You have now fulfilled your dreams – you are a published author. It is time to get the word out there to an international online audience.

It takes time to build relationships, learn your readers’ wants and needs, and develop a base of loyal fans. Understanding your potential readership is important when developing and maintaining your website. You want to know what marketing strategies are working and what strategies are not.
Google analytics tells us the demographics and psychographics of who is visiting our site. Our website viewers information is tracked for us on a monthly basis, all we need to do is place the Google analytics code on our website .

What do Google analytics tell us?  Google analytics helps us make strategic decisions about our current advertising campaigns, future promotional campaigns, who our readers are and how our audience sees us.

By logging into Google analytics we are able to see detailed monthly reports or, better yet, have these reports delivered to our inbox.

Some features of Google analytics are:

Identifying the mobile devices used to view our website. Go to audience, mobile to access this information.

Assisting us with targeted newsletter campaigns to potential readers. Do you need to know what region your advertising campaigns are currently reaching? Navigate to Audience > Geo > Finding our visitors’ location. Use segments, advanced filter or secondary dimensions to learn more about your how your visitors found you.

With Google analytics you can identify the percent of new visits per region. You can then target your advertising campaigns around mature vs emerging markets. Best of all, you are able to track the outcome. Not only will you know if an advertising campaign is working, this will help you decide where you need to build customer loyalty in various locations.

Behaviour – new vs returning visitors. Returning visitors means potential buyers. You may wish to build a customer loyalty program to target them through membership on your site or with an email newsletter campaign. This way you can build your list in one place, like Apple and Starbucks, and reward your readers for their long-term loyalty and prompt them to return.

Go to Audience, then Overview. From here we can see our visitors, unique visitors, pageviews, page visits , new vs returning visitors, bounce rate, and more.

New vs Returning Visitors

If visitors only view once and do not return, then you may not be marketing to the right audience or there may be issues with your site content.

Visitors and Unique Visitors tells us the visit length. The default visit duration is 30 minutes, but this duration of time can be reduced or extended using the _setSessionCookieTimeout method. Unique visitors are new visitors who have never visited your website before for that date range specified.

Pageviews

Pageviews tells you the amount of pages loaded on your site in a given month.
We can narrow down the bounce rate when we look into the keyword traffic. It is important that we pay attention to bounce rate and how many page views we have. This gives us the feel for how people see your site. How is the front end of your marketing working? We know the answer by looking at the keywords.

Keywords

Keywords tell us about the search engine traffic. Search traffic tells us the percentage of their traffic which comes from search engines. If it is low, it might mean that you are missing some important keywords that you should target and it may mean that you need to work on your SEO.

The YP Publishing provides author support services that helps authors spend more of their time doing what they do best – writing a great book. You have a story to tell.  Let’s get you out there to tell it!

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