Google Analytics - Should I Use Google Analytics with HubPages?

What is this Google Analytics nonsense?

Why should I waste my time and effort signing up?

If you are at all interested in making money from Google AdSense, then Google Analytics is your best friend on HubPages.

Google Analytics gives you a range of interesting statistics including the number of people visiting your hubs, who are the people visiting your hubs, which hubs are being clicked on, and most importantly, which hubs are making you rich.

The two most useful areas within Google Analytics are:

1. Keyword statistics - which are the keywords that are bringing you web traffic and which are the keywords that are bringing you money. There is also a new 'feature' that allows you to see limited ranking information on your keywords (i.e. where your keywords ranked on Google search during the click).
2. Content statistics - which hubs are getting clicks, and which hubs are bringing in Google AdSense money.

This information will let you identify your best keywords and high-yield topics, so that you can capitalize on them, and write more articles around them.

The first thing to do is to sign up for Google Analytics. Caspar has a really good step-by-step guide on how to get started with Google Analytics.

Once you are signed up, you want to link your Google Analytics account to your Google AdSense account. This will give you important statistics on which keywords and which hubs are earning you Google AdSense money.

There should be a link at the top of your main Google Analytics screen that lets you do this.

Step 1 - Select Account and Profiles to link with AdSense- Make sure you select your HubPages account for linking.

Step 2 - Select Primary Domain - You must choose HubPages as your primary domain to receive AdSense information on your hubs.

Step 3 - Get Code - If you have multiple domains that are earning Google AdSense revenue, e.g., your personal websites and personal blogs, you will need to add a code snippet, provided by Google, to the bottom of every page in that domain.

Once you do this, pour yourself a margarita, kick-back, relax, and wait for the data to roll in. It will take at least a few hours up to about one day before you start seeing data in your Google Analytics account. You may want to lay-off the margaritas after the first few hours.

Once you have roused yourself from your margarita haze, Google Analytics should be all ready for your passionate attentions. Do not hurry with your Google Analytics. Take your time and treat her well and she will return the favor to you ten-fold! Like any lady though, some areas will achieve greater returns than others. Ultimately, you want to focus on -

Traffic Sources > Keywords.

[seen at the left of your Dashboard]. This is where you will ultimately get the most satisfaction. Don't forget the mood music!

Once you get to the keyword page, you will see some information tabs in the middle of your dashboard: Site Usage, Goal Conversion and AdSense Revenue.

Goal Conversion is mainly for e-commerce websites to track transactions such as sign-ups, purchases, and other visitor activity. As such, it is not very relevant to us hubbers.

Site Usage gives you statistics on Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate for your various keywords. This information is useful to help you fine tune your hubs.

For example there may be particular keywords that are getting in a lot of visitors, but visitors leave right away (high Bounce Rate). This may indicate that your hub is not providing relevant information to visitors who are doing searches on those keywords. You may want to retool those hubs to contain information more relevant to the keywords that are bringing you traffic.

Visitors who stay longer, and visit a greater number of pages indicate well-written content that give visitors what they want, thereby enticing them to read more from you. These are the hubs that you should emulate for future success.

Finally, the AdSense Revenue tab is also very useful. This tab gives you statistics on AdSense revenue, number of AdSense Ads Clicked, number of AdSense Page Impressions, AdSense CTR, and AdSense eCPM.

Pay special attention to CTR which means Click Through Rate and eCPM which means effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions.

CTR tells you the percentage of visitors that clicked on a Google AdSense advertisement. A CTR of 100% means that every visitor that entered on that keyword phrase clicked on an advertisement.

eCPM tells you how much a keyword phrase can earn per thousand impressions. The advertisements for a keyword phrase can vary within a big range. eCPM gives you an average measure of how much you can earn from a particular keyword phrase for every thousand visitors.

This will quickly let you determine which are your highest paying keywords, which are your highest click keywords, and which are your most valuable keywords.

Note - It is against the Google AdSense Terms of Service (TOS) to show your CTR and eCPM so do not publish these figures anywhere including your screenshots. Doing so may get you banned from Google AdSense.

It is also useful to view this information on a hub by hub basis. To do this, select

Content > AdSense > Top AdSense Content on the left of your Dashboard.

Very recently, Google has added a new tracking variable into some of its search results. Apparently, this new tracking variable allows you to obtain your keyword ranking on Google search at the time of the click.

Note - Apart from the coolness factors of getting search ranking information from Google Analytics, I have not yet found a good use for this data. Indeed, most of the rankings you see will be quite good because they are exactly the ones that are getting you Google traffic. What I truly want is the ability to track certain goal keywords irrespective of whether I am getting clicks on them or not.

This feature is also still very new, and cannot be easily obtained in your Google Analytics tables yet. However, you can get a preview of these rankings by creating some of your own filters.

First of all, you want to create a new profile. This is important because you still want your original Google Analytics HubPages profile to contain all of your data in unfiltered form.

To create a new Google Analytics profile -

1. Click on the Analytics Settings link on the top left corner of your Google Analytics screen. This will bring you back to the main menu where you see a list of all your domains.
2. Find your HubPages domain and look to the right. There should be a +Add New Profile link. Click on that.
3. Choose Add Profile to an Existing Domain. Make sure that HubPages domain is selected in the Select Domain section below. Also enter in a unique Profile Name. Then click on Continue.

This creates a new profile for you, and puts you back in the Analytics Settings screen.

Now that you have your new profile, click on the Edit link to the right of your profile name. Scroll down to the Filters section and click on Add Filter.

Then follow the steps for filter creation listed here, on WebMaster World.

Note that there are some small mistakes in the instructions -

In step 2c the filter pattern should be - google.com/(search|url).*\bcd=\d*

In step 2d the custom filter should read -

Field A -> Extract A -> Choose Referral -> \bq=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B -> Choose Referral -> \bcd=(\d*)

Once you are finished with this, go get more margaritas, and wait for Google Analytics to collect data in your new profile.

Go to your usual Traffic > Keyword menu. To view the new ranking information, go to the section that says Dimension, it should currently be set to Keyword. Click on the box and select User Defined Value at the very bottom of the drop down menu. This will show you the keywords as well as their Google rankings.

Note - It seems that Google has only added this new ranking information on a small number of searches. I only get ranking information for less than 5% of my total traffic.

Join HubPages and start making money with Google AdSense.