Grow your business with Google Analytics part 1 of 6

One key piece of growing your site is understanding your users and their interaction on your pages. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you uncover these insights by giving you a complete picture of your audience and their needs. To help you build a loyal and engaged audience, we’re rolling out a blog series focused on helping AdSense publishers like you pull key insights out of your Analytics reports.

This week, we’ll focus on getting started with Analytics. Next we’ll share tips on how to learn more about your mobile users. Then we’ll move on to more advanced topics like engagement and loyalty analysis to help you improve your content strategy. Check out the following steps to get started.

1. Link your AdSense and Analytics accounts for richer insights

The first step is to link your AdSense account to a new or existing Analytics account. From here, you’re on your way to accessing new information that can help you identify opportunities to monetize your content more effectively. Keep in mind that you can only link one AdSense account to one Analytics account, and that the AdSense login must be an ‘Administrator’ on the Analytics account.

2. Set your site goals and conduct experiments to improve them

Think about what you want users to do on your site. Once you know these intended actions, you can map them to goals and conversion actions in Analytics to track how your site is performing. A goal is either a visit to a specific page of your site, or a specific action completed on your site. Once you’ve devised your goals, you can use Experiments to test how well different versions of your pages work in getting your visitors to accomplish these goals. For example, growing your AdSense revenue can be set up as a Content Experiment Goal. 

3. Create custom dashboards / reports  for quick access to insights

The next thing you’ll want to do is to start accessing the broad range of insights that Analytics offers. Analytics dashboards provide a performance overview by displaying summaries of different reports on a single page. Custom reports allow you to customize the dimensions  (City and Browser, for example) and metrics (Visits, Pageviews, and Bounce Rate, for example) in a report to gain insights into your user visits and behavior. To help you get started with your AdSense data in Analytics and show you some relevant information at a glance, we’ve created this easy-to-use dashboard. Select one of your profiles to import, and you’ll be able to quickly see and customize the reports which matter most to you. You can access this dashboard any time by clicking ‘Dashboards’ under the Reporting tab in your Analytics account. You can also visit the solutions gallery to download ready-to-use custom dashboards and reports that will be most helpful for your site. Alternatively you can create/edit your own dashboards and reports.

Once you’ve completed these three steps, we also encourage you to opt in to the Account specialist data sharing setting and our customized help and performance suggestion emails in your AdSense email preferences. You’ll be eligible for targeted optimization tips from our marketing and sales specialists.

If you have any questions about the topics covered in this blog post, share them with us by filling out this form. At the end of this series, we’ll record a video with answers to the most frequently asked questions and share it on Google+ on February 26th. See you back here next Wednesday when we’ll take a closer look at how you can optimize your mobile presence with Google Analytics.

Posted by Cemal Buyukgokcesu - Google Analytics Specialist

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