Digging Deeper With Google Analytics
Google Analytics is another form of stats that you can receive for your Hubs. It is a free service offered by Google that provides detailed statistics for website owners. With an Analytics account your can view your unique and repeat visitors, location of the visitors, originating source of the visitor (what website the visitor clicked off of to get to your Hub), the keyword the visitor used to find your Hub, how long your Hub was looked at, and more.
Although, HubPages offers a great deal of stats that you can use to monitor your Hubs and account, Analytics is a great means to better your Hubs, especially by knowing what keywords have been giving you the bulk of your traffic. Since Google Analytics is such a great tool to follow your Hub stats, HubPages offers an area in your Affiliate Settings screen, as you can see below in Figure 5.14.
Figure 5.14: Google Analytics Affiliate ID
It's really easy to sign up for a Google Analytics account and best of all, it's free. All you have to do is follow these steps.
- If you don't have a one, you will need to sign up for a Google Account. Otherwise, if you do have a Google account, just sign into your account.
- Once you're signed in, click the My Account tab at the top right of the screen.
- Then click the Analytics link, and look for the Analytics Setting at the top left of the screen.
- Once in your settings area, find the Add Website Profile at the bottom left.
- Enter hubpages.com and click continue. (Do not include the 'www')
After adding the HubPages link, a JavaScript code will populate. You do not need the entire code for HubPages purposes. All that you need is the Tracking ID, which is going to look like- UA-123456-7. Copy this code and go back to your HubPages account. When in your HubPages account, go back to your Affiliate Settings section via the My Account tab and paste the Analytics Tracking ID into the appropriate box labeled Analytics and update the page.
Figure 5.15: Google Analytics Summary
When in your Google Analytics account, you will be able to see different stats such as the following:
- The Content Overview section will show you a list of all of your Hubs with the number of page views and percent of page views for that Hub. If you have a large number of Hubs, you can click the View Report link for a full listing.
- Graphs that display the number of visitors you've experienced within a specifed timed frame.
- A Map Overlay showing where in the world your visitors are coming from, with the darker, highlighted areas showing where most of the visitors are from. You can click "View Report" for more details.
- The Traffic Source Overview shows how much traffic you have recieved from different search engines, referring websites, direct traffic, and other sources. You can click the 'View Report' link for more details about your traffic sources.
This analytics information can get as detailed as you'd ever want to get and can be a very valuable way to get a even better sense of what your Hubs are up to and what types of traffic they're getting. By using some of the information that Google Analytics shows, you can continually improve your method for publishing Hubs, so don't just look at it, learn from it!
