How to set-up and use Google Analytics 4 in a blog made with Blogger

This article is about updating Google Analytics tags in Blogger, to collect data for Google Analytics 4.

It also explains and why you need to do this as soon as possible if you want to compare your blog's performance vs the same time last year.

AdSense, mobile templates and Analytics - and how they do (or don't) work together

If you

• use AdSense to make money on your blog, and

• have a mobile template enabled
  (which should, unless the blog is about something that makes no sense on a mobile device), 

then it's an extremely good idea to have at least one AdSense ad-unit that was made with Blogger's official AdSense widget rather than by getting the code from AdSense and installing it manually.

Setting up Google Analytics for a 2nd or later blog

This article is about how to set up Google Anaytics to work on subsequent Blogger sites, if you have already set it up for your first blog or website.

Setting up Google Analytics so it gets AdSense data from more than one blog or website

This article is about setting up Google Analytics on your blog in a way that includes data for AdSense clicks and behaviour.

Blogger and Analytics adjusted-bounce-rate

I've had interesting discussions with people about whether the bounce-rate in Google Analytics is worthwhile: one of my sites has information about local bus routes and neighbourhoods, and many visitors only need to look at one page (the one suggested by Google search) to get the information they need.  I've long believed that these people counted as a "bounce" (ie look at a page and leave), while friends assured me that Google is smarter than that and wouldn't count visits that last for a certain length of time as bounces.

I've just discovered that I was right after all: by default, Analytics counts all one-page-only visitors as bounces.

Google have now told us how to change this, and not count visitors as bounces if they stay on the site for a certain length of time (we can choose how long)

Unfortunately this option isn't fully available to Blogger users at the moment. We can either


1)  Install Analytics in a way that it works properly with dynamic and mobile templates,

Thsi approach will most likely be supported if Blogger invent any other types of templates in the future, so is what I recommend now.  GreenLava explains how to do this here. 


OR


2) Install the Analytics code in the same way it gets put into other websites.

This won't count visitors who view the blog using a dynamic template (either because you choose one or because they added a command to your URL in order to see your blog that way).
And if you have enabled a mobile template, it will only count visitors using mobile devices if you have:

• Installed the Analytics code using an HTML/Javascript gadget (I've explaiend how to do this here)
• Edited your template so that gadget is "shown" on mobile templates (by default, HTML/Javascript gadgets aren't - I've explained how to change this near the end of this article)

So at the moment, our options for Blogger are to either count visitors properly and not see the adjusted bounce-rate, or undercount the visitors but get the custom-adjusted bounce rate.

Content Experiements in Analytics

Content Experiments is a new feature in Google Analytics.

It claims to

helps you optimize for goals you have already defined in your Google Analytics account, and can help you decide which page designs, layouts and content are most effective.

I'm not sure how possible it will be for Blogger users to use it - suspect that it may need some serious template editing at lease.

Sharing Google Analytics reports with other people

Google Analytics has added a Share button to

• Custom Reports: (Actions menu on the table that lists your reports)
• The dashboard: (top-left corner)
• Advanced Segments: (Admin tab > Advanced Segments)

This a way to let you share reports etc that you've designed:  it works by giving you an  URL that you can email or publish in a blog-post.

When someone clicks on this URL, they go into Analytics, and a custom report - which is just like yours at the time you clicked Share and created the URL - is added to their own dashboard.

Effectively, what the other person sees is:

• your report structure
• showing their data

Analytics is hugely powerful, with far more features than your average blogger needs. Some blogger-helpers don't recommend it, just because it's so large (a bit like using Microsoft Word to edit a text file).

But it has a number of advantages over Blogger's built in Stats (including counts not being reset to zero every time that you edit and publish a post with an updated date/time - which is the way I give one of my blogs a home page).

It seems to me that this share-your-analytics-design feature opens up a large opportunity for people who really understand how Analytics works to help the rest of us find actionable information about what's happening on our blogs.   Do you know any Analytics gurus worth following?

Country-specific Blogspot URL may affect your earnings - and other things too

This week, Blogger announced they are redirecting blogspot.com blogs to country specific URLs.

This means that when someone in India looks at http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/, they will actually be directed to http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in - and similarly for other countries, so far I know it's been applied to Australia and New Zealand too.

This is likely to have affects on other products:

AdSense:

If you have protected your AdSense ID from malicious use (and really, you should if you care about it), then you will find some new entries in your unauthorised sites list:   I just went into mine and authorised

• blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.au 
• blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in
• blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.co.nz

and I expect to be doing some more as it rolls out further.   

If I didn't do this, then any advertising "clicks" from people visiting via country-specific-URLs won't be counted.

(Interestingly, I tried using the authorise link beside the unauthorized links on the Home > Account settings page.   It said it worked, but those sites weren't actually added to my authorized list.  I had to add them to the Authorized list and click Save myself.)

Analytics:

I'm not sure yet if this has an impact on statistics gathered with Analytics.   Maybe not - my overall visitor numbers aren't down, and the Visitors > Map overlay tool shows that I've had 79 visits from India today.   

I do have some more checks in mind, but these will take a while to do - comments from anyone who has  investigated are very welcome.

3rd party statistics packages:

I don't know for sure, but would be surprised if this doesn't affect the stats gathered by SiteMeter, StatCounter, et al - at least in the short term.

Search

Nitecruzr has explained how Blogger's use of a canonical statement makes sure that the search engines only index our blogs under one address.

The way to check that you've got a canonical statement in your template is to 

1. View the blog itself  (ie not the template, and not the posts)
   - eg I looked at www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com in my browser, while I was logged off of Blogger.
2. Look at the source code   (in Chrome, I get to it through the "wrench" in the top right corner, then Tools > View Source - or by using Ctrl / u)
3. Check that this line is showing somewhere:    
   <link href='http://yourURL.blogspot.com' rel='canonical'/> 

If that line isn't in your source code, then the quickest fix is to either change to a newer template, or edit your template and add it just underneath the <head> statement.

That's all I can think of for now ... but I have a hunch there's more.    Will post again if I find more issues.

Analytics "old" interface to live a little longer?

Back in Nov 2011, Google Analytics said that the "old" version would stop working in January.

However this week's announcement makes it sound like they're still workign on some key features, and so the deadline has been extended.

Also they're surveying for features that we use which aren't in the new version - even if you reported some before, it might be worth checking them now, and reporting them again.

How long does it take your average blog-page to load?

If you use Google Analytics on your blog, then you can get data about how fast your pages(*) load. This is seen in the the Site Speed report which was turned on for all users in mid November

Analytics have now published more information about what it contains, too.

Blogger users can't control some of the items that are shown (redirection time, domain lookup time, server connection time, server response time) - although you may like to keep an eye on them if you are concerned about whether the Blogger platform is suitable your blog/website.

But we do have a lot of control over page(*) download time. This is impacted by the size of our posts (especially the picutres and videos), and by the widgets that we use.

How much difference  page-load speed makes to you and your visitors (how many pages they view, and how likely they are to come back) depends on your niche and how impatient they are.

As with lots of web-statistics, there are no hard-and-fast rules. I recommend keeping an eye out for change.

• For example, if adding a widget adds one second to your average load time, but there is no change to visitor numbers or pages per visit, you probably don't have an issue.
• But if it adds 0.5 seconds and pages/visitor decreases by 50%, you might need to think about whether the widget is worth it, or whether you need to do something like only display it on the home page.

(*) These "pages" are not the same as so-called "pages" in Blogger: read more about the difference. LINK

"Old" Analytics interface will end in January 2012.

The "old" Google Analytics interface is going to be "sunset" in January 2012. fyi, "sunset" usually means "turned off".

(These days, I use a netbook quite often, so I really hope they have the problems with small screen sizes not displaying properly sorted out by then.)

Finding the Web Property ID & tracking code for an existing Google Analytics profile

This article shows how to find the Google Analytics Web Property ID for a website that you have previously set up in Analytics.

Setting up Google Analytics for your blog

This article shows how to add Google Analytics to your blog.

Using Google Analytics to get statistics about AdSense performance on your blog

This article is about how to set up your blog so it collects data about your AdSense performance, using Google Analytics.