How to stop Google Analytics tracking your own visits: Tutorial

If you use Google Analytics it is very important to set up filters to stop your own visits to your site from skewing the statistics. This can be easily done and I will briefly outline the process:

1. Log in
2. Go to Account settings (in the top left).
3. Got to Filter manager
4. Click 'add filter'
5. You have several options here: You can either

- Exclude all traffic from a domain
- Exclude only traffic to a subdirectory
- Create a Custom filter (more advanced)
- Exclude all traffic from an IP address. To block your own visits this is the one to use.

6. You then make up a name for the filter.
7. Find your IP address and enter it in replacing the example they give. (enter it in the same format with the '\' included - just replace the numbers with your own).
8. The website that you are trying to create a filter for should have appeared in the 'available website profiles' box. Click on it once (so it turns blue) and then click 'add', which will move it into the 'selected website profiles box'.
9. Click 'finish' and your done!

Google Analytics - Week 9 Overview

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As you can see, traffic this week has been a little disappointing with out any spikes or major events. Everyone has the occasional 'off week', but the question is:

What can be learnt from this uneventful week?
As usual there are a combination of factors that caused the events/'unevents'. The answer can be found in more wonderful graphs below.



All of the minuses and drops in referrals may look disheartening, but it is important to figure out why traffic has dropped, or at least not grown.

You can see that the greatest drop is from fewer people finding this site via Google using the keyword 'Wealthtoolbox'. A quick Google search of that keyword still reveals that this blog occupies the number 2 and 3 spots; so the cause is not SEO failure. The only possibility is that people have finally caught on to Wealthtoolbox being untrustworthy and so it is less popular, resulting in fewer people searching for it.

The decrease in the number of referral traffic also has a simple explanation. Last week I received a link from JohnChow.com for winning his 'Guess my february blog income' contest which gave me more referral traffic than usual. This week I have simply lost that advantage, sending referral traffic back to usual which gives a negative percentage on the charts.

I have not made any new posts about Wealthtoolbox,, Mylot
or SlashMySeach, which always send a decent amount of traffic. This is because there is simply not much more to say about any of those programs and I would rather focus on more interesting blog topics. Unfortunately it is harder to rank well for more general keywords and so this causes a further decrease in traffic; at least for a while until this blog ranks more highly for more competitive terms.

That’s all for this weeks overview. As I wrote in the Week 9 earnings reportAdSence earnings increased despite the decrease in traffic, so arguably the quality of traffic has been higher.

Google Analytics - Week 8 Overview

One week ago today I made the first Google Analytics Weekly Overview. During that week, the point of interested was SlashMySearch. This week has been busy as well, so keep reading to find out about this blog’s growth.
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Here is my traffic for the week. You can see it has increased nicely as the week went on, despite a little 'blip' in the middle. Buy what is the explanation for this relatively steady increase?



Well, this chart offers part of the explanation. The noticeable difference between this chart of referring sources and the usual one is the appearance of JohnChow.com. It has leapt onto the listings snatching third place provided 64 visits over just a couple of days. The reason for this was my winning of his 'Guess my income' contest, which got me a link from one of his blog posts.

SlashMySearch.com has provided me with 34 visits, which I acquired by posting in their forum and having this sites address in my signature. This was doubly good because I was earning real money while reading and posting in those forums. The same thing can happen for your site so join SlashMySearch here.

Just a quick word about Earners blog who are running a John Chow style 'review my blog and get a free linkback'. I though it would be worth a shot, and it was just about, with my review of Earners blog getting me 12 referrals.

I am also very thankful towards Million Dollar Journey and Making Money on the Web, which sent some traffic my way.



This chart reveals the other reason for my steady increase in traffic. It shows more impressive figures about SlashMySearch and how my two posts about it, SlashMySearch a trial run and SlayMySearch - In depth review and proof of payment have brought me significant amounts of traffic, (91 visitors). It is interesting to see that a lot of these top 10 posts are newer ones, so perhaps that indicates an increase in quality for readers and SEO of my posts.

That’s all for this week overview,

Coming up
- Brand new Cashcrate info.

so Stay tuned.

Google Analytics - Week 7 Overview

I previously promised to show you all how much traffic this site gets, and where it gets it from. I will do this every week, in the form of a Google Analytics Overview. I will do this by going through Google Analytics and picking out the most important graphs/charts and explaining them to you. The plan is, that I will become proud of these reports because they will be a way of boasting about all the traffic I get, which at the moment is not the case.... So why am I doing it so soon?

Because you love it!. I would love to see the traffic stats for the blogs I read, it would be fascinating and I am guessing you are the same. I also hope that it will catch on and I will be able to see the traffic stats of the blogs I read, not to mention that it helps me unravel things in my mind.

So lets get going!

You can click all the images to enlarge them.



This graph is of my traffic for the week. The Blue line is the number of unique visitors. You can see it hovers around the 100 mark for most of the week, starting at its lowest of 89 and moving on up to 157. I am obviously very happy with this increase, although I do not think it will last. I would say that my weakest post all week has been the one on the Text Link Ads Calculator. However that post was on Tuesday, not Wednesday, (when the traffic dropped). Perhaps it took a day to get listed by the search engines, who knows…

Wednesday had the post called Article Marketing is a Waste of Time? which I though was quite good (lol). Anyway, the internet does have its 'off days' when there is just less traffic due to chance... I may not know the reason for the decrease in traffic midweek, but I do know the cause of the increase. Read on to find out...



This is where it gets interesting. This screen shot shows the top 10 referring sources for this blog. What I first noticed when I saw this is that it is very different from usual and can be used to explain the sudden bloom in traffic over the last couple of days. Firstly, I normally only get a couple of referrals from Dotmyspot but this week I am in the featured sites list, which brought me more, so thanks Michael!

Secondly, Mylot referrals are much higher that usual, this is because I have been doing more posting there than usual to promote this blog and also SlashMySearch (as part of my experiment with it, which proved very effective, getting me 8 referrals over night :D). While messing around on the SlashMySearch forum, I did a little blog promotion, which as you can see got me 10 referrals. This leads me on nicely to the next chart...



This shows the content that has attracted the most visitors. Everything is pretty much as usual, apart from No.4. Can you guess what it is? Yes it's the SlashMySearch post! It all fits together!

So:

1. I discovered SlashMySearch and wrote a post about it, which was popular in the search engines because its a new program and there is very little competition, which brought me some traffic.
2. I promoted it in Mylot, which got me some traffic (and signups).
3. I also did more networking this week that usual. I actively commented on the blogs I read, many of the authors returned the favour or at least came for a visit.
4. The Z list has helped boost my Technorati ranking, bringing me slightly more traffic from there.
5. I am in the Dotmyspot featured blogs list, bring more traffic.
6. My earnings report was popular, people like to hear the grit and know the details.

Isn't it weird how it all fits together?

To end I will throw in this chart of my new vs. returning visitors.



This shows the balance I have. Returning visors read more and more actively participate, but first timers probably click more ads. I have happy with this ratio, the fairly large number of returning visitors shows I am not writing a load of crap, and the new ones show my SEO is going well.

I am interested to know your feedback on all this. Would you like a post like this every week? Or maybe every other week? It’s all done For you!

Spicypage is 1 Month Old!

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Spicy page sent this to me, "We are proud to announce that we are officially one month and one day old". I am a huge fan of spicy page. Don't ask me why that screen shot is a bit odd (the pie chart has gonw a funny colour), but you can still see that I get 2.1% of my traffic from Spicypage. The graph on the right is the Spicypage traffic plotted on it's own. You can see it started of high, because after I joined I voted on a whole load of sites and added their Webmasters to my 'Friends' list. Many reciprocated with a vote which got me on the front page for a few days. Its pretty easy to get on the front page, you just need about 10 votes in a day but you wont get massive amounts of traffic like Digg because Spicypage is still growing.

They also made this handy addition:

"Just a reminder that our policy allows for a site to receive votes from the same people every 30 days. So, for those of you who voted for sites 30 days ago, you can vote again for the same sites.

you can send messages to multiple recipients. So, if you need others to vote for your site/blog, let them know and keep on letting them know every 30 days. Your site/blog might be inside the Most Popular section all the time!"

Unfortunately for me I joined on January 25th which isn't 30 days ago. I think Spicypage has some great potential for growth so join now and get voting!

Google Analytics

To make money from a blog you need traffic. I have already discussed in several previous posts about free methods of getting traffic. The next stage is understand WHERE that traffic came from and knowing WHAT you need to do to keep it coming back and what you need do to ATTRACT more traffic from other sources.

Google Analytics does just that. The image shows the fascinating diagrams and charts that greet me when I log into my Google Analytics account. There is a map of the world with the positions of my visitors plotted on. There are two pie charts that show me where my traffic has come from and how many visitors have returned which at the moment is 33% which I am quite pleased about.

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Amongst other features, there is a conversion summary and a very interesting Marketing summary. This shows the top 5 sources (URLs visitors found my sites link on), the top 5 keywords for my site (surprisingly my number 1 is 'AGLOCO scam' and the top 5 campaigns. There is also a content summary that shows which posts you folks have been reading and a unique visitor tracking section. I AM WATCHING YOU!!!

The two other main sections are the marketing and content optimisation sections which provide more tasty charts and helpful pointers as to what you need to do for your blog to progress. These sections are highly detailed; in the marketing optimisation section alone there are over 20 subsections.

There is a lot to learn on Google Analytics but you can chose to use only the simple parts if you with. However I doubt you will be able to resist advancing you knowledge in the name of success.

Google Analytics is free (and I get no reward for you signing up). You can sign up here