Analytics – 5 Reasons Why You Are Using Google Analytics The Wrong Way

Online Marketing

Are you addicted to viewing statistics? I once was.

I mean you start off all innocent – “I’ll quickly check my traffic again, just in case something happened.”

It’s cool, things are going well.

Then one thing leads to another and you’re stuck in this constant cycle of checking your Google Analytics, your life takes a beating and your soul is slowly being destroyed.

You end up in a very, very bad place.

You are, in fact, now part of the “Google Analytics Zone”. A place where time has no meaning. Be Afraid.

5 Ways To Tell If You’re Using Google Analytics The Wrong Way:

1. Numbers are Always on Your Mind

Numbers are cool, but when they become your reason for every single thing you do – it’s wrong.

If you’re writing a blog post with purely numbers in mind, it’s not going to be great. Don’t write to please Google Analytics. And the same goes with creating products – you should be thinking about individuals, not numbers.

 2. You Constantly Stare at Your Best Variable

Let’s admit it – we all do this. I mean it feels good, right? There’s nothing like seeing those 10 minute visits which contain 7 page views… that come from one traffic source… and there’s only 2 people that have visited.

It can be motivating, for sure. But there’s definitely something wrong when you’re focusing your time on the few ‘good parts’ of your website statistics compared to the majority, which you know about but prefer to ignore because it’s depressing.

And sure, those outliers may convert, or purchase your product – but it’s a couple of people out of many that aren’t. Focus on your overall traffic if you want practical results.

3. The Only Thing You Care About is Visits

I remember hitting the top link in the productivity subreddit, it’s fair to say I was pretty proud of myself (even though all I had to do was copy + paste a link and click submit).

Around this time I was getting about 80 visits to my blog per day, as soon as I hit that top link – I jumped to 600 visits the first day, then 300, then 200 for a couple of days.

My first thought was, “Yus! I’m going to get loads of email subscribers and clicks on Adsense!”

Haha.

When I looked at the quality of my traffic (time spent on site, page views) I saw pretty demotivating numbers. An average time of 0:44 seconds and 1.2 page views – no wonder I wasn’t getting any subscribers. The key is to use the Google Analytics statistics to learn from and continuously improve your site.

Visits mean nothing if people aren’t staying on your website.

4. You Compare Today’s Traffic to Yesterday’s Traffic

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but expecting to increase traffic and traffic quality daily and consistently is a little farfetched.

It’s not always going to go straight up; there’ll be days where you have massive dips and low page views – that’s just how it is. Common sense.

Depending on how big your website is, and what its purpose is – there aren’t many reasons for you to check your Google Analytics daily. In fact it’s probably detrimental.

5. You Jump on ‘Real-Time’ Whenever You get a Traffic Spike

It’s pretty awesome being able to see how many people are on your website at once, especially in the middle of a social media storm.

But what does it really achieve? Oh, you’re analysing the page views per second? Okay.

I’ll be honest, I felt pretty motivated the first time I saw 10 people on my website at once – but I stayed there staring at the screen for a good 30 minutes, slowly watching people leave.

95% of the time it’s unimportant to analyse your traffic in real-time. Check it, and then leave it.

Google Analytics Take Away..

Google Analytics is a great free tool and one that every website and blog owner should be using. Just be aware of the dangers of falling into the “Google Analytics Zone”.

Sincerely,

A Former Google Analytics Addict.

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