How To Easily Connect Google Analytics 4: For Beginners In Blogging

Beginners in blogging need to learn and understand certain things to be successful bloggers. Google Analytics is one of them. When we are here to set up Google Analytics, as beginners we need to understand Google Analytics first.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a vital tool, which is currently a part of the Google Marketing Platform brand, it tracks and reports website traffic.

Why should we use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics helps blogger understand their audience.

Where do they come from?
When do they visit?
Are they new or returning visitors?
How do they come?

Organic search
Direct
Referral
Social

What are they using to visit your site?

Device type
Browser
Operating system
Screen resolution

How long do they stay on your site?
What activities do they do on your site?
What pages are they visiting?

With the help of these questions, you will learn a lot about your visitors’ preferences, how they use your website, and how you can enhance their experience.

You will also see here what is bringing the visitors to your site and what is driving them away.
Google Analytics gives complete information and it also tells you if you are having bad traffic and where it is coming from.

This is a highly recommended tool for every blogger. Follow the tutorial in this post, it will be very easy to set up and start using google analytics.

How to connect Google Analytics 4 to your blog?

Signup or Sign in with the same mail id as your Bloggers or WordPress
Click on “Setup For Free”
Create a Google Analytics account:

Type the account name, you can type your name or website name as the account name.
Leave “Data Sharing Settings” enabled.

Next, select Web if you are doing this for a Blog/Website.
Setup property:

Enter Website Name and URL – Select Industry Category and Time Zone.
Now click on create and accept the terms of the service agreement.

Install Global Site Tag on your Website:

You are now on the page where it gives you a tracking code. You are seeing one below the “Global Site Tag”

Here starts the connecting process. The most vital step to connecting your site to Google Analytics is adding the tracking code to the web page’s <HEAD>.

WordPress users can use a plugin to insert the code on every page. you can also use Google Tag Manager along with the Google Site plugin to use the tracking code.

You can connect your website to Google Analytics with some WordPress plugins by simply inputting the Tracking ID. But take care to avoid applying your ID more than once to each page. Your analytics data may be skewed by having multiple Tracking IDs.

For bloggers, you have to copy this code and paste it into the HTML page.
Go to the Dashboard Click on Theme below Layout and click on the drop-down arrow beside Customise.
In the drop-down, you see Edit HTML.
Click on Edit HTML and you will see the HTML page,
Search for the <HEAD> tag and below it paste the code.

Now Configure Google Analytics Account:

Once you have added the tracking code, Google Analytics will start tracking the activities on your blog. Now you need to configure settings to get more accurate analytics.

Google Analytics Data:

Accounts, Properties, and Views are the three types of data in Google Analytics.

Accounts are what we created at the beginning of the setup. We also created Property. Property is the different websites we have and each website has a unique tracking code. So, if we have one website, we have one account and one property.

Views can be created to filter out different forms of visitors for each Property. You can have up to 25 distinct views per Property.

Whenever the analytics account is created the default view “All Web Site Data” covers all traffic to the sites where the code is installed. Don’t change this setting but you should create a view that does not count the traffic from you, bots, and spiders.

Keep the view unfiltered so you can always return to it if the modified views cause problems or if you want to see the data without filters.

How to create a new view?

Click on Admin next to the Gear Icon in the lower left of the Analytics dashboard. Then click on Create View.

Below Reporting View Name, give your new view a name like “main view or first view” select a time zone, and then tap Create View.

Just remember to keep track of whatever view you are currently using whenever you look at data or modify a View.

How to Exclude Bot and Spider Traffic?

Click View Settings in the View menu after creating your new view. Check the box next to “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.” It should be checked by default, if not, check it.

This will stop the count of visits from Google and other search engines when they crawl your website. But if you want these visits to be counted you can uncheck the box.

The option to keep track of the user’s website search terms is located beneath the Bot Filtering in case you want to know the user’s search queries.

Stop counting your own clicks.

The increased traffic is always welcome, but your site’s clicks shouldn’t be included in your stats. If you work as a team you should also exclude the activity of your site’s staff members. Your perception of your traffic data will be inaccurate as a result.

Here is how to fix this.

Go to the View menu and tap on filters.
Click on the Add filter button
Enter a filter Name
Select “Exclude” under “Select filter type”
Under “Select source or destination” select “traffic from the IP addresses”.
Under “Select expression” click on “that is equal to”
Enter your IP address
Click Save.

Want to know your IP address? In the Google search bar type “what’s my IP” and it will give you your IP address.

The above settings will stop Google Analytics data from counting traffic and all activities from the selected IP addresses.

Google Analytics to Google search console.

Another vital tool for bloggers is the Google search console.

You should have a Google Search Console setup for your site, and you should connect it to your Google Analytics account

Google Search Console gives you vital insights into the search queries people use to find the content on your website.

What does the Google search console do?

Google search console provides the following information:

It gives you the performance score of your website on Google search
Number of visitors who click on your site
Total Impressions
Average CTR – {click through rate} percent of impressions resulting in clicks
Sites Average position
Breakdown by queries (keyword), pages, countries, devices, search appearance, and Datamonitor how Google sees your site
No of the pages / URLs are indexed
Pages or URLs with errors
Enhancements detected on your website and any errors
Mobile Usability
Breadcrumbs
FAQ
How-To
Sitelinks search box
Speed
Monitor the external and internal linking that Google sees

This information is very helpful to bloggers in determining what drives organic traffic to their website and where changes can be made, especially when it comes to the keywords that the site is ranking for.

Sitemaps can be submitted through Google Search Console as well. Sitemaps assist Google in crawling your website and understanding its structure.

In the google search console, you can review any URL on your website and submit it for indexing. You should submit your URL for indexing as soon as you publish it.

Last but not least Google search console also shows any sort of security issues or manual actions from Google.

How to connect the Google search console to Google Analytics?

By linking Search Console to your Analytics account you can access some of your Search Console data without leaving Google Analytics. They are :

Landing Pages
Countries
Devices
Queries

Here’s how you link the search console with analytics.

On the admin page, go to the property menu and click on property settings
Find, the “Adjust Search Console” button under Search Console and click on it
Tap on, Add on the next screen, and you will come to a page “Enable Search Console data in Google Analytics”
Click on the “Add a site to Search Console” button and click Ok
The next step will finish linking your site to the Google search console.

Remember you have to use the same Google account for Google Analytics and Google Search Console. And if you do not already have Google Search Console set up you will have to validate your domain.

Once you have followed the steps above your search console data will start showing in your Google Analytics account.

You also have the choice to connect your Google Analytics account to other Google services like AdSense and Google Ads by using the Property menu in Google Analytics.

Data from these platforms can also be viewed in the same way in your Analytics account after linking them.

More Google Analytics configurations.

There’s a lot more you can do with Google Analytics configuration and get deeper details.

Create Goals: Track conversions such as online sales or lead generation.
Create content groups categories: Group your website’s content into categories. Modify tracking codes and use them only on pages that belong to the specified content group(s).

This setting will enable you to compare content groupings by comparing the pages that make up each content group as a whole.

1. Divide the audience into segments:

Demographics
Technology
Behavior
Date of First Session
Traffic Sources

2. Create Alerts:

Create alerts to receive emails and notifications when a condition reaches a specified threshold.
You may, for instance, set up a traffic alert to notify you if the volume of sessions falls below a given threshold, rises over a certain threshold, or alters by a certain amount or percentage.

How do bloggers use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics offers crucial data about its website to bloggers.

Here we’ll learn how to get the main reports and find vital data on our site.

But remember except for the ability to create and change custom reports, alarms, and dashboards, it is a read-only system outside of the Admin panel.

To Optimize your blog you need to understand how to use your Analytics account, I suggest taking some time to navigate through the reports and look at all of the possibilities.

What are the main reports?

Realtime
Audience
Acquisition
Behavior
Conversions – needs to have objectives and/or eCommerce tracking turned on.

A summary of the main information from the underlying reports is included in the Home dashboard.

For a more in-depth look at the data in the chosen area, each of the main reports has a distinct report in addition to an overview report.

You can also design customized dashboards, saved reports, custom alarms, and reports from scratch.

To take things a step further, you can use Google Data Studio to build in-depth dashboards and reports using information from both Google Analytics and Search Console.

Choosing Report Date Ranges and Chart Granularity

Other than real-time, you can change the time range the report covers in the top right of the report.

You can also compare the performance to another time by checking the box next to Compare to.

Furthermore, most charts allow you to view data at different time granularities (Hourly, Day, Week, or Month).

Most charts allow you to add a statistic for comparison, as well as segments if you have them set.

Realtime Report:

You can use the Realtime Report to view what is occurring on your site right now.

Realtime Report gives this data:

Users
Pageviews
Referrals
Social Traffic
Keywords
Active Pages
Location

The real-time report shows you what content your visitors are currently interested in. It also shows the impact of the social media posts you just posted linking to your content.

If you publish a post on social media, say Facebook or Twitter, you can monitor the Realtime report and watch it drive visitors to your site as it happens.

Audience Report

Important details about your visitors are provided in the Audience report:
Users
New users
Sessions
Sessions per user
Pageviews
Pages per session
Average session duration
Bounce rate
Demographics

Language
Location

System information

Browser
Operating System
Service Provider

Mobile

Operating System
Service Provider
Screen Resolution

To examine and go deeper into the data, the majority of these categories include unique sub-reports.

How can you use this data?

Here’s how:

Based on their frequency of visits, bounce rate, and the number of pages they view, you can tell how well people are responding to your website.
You can find out how your website is performing on what platform, better or worse (for example, if your desktop bounce rate is excellent but your mobile bounce rate is close to 100%, you need to focus on your site’s look and usability on mobile).
Utilize user demographics to tailor your content

Acquisition Report

The Acquisition report displays the paths taken by visitors to reach your website. There are details on:

Organic traffic
Paid traffic
Referral traffic
Social traffic

The Google Search Console data that was previously described can also be available here.

Bloggers can use the Google Analytics Acquisition report to understand the sources of their traffic and change their focus as necessary by learning where their traffic comes from.

The Acquisition report is a very effective tool. For example, if you use Pinterest. You may observe how particular pins direct visitors to particular blog entries.

You can assess your pin performance by:

In the Menu bar, Click on Acquisition – Social – Network Referrals.
You come to a table, and on the table, click on Pinterest.

This will enlarge the table and display each blog post that has received traffic from pins during the selected time period.

Tap on a post.

The table displays all of the pins that are directing visitors to the blog post during the selected period.

You can do this with other social media posts as well.

You can use this information to track the traffic that the social media post is bringing to your website over time.

It can suggest that you need to make a new Pinterest pin for a blog article, or it might reveal which pin types are more effective in bringing visitors to your website.

Behavior Report

The Behavior report shows you how users interact with your site.

Pageview statistics for site pages
Behavior flow

See how visitors move through your site

Site speed data
Site search data if configured
Events by visitors

User interactions
Link clicks
Downloads
Form submissions

Finding problems with your website depends on your ability to observe how users interact with it.

You can use this information to identify underperforming pages and enhance your internal linking structure.

You can use the search bar at the top of the page to ask questions about your data in addition to the reports.

You will see the response in the sidebar on the right, along with a link to the relevant report and options for more follow-up.

You also have an insight button, clicking on it will give you a view of some insights found by Google Analytics and a number of suggested insight questions in the sidebar.

My Say :

Google Analytics for a Blogger is a must tool and there is no other free tool out there that can give you as much information about your website as Google Analytics.