It’s been my experience that some folks who use WordPress to run their blog often just use JetPack for their analytics.

JetPack is great–don’t get me wrong–but there’s really nothing better for improving your blog than Google Analytics.

It’s not complicated to install on your site; I just used a plugin.

Once you have Google Analytics installed, there are some really valuable things you can learn from the ensuing reports.

1. Traffic. Um… obvs. GA stats are going to be more accurate than WordPress’ because of bots and webcrawlers. GA doesn’t count these, giving you a more accurate representation of your traffic.
2. Where is your traffic coming from? Check out Acquisitions. This will break down for you where your traffic is coming from. Organic search? Awesome. For more suggestions, see below. Social? Click on it and look at the breakdown. See what’s working and put more energy into those top networks.
3. Keywords. What keywords are people using in Google to bring them to your site? If you know this, you can use these words more, hopefully resulting in more traffic to your site. Click on Acquisition–>Overview–>Organic Search. This is the one place where you may get better results with JetPack, as Google “hides” some of this data (so it can make money on AdSense).
4. Best-performing posts. Which of your posts are performing the best, and bringing the most traffic to your site? Click on Behavior–>Site Content to learn which posts perform best. Now you can create more content along these lines. One thing you’ll notice about mine? My top recipes tend to be vegan ones, so more vegan recipes should be on my list of things to do.

And now here’s today’s infographic: Improving Your Blog with Google Analytics

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