How to Use Google Analytics to Track Individual Page Traffic Sources

Happy Humpday everyone!

Now this is something that I just figured out, and it took me a little while to find, so I thought that I'd share my findings with you if you were lost in Google Analytics like me. 

First of all, if you don't know, Google Analytics, is a tracking code that you can put into your site that will read all of your site's traffic, stats, performance, etc. It's simple to install (especially on blogger!) and give you much better and more accurate statistics than your built in stats on either Wordpress or Blogger. 

It will take about a day to set up and start pulling data from your site. So once you've done that, it's great to track numerous different types of traffic. Before delving too deep into what Google Analytics does, let me get to what I'm trying to show you today. If you need a basic intro to analytics, Elle & Co has an absolutely wonderful resource for that. 

I've been using multiple types of social media sites to promote my blog including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Google +, and then link-parties. Certain posts have been crazy popular and I wanted to find out, what source is really driving the most traffic to that post?

First of all, you'll want to navigate to your Analytics page and go to "Behavior". I always thought that I would have to find this in the "Acquisition" tab but I was incorrect! It will automatically take you to "All Pages" which is where you want to be. 

That page will look like this. At the top right of the page, you can edit what dates you want to track statistics from. It defaults to the past thirty days. For this demo, I'll keep that since the post I'm going to select was posted within thirty days. You can go back in time to when your blog started, the past month, even as little as the past day. 

Next, scroll down and choose the post you want. I'm going to choose "Eight Clues that You have a Resting Bitch Face" since that was a post that is listed as one of my most popular pages on Blogger. You'll now see that at the top below "Page" it shows the HTML/title of the page I selected. You will have a plot graph of how many pageviews you have per day, You'll see that the traffic on that post peaked in early July, which is the day that the post launched. Makes sense that that day would have the most traffic, right?

But what we want to get into is what traffic source is the best for that page. So let's go down to the "Primary Dimension" where I have the red arrow. You'll hit the "Other" drop down and click "Acquisition" then "Source."

Viola! Here's all the statistics that you want! I can see what traffic source brought in the most traffic and how those viewers behavior once on the page. As you can see from below my "top" traffic sources that brought in the most page views are Disqus, Stumbleupon, direct, Bloglovin' and Virginia Bloggers.com. However, if you look at their behavior, the people who came in from Stumble Upon and Bloglovin really didn't stay on my site long enough to read my post. Stumbleupon was about 1 second (which make sense for Stumbleupon, they saw the title and just kept stumbling) and only 11 seconds for Bloglovin. This is a testament to how well Bloglovin is working for me....(ahem...not well.) This also shows really good stats for my direct readers, Disqus and for Virginia Bloggers.com. Look at how much time they spent reading that post! 

It's also nice to take a peek at how many pageviews you have versus how many unique page views you have. 

By no means am I a Google Analytics expert, I am learning every day. So I hope this helps the rest of you who are learning just like me. However, feel free to ask me any questions or let me know if I need to clarify any terms I used in this post.

What is your best traffic source on your most popular post?

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