You can also use Justunfollow to find accounts based on keywords you choose. When I upload something new here, I click the Twitter box and then save the address of the image on Twitter. I have a bank of tweets ready to go with those image links and the back link to my AW site. I'll send out tweets every few hours, usually a couple at a time. They always produce views, and most get RTs, particularly the last one I do each day. I use Puzzleflip to store that bank of tweets, and that also gets me retweeters (I think I have more than 100 from there). When I'm going to be away from the computer for a few days or weeks taking pictures, I use Hootsuite to schedule tweets to keep the account active in my absence. Since I've been doing this, my ratio of sales to views has gone down, but overall sales have gone up.

I suppose we've gone off topic from GA. But I wouldn't mind hearing good FB strategy tips...

i just added my aw site to my ga page. it gives me a headache. i used to think i knew english.

I can never find one of these for me, I have also noticed google has changed things or something and I think that's why my sales have dropped, My Edgar Allan Poe used to be on the front page of images if you typed in his name and lead people to my work on FAA now it's not there anymore, so I don't get how all that works and why ? I think that's great Angel that you are figuring it out

How do you get yourself on Houzz? I had a quick peek at the website and then got a bit lost lol

I LOVE google analytics. Like smoochy over the top adoration. Unfortunately I'm making do with Wordpress Analytics until I can move my site to a new host.

If you are seeing fewer views and more sales, you are probably seeing a decrease in robots and spammers and people lost on the internet, and an increase in targeted views. You may also be seeing people who've wanted to buy but needed to feel better about their immediate financial future to do so (consumer confidence). Consumer confidence will affect online AND offline sales. Google's pigeon will affect ONLINE views and sales.

I've been seeing more sales and about double the views on my website. Most of my views are pages where I have added detailed descriptions of pieces or a short article on a series. So, lots of relevant words that help google make sense of my site. I've also seen an uptick in views of the artist interviews I've done, and traffic coming through blog posts written more like articles instead of image show and tell.

I hate to write, but c'est la vie.

Hope this helps