This is part 2 of a series I’m writing called Using Google Analytics for your blog.   If you missed the first part, which discussed what Google Analytics is and went over the Google Analytics Audience Overview section,  please head over and give it a read.   This article will dive into the next section, Google Analytics – Traffic Sources where we’re learn how to find out who is sending you traffic.

Remember, this series will touch on the basic information from each section of Google Analytics.  The article is not intended as a deep dive into all of the underlying detail that Analytics provides.  As I stated in first part of this series, doing a full deep dive would take a large eBook.  This article and the others in the series will focus more on basic information you’ll use on a frequent basis.

Traffic Sources

The next section in your left hand menu (after Audience Overview) is Traffic Sources.  Clicking on Traffic Sources will, by default, show the Overview sub-section.  Your screen should look similar to this:

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The traffic sources overview page provides you with an overview of the sources of your traffic.  I know, you’re thinking – Well gee thanks Captain Obvious…let me explain…

Day to day, visitors arrive on your website.  Some of them go straight to your blog using your URL or domain name.  Most of them more likely come from other sites  such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, social media, and blogs that link to you.  The Traffic Sources overview page will show you where these visitors come from.  Let’s look at the data provided on the main screen first, then we’ll dive into some of the other sections that you’ll find useful.

The graph at the top of the page is the same as the graph in the Audience Overview.  By default it shows your Visits.  You can also adjust the graph to view other information.   I seldom ever change this.  You can also adjust the date range in the upper right corner.  By default the last 30 days are shown.

Below the graph is a summary of how many people visited your site along with a pie chart showing the breakdown of traffic sources by search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic and campaigns.

Search Traffic – Shows the percentage of your traffic that arrived from search engines.  Just below the percentage is the actual count.  From my screenshot, my search traffic accounted for about 52% of my overall traffic.  There really isn’t any “good” or “bad” number here.  Good and bad are relevant based on how you are targeting your traffic.  Generally though, you want this number to be fairly high, and greater than 50%.  Why?  Search engine visitors are the visitors that generally click on ads.  If you’re trying to earn income, especially using Adsense, search engine visitors are the primary type of traffic you want.

Referral Traffic – This is traffic coming from other sites outside of search engines.  This traffic is the result of people clicking on links and arriving at your site.  I’ll show you how to figure out exactly which sites below.  This would also be where your email list traffic would be included.

Direct Traffic – This traffic comes from people directly navigating to your website, either from a bookmark in their browser or by typing your blog’s URL directly into their browser.

To the right of the summary data is a list of keywords that people used in search engines to arrive at your site.  If you’re like me, a large percentage will fall up under “not provided”.  You can read about why your keywords are hidden in David Kutcher’s article A “not proivided’ tip from your analytics.

In the screenshot, I hid my keywords – I apologize for that.  Unfortunately this is the internet, and you can’t trust everyone.  I know most of you are honest and straight up, but I’ve just worked too hard to rank well for some of these, and don’t want to risk someone trying to out rank me.  Hope you understand.

The summary information is good of course, but there really isn’t a whole you can do with it.  The good stuff is down in the details a bit.

Traffic Sources>>Sources

Under the Traffic Sources menu is another menu named Sources.  Click to open it, and then click on All Traffic.

All Traffic will show you, in order of Visits, who your top traffic sources were from for the time period selected.   I use this frequently to see if any large sites have linked to me, to see how many click throughs I’m getting from guest posts I’ve done, and also to see which social media platforms are doing well for me, and which ones are not.  This is one of the Google Analytics screens I check at least once daily.

Here’s a screenshot of my Sources page:

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The Pages/Visit metric I discussed in the first article in this series was for your whole site.  On this page though, we’re seeing these numbers broken out by referrer.  This allows you to see how “sticky” traffic is from each of the referrers listed.  For example, looking at mine, I see the pages/view for Google+ and other blogs that refer to me have higher numbers, where searches from Google have lower numbers.  Google users are typically looking for an answer, they get it and move on.  Where links from guest post articles often involve people browsing my site and spending more time.  If you’ll note, the bounce rates reflect the same.

Also interesting is Pinterest.  I received a really nice burst of traffic from PInterest, primary from my How to Build up Your Blog article, but the bounce rate is high.  I’m going to give myself a little homework assignment to research if that’s common, and if not look at some additional changes I can make to make Pinterest visitors a little more sticky.  I’ve already taken one shot at this, but obviously need to improve a little more.

Sources>>Direct

The direct sub-menu will show you the pages people visited directly.  Generally this is because people have bookmarked your content.  These articles are typically “evergreen” content articles, and frequently some of your “best stuff”.  Which is why people bookmarked it.  For earning money, these are articles that you would typically want to tweak to either include ads or affiliate offers where applicable.

I don’t typically use the Search page or Referrals page much as the information I need is on the overview page.

Traffic Sources >> Search Engine Optimization

This page will provide you with more detailed information about the queries users are putting into Google.  Clicking on the Queries menu will show you a list of keyword queries people are using to arrive at your site.  While this is interesting information, I personally seldom use it.  I prefer to use Google’s Webmaster tools as they provide you with much better and more comprehensive information.

The Landing Pages menu shows you the pages from your site that visitors arrive on most frequently when coming from search engines.   I use this page to determine which of my blog posts I need to focus on making “sticky”.

The strategy here is to use this data to determine which pages visitors land on, then update and edit those pages so that visitors have lots of more content options to click on.  You can give them more options by editing your article text to include additional links, adding “Other pages you might like” options and adding widgets to the sidebar to feature more content.

The Geographical Summary menu will show you what countries your search traffic is coming from.  Good information, but again not something I’ve found a need for just yet.

Traffic Sources >> Social Media

The Social Media Overview section provides you access to metrics on your social media traffic.  Here’s a screen shot from my Analytics:

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The graph is really more focused on conversions – meaning social traffic that lead to people making purchases or clicking ads on your site.  Conversations are calculated using Google Analytics goals.  I won’t go into the details of goals, but at a high level goals allow you to keep track of when people visit certain pages on your site.  I have goals set-up, which is why I’m showing some conversations, but not dollar amounts.

The main data that you’ll be interested in on this page is in the lower right hand side.  This will show you the number of visits you received from social media, and the percentage of overall site visits that social media accounted for.  As you can see here on Side Income Blogging, over the past 30 days, Pinterest was first, Google+ second, and Facebook a far third.

The other menu items below Social allow you to drive into further detail about traffic from your social media visits:

Network Referrals

Similar to earlier pages we looked at, this page shows you more detail about your social media visits.  The graph shows you a comparison of your social media traffic to your overall traffic.  The table below shows you detail on Visits, Pageviews, how long the visitor was on your site and how many pages they viewed per visit.   This is actually a pretty interesting section as it gives you some good data on how sticky your social media traffic is by social media site.  You can use this data to determine where and how to spend your social media efforts.

Landing Pages

The Landing Pages section shows you what pages visitors from social media arrived on, again with information on pages/visit and duration.  You can use this page to determine which of your pages was most popular on social media.  Knowing which pages did well, allows you to create similar or complementary content that should also do well on social media.

Conversions

I mentioned conversions above, and primarily this section is intended to capture monetary earnings from conversions resulting from social media traffic.  I personally don’t use this section currently.

Plugins

This page is used to track specific actions that occur and are specific to social media.  For example, on Google+ it would be +1s, on Facebook Likes, etc.  By default, Google Analytics will track your Google+ activity automatically.  For other social media sites, you’ll have to make some changes to your default Analytics scripts.  I personally don’t track this level of data but if you’re interested, you can read up on how to add additional social media plugins on the analytics help page.

Visitor Flow

This is another page I personally don’t use much, but definitely has a high cool factor 🙂  On this page, you can see, by social media site, the path that your visitors navigate through on your site.  The flow graph even shows how many people went from page to page so you can see how many dropped off your site, and how many didn’t.  Like I said, really cool, but not something I’ve found highly useful just yet.

Wrapping Up

That wraps up the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics.  As you’re probably beginning to see, Google Analytics tracks an enormous amount of data and most of it you probably won’t use frequently, at least if you’re like me.

Next in the series we’ll discuss the Content section, then I’ll wrap up this series with some very specific tips and strategies for how to pull out some valuable information about your site from Google Analytics.

Analytics is a really powerful tool for improving your site, and I hope you’re finding this overview information helpful!

One of the primary jobs I often do as part of my blog development business is performance tuning client’s sites.  About a year ago, Google modified their ranking algorithms to factor in overall site performance.  Meaning, the slower your site compared to other similar sites, the lower your site and articles would be ranked on the Google SERPs.  As a result of this announcement, I received an influx of requests to performance tune sites.  As a result of this work, I came up with a list of the top 10 reasons why people’s blogs and websites are slow.  The good news?  All of these are pretty easy to fix.

1 – Too many plugins

One of the most common reasons why your site may be slow is due to having too many plugins.  One of the really slick features of WordPress is that there are literally thousands of plugins for WordPress that will do pretty much anything you could ever want.  The downside is that many of these plugins are written by amateur developers and are not performance optimized.  Another consideration is that most every plugin, regardless of how optimized it is, slows your site down a little.  The more plugins you add, the slower your site becomes – Creeping normalcy if you will.

In a perfect world, you shouldn’t run any plugins.  Realistically, you should only run the bare minimum amount of plugins.  I typically don’t have more than 10 installed and two of these are performance optimizing plugins (W3 Total Cache and WP Minify).  You can read about the minimum plugins I recommend at Base plugins for blogs.

Wondering if your site has too many plugins?  Want to see which plugins are having the most impact to your site?  Ironically, I’d suggest installing another plugin called: P3 Plugin Profiler.  P3 will analyze your plugins and give you some really great detail on which plugins are taking up the most time and their overall impact to your site’s performance.  Once you’re done with the analysis, I’d recommend deactivating the plugin until you need it again.

2 – Theme

Another frequent cause of slow site performance is your WordPress theme.  WordPress.org offers many free themes.  Unfortunately many of the themes that look really great, are terribly slow.  I used to run a few of these free themes, but over the years realized that some things are just worth paying for.  All of my sites, except this one, now run on the Genesis theme, which is incredibly optimized and fast out of the box.   Converting this site over is still on my todo list.

3 – Too many pictures or graphics

I love pictures on blogs, especially free pictures.  They draw a reader’s attention, break up the wall of text often seen on many blogs (blogger blogs…*cough* *cough*) and frankly if done right, really make a blog “pop”.  Pictures though can have a negative impact on your site’s performance especially when not used correctly.

Here area few things to consider when using images on your blog:

• On your main page, use smaller images or thumbnails.  Only show bigger images on your single post pages.
• Optimize your image files before you upload them.  Image Optimizer is a great tool.
• Don’t use HTML to downsize your image.  One of the big mistakes people make is uploading a 1024×768 (or bigger) image, then use the img tag height and width attributes to resize the image to 150×150 pixels.  Here’s the problem: the full image is still downloaded to your browser.  If you want the image to be 150×150, resize it first, then upload it to your blog.
• Minimize the number of images used on a single page.  I was visiting a site the other day, where the blogger included a large amount of pictures in her posts.  This is all well and good, as the primary intent of her blog was photos.  The problem was, she was showing full posts on her main page and showing a good 50 posts on that same page.  It literally took a couple of minutes for her main page to fully load – very very bad.  In this case, I’d recommend only showing one image per post on the main page or better yet show 10 partial posts on the first page and only show 1 thumbnail.  The Genesis theme does this with just a few clicks.

4 – Too much Javascript

Another common cause of overall sight slowness can be Javascript, either too much of it, poorly written script or script that calls out to other sites too much.  Javascript can be a bit tricky, as if you view your site code you’ll often only see a few lines of actually Javascript, but what’s it doing is potentially loading a much larger javascript or HTML file from another location.

Try to minimize your javascript as much as you can.  If a plugin or widget gives you the option of using HTML or Javascript, I personally lean towards using the HTML.  One plugin that will optimize your Javascript (and CSS files) is WP-Minify.  I highly recommend you install and configure it.  Enabling GZip compression (see the next item) will also speed your Javascript load times.

5 – You don’t have Gzip Compression enabled

Gzip compression causes all of your site content to be transmitted across “the wire” compressed.  Meaning that the amount of data transmitted is much smaller. Smaller data = faster load times.  If you aren’t sure if Gzip compression is enabled for your site, visit this gzip compression tester and enter your sites URL to find out.

If your site isn’t Gzip compressing, doing so is really pretty easy.  Just install the W3 Total Cache plugin.  Not only will this plugin enable Gzip compression, but it will also cache all of your site content, both in the browser and on the server.  Caching will cause your site to perform much faster – I’ve often seen it cut a sites response time in half.

6 – Your hosting plan is too small

One of the most common reasons your blog might be slow is due to having a hosting plan that is too small, or a shared hosting plan that isn’t correctly managed by the hosting provider.

Many times as new bloggers, we start off with an inexpensive hosting plan.  These plans generally work well for a few months as we slowly build blog traffic.  At some point, and this particular point is often difficult to recognize, our blog outgrows the current hosting plan.  I recommend monitoring your site performance from day one.  Just check your response times a couple of times a week, and record the times in a spreadsheet.  What you’ll generally notice is that over time, your site progressively slows down, then all of the sudden gets exponentially slow.  This is generally the point where your site traffic has exceeded your hosting plan and a big sign it’s time to upgrade.  Your hosting provider or a consultant like myself, can usually help you determine when it’s time to upgrade if you aren’t sure.

Another common problem with inexpensive plans is that they are generally what’s called “shared plans”, meaning your website runs on a single server along with many other websites.  The number of sites on a server varies greatly from hosting company to hosting company.  The problem with this approach is that if one of those sites has a technical issue or gets a large amount of traffic, the performance of your site will most likely be impacted.  The solution?  You can complain to your hosting provider who can manage this to some level, but generally these types of situations are the reality of a shared plan.  The real solution is to get a dedicated or virtual server.  The downside is the cost.

When picking a hosting company, I always recommend someone that has seamless upgrade options, meaning you can increase and/or decrease you plan as needed.  The three hosting companies I recommend for bloggers are:

• HostGator
• Bluehost
• A Small Orange – This is the provider I run all of my sites on.  They are a little more expensive, but provide a high level of service and performance.

For more detail on selecting the right hosting, check out my article: Hosting for blogs.

7 -You aren’t caching

I already touched on caching above.  Caching is a technology that stores pages when they are requested on disk for fast access.  Enabling caching within WordPress, using a plugin like W3 Total Cache enables both server side and browser caching.  Caching offers significant performance increases for WordPress blogs due to the nature of how WordPress builds pages.  The content for each WordPress page is stored in a database, WordPress pages when requested are built using a combination of code and the actual page content from the database.  In a nutshell, running that code and retrieving the page content from the database each time takes time.   A caching plugin stores the final HTML page, so that the next time it’s requested, it doesn’t have to be completely regenerated.

If you aren’t caching, you should be.  Spend a few minutes installing and setting up W3 Total Cache, it’s time well spent.  One note, if you’re running Thesis – do not enable Object caching in W3 Total Cache, as it will cause your site to not render correctly.

8 -You don’t have the latest WordPress and plugin versions

Another common cause of slow site performance is having old versions of WordPress and various plugins.  WordPress and the many available plugins are constantly being upgraded and improved.  Staying on the lastest versions can not only make a considerable performance increase to your site, but it can also keep you from being open to hacks or security vulnerabilities.

Also make sure your WordPress version and plugins are on the lastest releases.  Fortunately this is easy to do with WordPress’s built in upgrade process.

9 – Too many blog posts on one page

I mentioned this earlier, but displaying too many posts on your main page can quickly slow down your site’s performance, especially if you have large posts or posts containing image or video content.   Every time a post is rendered in WordPress, WordPress has to fetch the post content and render it.  WordPress has to do this for each post.  Thus, if you display 20 posts on a page, and you’re displaying full posts – rendering that page is almost equivalent to displaying a single page 20 times.  For those more technical, I realize this isn’t exactly true – but regardless, the more posts on a page, the slower the page gets.

I generally recommend no more than 10 posts on your main blog page, and even then I recommend only showing “teasers” for each of those posts.  That is similar to what I do here on Side Income Blogging.  I show 2 partial posts, followed by 6 teasers with thumbnails.  I decided on the number of teasers to show based on the length of my sidebar.  As you can see, the main page loads quick, even with the images.

Tip – While some might think this is a bit sneaky, showing partial posts and teasers on your front page not only makes your site faster, but it causes your reader to view two pages on your site.  Why would we want to do this?  That’s twice the advertisements we can show them.  Devious?  Perhaps, but remember, this site is about how to earn a side income blogging and without advertising there is no side income.

10 – You have a hosting issue

Finally, while not common, a cause of your site being slow may be an issue with your hosting company.  Perhaps they are having some type of network issue, hardware problem or configuration issue.  If you have all of the above taken care of, and your site is still slow, ping your hosting company.  Most likely they’ll say everything is fine, but every so often they identify a problem and fix it.  This is one of the reasons I like A Small Orange and pay extra for them – They have 24×7 support and most notably 24×7 phone support – meaning I can get a live person whenever I want.

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Not sure if your site is performing fast or slow?  Visit Google PageSpeed and get an online analysis.  I got an 87/100 on this site, which isn’t bad at all but means I do have a little bit of work to do.  How did you score?

Did I miss any?  Have you experienced another reason for site slowness or have a technique, idea or strategy for making blogs faster I didn’t touch on?  Add a comment and make this article even better!

Photo by: ell brown